Editor’s Note: The following text has been excerpted with permission and adapted from Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry, and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard by Bridget Quinn, published by Chronicle Books on April 16 and available online and in bookstores.

Do you know the term chiaroscuro? Maybe you remember it from an art history course you took once, or some half-forgotten book. Or maybe you know it well. It’s a word that feels good in your mouth. Chiaroscuro. It means “light and dark.” 

Western painting owes its illusionistic realism to the play of light and shadow. Both visually and metaphorically, chiaroscuro is how we comprehend the world. Without the devil there is no god. No hero without their antagonist. No heroine either. Literature knows this. Art history, too. Which is one reason why, whenever French 18th-century artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard is mentioned, it’s almost always as a counterpoint to her better-known “rival,” Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. But also, when it comes to women of talent, the world loves a cat fight. It was true then and still is now, see: Beyoncé “vs” Taylor; Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese; etc. ad nauseam.

In late-18th-century France, no one understood competition — its pleasures and profits — better than impresario Claude-Mammès Pahin de Champlain de la Blancherie, a Paris P. T. Barnum who was a producer, promoter, salesman, and huckster. A little bit brilliant, quite a bit déclassé, and a hell of a lot of fun, La Blancherie ignited one of the great rivalries in art.

In 1777 La Blancherie debuted an influential exhibition, he would come to call the Salon de la Correspondance. In practice, this was a weekly hodgepodge display of “works in all genres” — that is, anything fabulous that caught his fancy — from locksmithing to metallurgy to animal husbandry to painting, sculpture, and more, most of it for sale, all of it lauded in La Blancherie’s effusive publication Les Nouvelles de la République des Lettres et des Arts (NRLA), meaning What’s New in the Republic of Arts and Letters. NRLA reported on all that had been seen, enjoyed, marveled at, or overheard at the Salon de la Correspondance. 

La Blancherie soon saw that the official Académie Royale’s strict limits on membership had left many French artists out in the cold. Especially women artists. During the eight-year existence of the Salon de la Correspondance, he welcomed many artists unable to join the Académie, including at least 19 women. For two of them — Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun — the publicity attending their Salon de la Correspondance exhibitions would prove decisive to history.

Implicitly understanding the uncanny fascination of pairs, among the wonders La Blancherie displayed in the spring of 1782 were a two-headed calf and, as described by him, “A hen, alive, having laterally to the right and left two ovarian openings with entirely separated wombs, located in such a manner as to allow zero doubt as to their communication. . . . For most monsters of this species, one of the two embryos is incomplete, but in this one they are both perfect.” In short, he had a thing for doubling. A two-headed calf. Poultry sporting two vaginas. Two impressive women painters — not necessarily monsters, but maybe not entirely natural either.

That same spring, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard showed at the Salon de la Correspondance for the first time, with a charming pendant pair that included her exhilarating pastel “Delightful Surprise” alongside a similar portrait of a young man. But the pair La Blancherie chose to promote that spring was not Adélaïde’s couple riding the naughty currents of rococo, but her quiet pastel self-portrait — held up against a stunning self-portrait oil by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Wonder of wonders! Freaks of nature! Two women artists! Impossible aberrations of nature that could somehow, inexplicably, still create beautiful forms to compare and contrast. 

Compare. What do the two self-portraits most obviously share? Gender: female. Hair: unpowdered. Hats: befeathered. Earrings: dangling. Hands: paintbrushes and palettes capably grasped in the left.

Contrast. How do they most clearly diverge? Media: pastel versus oil. Posture: sitting versus standing. Location: studio versus outdoors. Attire: fichu-covered chest versus plunging neckline. Smile: Close-lipped versus lips slightly parted.

 Since the current location of Adélaïde’s pastel is unknown, and the only reproduction is in black and white, it’s difficult to compare the artworks in terms of color, tone, or handling. But on this very score — the artists’ comparative styles — La Blancherie had plenty to say, commending Adélaïde’s “perfect resemblance” and Élisabeth’s“charming productions.” Their work is still compared in similar terms today, Adélaïde viewed as the more rigorously realistic (a.k.a. masculine), with Élisabeth regaled as an amiable flatterer (feminine, naturally).

La Blancherie kicked off a rivalry between two women who had nothing to be rivals about except that they both existed in a world not intended for them. And yet, the world does love a cat fight, which he of course understood. As he enthused in the NRLA, “The self-portraits of two women artists, which chance has brought together as pendants, have created a highly piquant spectacle.” Which chance has brought together? La Blancherie himself hung the show — et voilà! — among dozens of offerings, self-portraits by two women hung as pendants. Not just their canvases, but the two of them as artists, and as women, to be publicly compared. This is the piquant part (“spicy” in my French-to-English dictionary; “engagingly provocative” according to Merriam-Webster’s). And from this moment forward critics tended to compare the two women artists to each other rather than to any of their male colleagues. A “rivalry” had begun.

It is impossible to know quite what the public assessed that June since we don’t have Adélaïde’s pastel for clear comparison. What is clear, though, is that her pastel was held up against an oil painting that is still much celebrated for its beauty and brio. One version of Élisabeth’s “Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat” hangs today in London’s National Gallery. Also in the National Gallery is the work upon which she based her painting, “Portrait of Susanna Lunden” by Peter Paul Rubens (long inexplicably called “The Straw Hat,” though the hat depicted is not straw). While Élisabeth hewed literally to the straw hat title in creating her own image, she also entirely understood the thing in Rubens’s portrait that is essential to its appeal. Not the hat, but the play of sunlight and gentle shadow across the pale face of a pretty young woman. 

Élisabeth was inspired by Ruben’s use of light and color, but she diverged from him in her depiction of temperament. Her own self-portrait reveals how a woman sees herself. Where the Flemish master’s Susanna glances out shyly from under her hat, the barest hint of a smile on her pale lips, as if embarrassed to be looked at and apologizing for it, Élisabeth looks directly out from her painting, charismatic and confident, her cherry lips glossy and parted so we can glimpse her teeth.

How can Adélaïde possibly compete? Here, she can’t. In her self-portrait she is a little stiff, like a middle school student on picture day. Where Élisabeth is all energy and charm, the class beauty who is sure of her social standing, Adélaïde is the nerdy hopeful wearing what should be the right clothes, done her hair in the current style, all of it, but can’t quite pull it off. She hopes not to be mocked, knowing in advance how much she will be judged. Not just her technique and craft, but her whole self, including and especially her appearance. Her looks were often publicly judged and found wanting, particularly in comparison with her “rival.” 

Adélaïde’s 1782 self-portrait is more an advertisement of ability — perfect feathers, transparent fichu, glinting earrings, shiny silken reflets — than a statement of self. It is not about her, in a sense, but about what she can make those brushes do. Her small, close-lipped smile feels forced, as if to say I am supposed to smile so no one calls me angry.

Whether or not Élisabeth’s canvas is larger than Adélaïde’s lost pastel, it certainly feels bigger. Cinematic. She, too, sports brushes and a palette, but Élisabeth displays her own palette fully charged with paints alongside a plunging neckline, her décolletage offered up with a bow. The artist as starlet, self-consciously so. 

A duel was now engaged in earnest, one created for public consumption rather than stemming from personal animosity. It’s impossible to know how Adélaïde and Élisabeth really felt about each other since we have no firsthand accounts, but surely there would have sometimes been bruising and hard feelings since one received mostly positive feedback at the expense of the other. They were set up as foils, and it can be tempting to play the character written for you. Still, we have no evidence of personal animosity between Adélaïde and Élisabeth, though no evidence that they were friendly either. To anyone who has attended high school, all of it — the competition, the wary circling, the cliques — is utterly understandable.

So the rivalry is a manufactured one, but the stakes were real. Élisabeth, who was already the favorite painter of Queen Marie Antoinette, unflinchingly allies herself with the old masters, while Adélaïde parries with a series of pastel portraits to claim her place among the current masters of French art. Between 1782 and 1783 Adélaïde showed six portraits at the Salon de la Correspondance. Her subjects were all members of the Académie Royale, including her childhood friend and current teacher, François-André Vincent, and his own teacher, Joseph-Marie Vien (recent head of the Académie Royale in Rome), as well as her family friend, the sculptor Augustin Pajou, who is depicted modeling a bust of his own teacher, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne.

It was a brilliant move. By creating portraits of important members of the Académie Royale, Adélaïde was securing valuable eyewitnesses to her talent. If any man admired his portrait, he must admire her ability as well. It was also a way of publicly establishing that she belonged among these men, both by ability and by artistic legacy. In depicting her teacher, Vincent, and her teacher’s teacher, Vien, she claimed her place in an important lineage of French art. In his journal, La Blancherie loudly proclaimed “the confidence in her talents demonstrated by these distinguished men.” Then added that such work “completely destroys the false opinion that envy or ignorance has hastened to spread . . . that the merit of her works was owed to a foreign hand.” That sly La Blancherie: Out of one side of his mouth he praises Adélaïde, while with the other he drops in a certain slander that a man (that is, Vincent) is responsible for her work. It’s a little like a chicken laying eggs from two holes, or a two-headed calf. Two for one.

Adélaïde was hardly the only one who experienced such accusations. Élisabeth faced them too, as have many women artists throughout history. And sometimes still do.

Her face has gazed over midtown Manhattan traffic, hordes of tourists, and guests coming and going from the famed Plaza Hotel for over a century. In Saint-Gaudens’s “William Tecumseh Sherman” (1903) in Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza, she is winged Victory, striding before the titular figure with one hand raised, the other holding a palm frond. But it wasn’t until 2023 that Hettie Anderson received official public recognition in words, rather than in likeness. 

Almost a thousand miles away in her native South Carolina, a historic marker placed by the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission stands on the site of the house Anderson was born in and later owned. Upon the metal plaque, she is described as an “acclaimed African American art model of the Gilded Age.” Indeed, she was the muse for many oft-commissioned American artists at the turn of the century, like Daniel Chester French, John La Farge, Evelyn Beatrice Longman, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who called her “the handsomest model I have ever seen of either sex.”  

The story of Anderson’s life comes to us, in the 21st century, full of holes, pieced together more often through public documents and letters describing her as a model than through her own words. Such gaps in history are common to those who are the subjects rather than the creators of artworks, and are even larger for her, as a Black woman. 

Though she personifies Union triumph in that sculpture, Hettie Anderson was born after the Civil War as Harriette Eugenia Dickerson, around 1873. Her family was listed as “free people of color” before the war, and her mother Caroline Scott owned property. It is likely because of the brutal treatment of Black citizens under Jim Crow laws that she left the South with her mother to find work in New York City, as so many other Black Americans did during the Great Migration. 

In the 1890s, the light-skinned Anderson (it is unclear why she changed her name) settled on the Upper West Side, and began working as a seamstress while taking classes at the Art Students League and modeling. Anderson was listed in the census as “white,” though she did not deny her family heritage, welcoming her relatives as visitors in New York. A memoir edited by Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s son Homer suggests he was aware of her racial background, but it is not certain how much her artist-employers did know about her race.

Her “goddess-like” poise (as Saint-Gaudens described it in a letter to artist Anders Zorn) made her a popular model for allegorical figures, which were common elements in the city monuments, municipal buildings, memorials, and the public parks being built around the country before and at the turn of the century. On top of the Greek figure of Nike for Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture, she also posed as Civic Fame, for Adolph Weinman’s figure on top of what is now the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building (1913); Truth, for Daniel Chester French’s bronze door reliefs at the Boston Public Library (1897), and a goddess, in John La Farge’s mural Athens at Bowdoin College (1898).

Anderson’s face will also be familiar to coin collectors. Around 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt approached Saint-Gaudens with the idea of creating a currency with a gravitas worthy of the nation. To Saint-Gaudens, only one model fit the bill: Hettie Anderson. He needed her “badly,” as he wrote to a fellow artist who was busy working with her at the time, begging him to let her model for the coin instead. Indeed, a century later in 2021, a minting of that $20 dollar gold coin made headlines when it achieved a hammer price of $18.9 million at Sotheby’s, a record for a coin at auction. 

As she got older, and modeling jobs dried up, Anderson secured a job at the Metropolitan Museum working in the museum’s classrooms, thanks to the help of her artist friends. She died in 1938. Little else is known about her later years. 

So how did the story of a figure who was lauded in her time become obscure? Of course, the artist’s model is by definition a passive figure, contributing to an artwork by her presence rather than any direct creative action. 

Anderson, however, was not passive in her life: her popularity allowed her to be selective about when and for whom she sat. Taking pride in her work, and understanding the complexities of how to preserve her property’s value, she refused the Saint-Gaudens family’s request to copy an early study of her as Victory gifted to her by the artist, though she lent it to a retrospective of the late artist’s work shown at the Metropolitan Museum and elsewhere between 1908 and 1910. She acquired a copyright for the work in 1908. 

Unfortunately, it may have been because of this force of presence that she was struck from the record by the Saint-Gaudens family. When asked about the inspiration behind his father’s famous figures, Homer Saint-Gaudens denied the need to identify them, writing in his father’s edited memoirs: “In reality … in all examples of my father’s ideal sculpture, little or no resemblance can be traced to any model, since he was always quick to reject the least taint of what he called ‘personality’ in such instances.” Whether out of petty revenge, racial prejudice, or to deflect scandal (the elder Saint-Gaudens was romantically involved with another of his artist models), Homer Saint-Gaudens also removed Anderson’s bust, which the artist had inscribed to her, from the official catalog of his father’s work. It was not added back in until 1982, which ushered in a new era of interest in Anderson’s life. 

The revival of Anderson’s story is and continues to be thanks to the efforts of a few dedicated individuals who recognized the gap between the frequency of Anderson’s likeness in the history of American art and the amount of scholarship on her life. Willow and William Hagans, family members of Anderson (who was known as “Cousin Tootie”); Karen Strickland, a South Carolina historian; and independent scholar Eve Kahn, have all dedicated time and resources to telling Anderson’s story. 

Hettie Anderson is buried in Elmwood Cemetery in her hometown, where her once unmarked grave now bears a headstone with her name. It was financed by South Carolina’s Numismatic Association and the Midlands Coin Club, in partnership with the state’s African American Heritage Commission. The gravestone, placed in June 2023, features a carved rendering of the famous coin, a monument to both the woman and her work.

Another iteration of Dumbo Open Studios organized by Art in Dumbo took place last weekend, so naturally, I spent the majority of my Saturday afternoon avoiding the seasonal hair-ripping winds by venturing through various floors of 20 Jay Street. Dozens of artists and project spaces opened their doors across six stories of the multi-use building, inviting the public into a whirlwind of contemporary creative output through both polished presentations and behind-the-scenes views.

The mezzanine floor was bustling with visitors, including some four-legged friends, as Kate Teale’s speckled renderings of window sills and interior spaces, public artist Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong’s bite-sized sculptures, and a peek into street artist Swoon‘s studio practice immediately stood out as highlights.

I spent the majority of my visit in Laura Karetzky’s studio taking in the textures and hues of her storytelling through paintings. Karetzky, who has worked in Dumbo for about 24 years, said that she has worked in her studio at 20 Jay Street for about seven years through the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program. Her subsidy expires at the end of this year, so she will soon be back on the hunt for a new space.

Karetzky said she investigates the idea that “there can be a story inside of a story” in her work.

“But even more than that, there can be several different perspectives within one story,” the artist continued, gesturing to the painting of a figure’s shadow between the asphalt and wall called “Shadow of Anemone” (2023). Several other panel paintings bear actual “windows cut into them, allowing viewers to peer through one painting into another, as if gazing into “other dimensions.”

Karetzky said she also amplifies color and texture throughout her works, evoking what she dubs an “almost realism.”

Regarding her time in Dumbo, Karetzky has said the neighborhood has changed completely over the last 20 years.

“When I first moved to the area, I was one of the first artists to rent out a space in this completely raw warehouse on Washington Street. I mean, I literally drew out the bay I could afford at the time and they installed the walls for me there,” she explained. “At the time, there was no hot water so we had to rinse out our brushes in icy water that sent jolts up to our elbows. The elevators never worked, there were squatters in the stairwells, and it wasn’t always safe. But that’s what kept it affordable.”

Now, Karetzky said that her modern studio with an HVAC system, air conditioning, high ceilings, and other critical amenities has helped her become the most productive she’s ever been, making the prospect of having to vacate the space this December even more disheartening.

“The community that we have of artists is just fantastic,” she continued. “There is so much collaboration between us, from studio visits to emergency crits and going in on deliveries together, to even just knowing we’re working among each other without even having to interact — I love being part of the beehive and feeling everybody’s energy. It’s really invigorating for me.”

Karetzky’s remark about collaboration rang true throughout the building, as various studios hosted group exhibitions for artists within and beyond the studios. The Space Between, curated by Tracy McKenna for the Platform Project Space on the third floor, was especially cohesive with a throughline of abstracted fiber arts. I found Mark Olshansky’s colorful geometric stitchwork particularly refreshing.

Over in the Triangle Arts Association residency studios, Wen-Woan Chang’s candidly humorous marker-on-paper narrations of mundane thoughts and encounters were exactly what I needed, and I can safely say that if she was ever inclined to write a daily newsletter, I’d be her first subscriber in a heartbeat.

The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program cohort made up the entire seventh-floor open studios, with standouts being Oscar yi Hou’s oil portraiture in progress, Kevin Umaña’s glazed stoneware tablets, Jesse Greenberg’s foray into oil pastels, and Danielle Gottesman’s dimensional manipulations of public signage and anatomy.

Though I was willingly ensnared by a single building this year — which certainly wasn’t helped by the confusing office numbering and slow elevators — I’m looking forward to expanding my reach in the future for more encounters with independent and resident artists.

Earlier this year, David Nolan Gallery in New York mounted the exhibition Fort Marion and Beyond: Native American Ledger Drawings, 1865–1900, gathering over 100 works on paper by Native artists from the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Hidatsa, Kiowa, and Lakota tribes. Co-organized with Donald Ellis Gallery, the show prominently featured works by Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart) of the Cheyenne Nation and Ohettoint of the Kiowa Tribe, two of 72 Indigenous warriors who were imprisoned without trial at Fort Marion in Florida between 1875 and 1878 after the Red River War. The United States military campaign “aimed at the forced displacement and migration of Southern Plains tribes onto reservations,” according to a press release. Art critics called the show “plaintive, pathos-filled” and “heartbreaking,” and Hyperallergic’s John Yau remarked that “the drawings of Nokkoist and Ohettoit … belong in an art museum.”

What was not mentioned, by either the galleries or critics, is that the exhibition featured several drawings from ledger books that were auctioned off by Bonhams in Los Angeles in 2022. Representatives for the Kiowa and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes attempted unsuccessfully to halt the sale, based on the arguments that the ledger books represented “significant cultural patrimony” and were created by incarcerated artists, calling into question the “chain of custody of the objects,” as Chairman of the Kiowa Tribe Lawrence SpottedBird wrote in a letter to Bonhams.

The auction house did not disclose the identities of the buyer or buyers of the four books, which sold for a total of $908,700 including premiums. However, drawings by Nokkoist and Ohettoint were taken from three of the books — which had been unbound, and the artworks individually framed — and included in the Fort Marion and Beyond exhibition.

This past weekend, they were also featured in the Expo Chicago booth of dealer Donald Ellis, who confirmed to Hyperallergic that he was the buyer of those three books at Bonhams in 2022. 

Members of the Kiowa and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, as well as other Native individuals with knowledge of ledger drawings, reacted with alarm and frustration when they learned of the recent displays.  

“When I read your email, my heart dropped,” Shannon O’Loughlin (Choctaw), the CEO of the Association on American Indian Affairs, told Hyperallergic. “It provides another level of evidence of how people are taking control of our cultural heritage, working to create their own narrative that is separate from the Native peoples who should be the true holders of this type of cultural heritage.”

“It just feels wrong that they’re here,” Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean), co-founder and director of exhibitions and programs at the Center for Native Futures, a Chicago-based Native arts nonprofit that also had a booth at Expo.

Yepa-Pappan and her colleagues confronted Ellis at his booth, asking him where the ledger drawings came from and whether any Native groups or descendants of the artists were benefitting from the sales of the works the gallery was offering at the fair, which she says were priced between $8,000 and $80,000. She described his reaction as “defensive” and “rude.”

On Saturday, April 13, Casey Brown (Ho-Chunk), an artist and member of the Center for Native Futures, wrote an email to Expo Chicago staff, raising concerns about the ethics of selling ledger drawings at the fair. 

“I was surprised to see ledger art outside of a tribal cultural center, museum or archive and also available for purchase,” his letter read. “This art was made under duress while these men were unjustly imprisoned; ownership of any of these works is problematic.”

When members of the Center approached Ellis and his assistant, they were “unable to explain where the collection came from and unwilling to let them copy down the names of who created these pieces for further study,” Brown said. “When asked if he had contacted any family of the unjustly imprisoned men, Ellis said he has ‘strong relations’ with ‘plains tribes’ but openly said he’s the only person profiting from these pieces.”

Within half an hour of sending the email, Brown was contacted by Tony Karman, the president and director of Expo Chicago, who spoke with members of the Center about their concerns.

“We are grateful to the Center for Native Futures for drawing our attention to the Ledger Books and to Donald Ellis Gallery for participating in a conversation with the Center around the complex issues involved,” a spokesperson for the fair told Hyperallergic. “Expo Chicago has committed to engaging with the appropriate organizations on the development of guidelines on the display of these types of materials, affirming our commitment to the proper handling of cultural property.”

Max Bear, the tribal historic preservation officer of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, echoed the Center’s dismay. 

“When the books were sold, they became art pieces in Pratt’s narrative, not ours,” he told Hyperallergic, referring to Richard Henry Pratt, the Army officer who oversaw the prison at Fort Marion. Pratt commissioned and purchased many of the ledger books — which included depictions of battle, the warriors’ journey as detainees from the Plains to Florida, and prison life — directly from the incarcerated artists, considering them examples that his attempts to assimilate and “civilize” Native Americans were successful. 

Bear bristled at the term “ledger art,” adding: “These are historical accounts from our people, and should be kept by our people.”

Although there has been a growing movement over the past several years towards repatriation of objects, art, and artifacts to Native Peoples, the ledger books reside in a legal gray area, said Ross Frank, a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). 

“In the letter of law, as it stands now, it’s a hard row to ask all ledger material to go back to the tribes. It is a kind of cultural patrimony, but in these cases, there was some kind of sale, which was legal at the time,” Frank told Hyperallergic. But the works’ legal status aside, Frank noted, “there may be ethical concerns about coercion” because the artists were imprisoned.

Frank explained that there are seemingly two systems that apply to US cultural institutions on the one hand, and private dealers on the other. Institutions should adhere to best practices, involving consulting with tribes regarding the exhibition and responsible stewardship of objects related to their culture. 

The tribal historic preservation officers of the Kiowa and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes told Hyperallergic that they had not been contacted by either gallery prior to the exhibition. 

According to Ellis, he was approached by “an intermediary on behalf of the Kiowa” after the auction and offered them the ledger book with drawings by Ohettoint at his cost (it was sold for $138,975 with premium), but received no response. He added that his gallery is “supporting financially and with loans” an upcoming exhibition on Fort Marion which “dozens of direct descendants of the Cheyenne prisoners” are involved with. 

“They are aware of my activities and involvement in the exhibition and we are not aware of any pushback,” Ellis said.

But as Frank of UCSD explained, “with private collectors, it’s a whole different world.”We’re at the mercy of a global capitalist system…which values the pages separately far more than the book staying together,” he said about the decision to unbind the books and display the drawings separately. (Frank is the founder of the Plains Indian Ledger Art (PILA) project, which digitizes complete ledger books, making them accessible online.)

Ellis defended the choice to detach the drawings, arguing that “one of the unique aspects of the Fort Marion sketchbooks is that there is no narrative arch between individual sheets, linear or otherwise, unlike most books that predate them.” 

Karen Kramer, the curator of Native American and Oceanic Art and Culture at the Peabody Essex Museum, offered a counter perspective, telling Hyperallergic that “to separate these drawings is to dismantle cultural heritage.” 

“Breaking apart ledger books that have Plains Indian drawings short-changes the possibility of understanding each drawing as a part of a whole story,” Kramer said.  “In the context of Fort Marion, these prisoner-warrior artists conveyed personal experiences and remembrances of tribal rituals and histories within the broader story of colonization and ledger art production under imprisonment and its radical aesthetic evolution between 1875–78.”

It is also worth noting that at least two drawings that were originally two-page spreads in the ledger books were framed and exhibited as single sheets, splitting the original image in half, at Ellis’s Expo Chicago booth.

In his communications with Hyperallergic, however, Ellis made clear that he considers himself more as a caretaker than a dismantler of Native cultural heritage. 

“With the possible exception of Ross Frank and PILA, my gallery was most instrumental in the preservation of complete ledger books over a 20-25 year period before the advent of digitization,” he said. “The decision to exhibit the drawings as individual works (our first experience in doing so) was a long and difficult process. Ultimately we decided the end justified the means.” That end aim, according to Ellis, is “to bring them to widespread institutional and private attention.” He noted that PILA has complete files of the three books he purchased and that he plans to produce facsimile versions.

Institutions that receive federal funding are bound by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a 1990 law which facilitates the “protection and return of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.” Private sales are not subject to NAGPRA, but they do fall under the recently passed Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony (STOP) Act, which helps prevent international trafficking of objects of significant cultural patrimony, although that legislation would likely not apply in this case.

Despite the technical legality of the books’ ownership, O’Loughlin sees the original terms of the sales by the incarcerated Native artists to Pratt as reason to reconsider grounds for repatriation. 

“If the original transfer does not hold up, if it was considered a kind of theft, then every transaction after that would be colored by that,” O’Loughlin said. She considers the books’ current owners complicit “because they know all the history, they know how the Tribes fought the purchase.”

Carbs, comedy, and colorful frescoes abound in this month’s miniature crossword!

LONDON — The Royal Academy and National Portrait Gallery in London, founded in 1768 and 1856 respectively, have long been symbols of the British art establishment — namely the White, male-dominated establishment. In February, the RA opened Entangled Pasts, which examines its own colonialist ties by interspersing the work of contemporary Black British artists of the African, Caribbean, and South Asian diasporas with its own historic collections, while highlighting historic Black figures excluded from standard art history. The National Portrait Gallery, newly spruced up after a three-year closure for refurbishment, takes a different tack. Curated by Ekow Eshun, previously director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure presents works by 22 African diasporic artists exploring the richness and complexity of Black life via portraiture. It is separated from the NPG’s permanent collection, both treating the artists independently from the stuffy artistic canon and demonstrating that portraiture — the museum’s raison d’être — is an exciting and relevant mode of contemporary art making. 

The mode of portraiture allows scope for psychological introspection. Where this can easily result in speculative interpretation by curators looking at historical works, the intent here is to explore themes in the widest sense, while centering the experience of artist and sitter. Eshun aims to shift away from external representations of Blackness — “the dominant art historical perspective” — and instead invites us to “[see] from the viewpoint of Black artists and the figures they depict.” The curation allows myriad artistic voices to speak with a powerful directness, referencing the canon embodied by the museum’s collection at their discretion, as in Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu’s “This Second Dreamer” (2017). This bronze head, sitting on its side on a plinth, evokes Brâncuși’s “The Sleeping Muse” (1910), a bronze head itself derived from his collection of masks from the African continent. Mutu reinterprets the form as a self-portrait complete with braided hair, reclaiming the notions of “exoticism” or “otherness” from White historic practices.

Eshun opens the show with the key concept of dual consciousness, introduced by African-American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903, which describes the experience of a Black person living physically within, and yet psychologically outside of, White society. Powerful works by American Nathaniel Mary Quinn fragment the sitter’s visage into facets in portraits that appear once collaged and (small “C”) cubist, breaking down the very components of expression and representing the internal conflict of this idea. Certainly as a viewer, it had the effect of making me feel complicit, as if my gaze itself smashes into the close-cropped faces. Towering over visitors is British sculptor Thomas J. Price’s monumental bronze figure “As Sounds Turn To Noise” (2023), a composite of 3D scans of individuals from London and Los Angeles. Its monumentality, drawing on the gilded bronze statuary common to historic Western sculpture, makes visually and physically present multiple marginalized people all in one outsized figure. 

A section called The Persistence of History applies the ideas of visibility and perception specifically to the Black figure in art history. More often than not White artists depicted Black figures as peripheral to the narrative, and often without identities. Like Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s deconstruction of the portrait itself, many of these are interventions into or versions of historical artworks. British artist Barbara Walker’s series Vanishing Point (2017–ongoing) reproduces historic Western paintings as embossed designs on white paper, so they are readable only as subtle shadow when viewed in raking light, while the narrative’s solitary Black figure is fully rendered in graphite. Playing on the idea of the vanishing point as the perspectival device rendering the illusion of depth, Walker instead makes the Black figure the focal point through the extreme contrast in visibility, marginalizing the White figures. Similarly, American painter Titus Kaphar literally cuts the White figures out of historical works, layering the canvas over another depicting a Black figure in extreme closeup. In these works, the background figure peeks through, again asserted as the focal point and reversing the original hierarchy in the composition. The familiarity of traditional Western historic painting is upended to foreground its marginalized Black subjects. 

The closing section, Our Aliveness, asks us to consider the “wonder and fragility of the Black everyday.” British-Jamaican artist Hurvin Anderson’s series of isolated figures in barbershop scenes again invoke the idea of double consciousness; these barbershops in Britain catered to the Windrush generation who were not welcomed in other establishments. Pictured from behind, the figures feel intimate and yet isolated amid the sparsely rendered backgrounds. Elsewhere, Henry Taylor’s work similarly evoke the earlier theme of Black visibility, depicting people from the margins of society that he encountered in his everyday life. 

The title The Time is Always Now was taken from a series of 1955 essays, Notes of a Native Son, by the author James Baldwin. Eshun chose it to emphasize the continuing importance of issues of Black identity, visibility, and recognition in predominantly White society as urgent, crucial, and emotive factors in the lives and experience of Black people, and of the flourishing art movements produced by artists of the African diaspora. All the works on display here are astounding from a technical perspective, and for the powerful aesthetic and emotional punch they deliver. While the RA’s Entangled Pasts is a retrospective look into its colonialist past with a view to consider the future, The Time is Always Now employs the NPG as a showcase for artists working today as it demonstrates its relevance as an active player in contemporary art on a global scale. It is notable that NPG director Nicholas Cullinan has declared a 34% increase in visitors to its last two shows, bolstered by a £5 ticket price for visitors under 25. With a show as exciting and important as this, it is clearly challenging the notion that such institutions are “just about the past and full of dead white males,” as Cullinan stresses, and targeting a new generation of art-goers.

The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure continues at the National Portrait Gallery (St. Martin’s Place, London, England) through May 19. The exhibition was curated by Ekow Eshun.

Along the 24th Street stretch of Manhattan’s High Line, cast human and wolf heads abruptly sprout from stripped trees made from bones and bare branches that grow from and around a steel armature. Some plants slouch from the weight of dying blossoms, while others splay out like the fingers of skeletal hands reaching out from buried graves, grasping at the air.

Italian artist Giulia Cenci’s “secondary forest” (2024), a new commission that melds the natural and industrial worlds, kicks off a pensive spring season at the High Line. The installation positions humans, animals, and plants as equals in a ghostly installation derived from found industrial objects and cast scrap metal.

The term “secondary forest” refers to the natural regrowth of vegetation in an area that once had been cleared through human intervention, inviting passersby on the elevated park to consider the cycle of life and growth and how it is impacted by unnatural causes. Cenci’s use of agricultural tools, old machinery, and car parts points at the Meatpacking District and the High Line itself as she forcibly dissolves the hierarchies separating people and industry from the natural world.

Diana Barboza and Romi Favayedi, friends visiting New York from Los Angeles and Toronto to see An Enemy of the People on Broadway, told Hyperallergic that the sculpture had a theatrical quality to it, interpreting the human heads as neutral masks.

Barboza commented that the bones and branches looked “genetically spliced together” to make up the trees in Cenci’s sculpture, also noting that “it looks like the rest of the people and the branches were devoured by some metallic entity, and the only things that survive are plants, which I love.”

“It does also look like the animals came out better than the people in this particular situation,” Barboza continued, pointing out the anguished expressions on the human faces.

Favayedi gestured to the two human heads lying on top of one another, stating that the pair looked like they died together and “all that was left of them were their nervous systems.”

“There’s a death quality — the fact that there are branches, that aren’t meant to be blooming along the faces of despair,” she explained.

Two of Tschabalala Self’s existing works, as well as new work by Teresa Solar Abboud, Tishan Hsu, and Chloe Wise, are slated to join “secondary forest” later this spring along different areas of the park. Cenci’s commission is on view at the High Line on 24th Street through March 2025.

Google users in the United States, Lebanon, the United Kingdom, Egypt, and select countries celebrated Etel Adnan today, April 15, on the search engine’s homepage with a brightly colored “Doodle” honoring the late Lebanese-American poet, journalist, and visual artist. The artwork was created by animator and filmmaker Olivia Huynh.

Born in Beirut to Greek and Turkish parents, Adnan passed away in 2021 at the age of 96. The Google Doodle shows the artist writing in her studio, surrounded by her distinctively abstract landscape paintings alluding to mountain ridges and the sun over the horizon — elements inspired by her time in California and Lebanon that appeared frequently throughout Adnan’s oeuvre.

In addition to recognizing her literary achievements, the graphic illustration also features references to her leporello works (accordion-style printed materials with alternating folds) and her strong connection to her Lebanese heritage, as displayed through the inclusion of the nation’s flag in the background. 

Although Adnan spent many years of her life living in the US and France, she always retained strong ties to her home country. She met her life-long partner Simone Fattal in 1972 after returning to Beirut to work as a journalist, but was forced to flee to Paris three years later when civil war broke out. She based her best-selling novel Sitt Marie Rose (1978) on the true story of Marie Rose Boulos, who was abducted and executed by a Christian militiaman.

Rendered in a prismatic color palette synonymous with her artistry, the Doodle was timed with the 69th anniversary of her first solo exhibition, held in San Rafael, California, where she taught art at the Dominican University from 1958 to 1972. In late 2021 to early 2022, the artist was the subject of an expansive Guggenheim Museum survey, Light’s New Measure. Her works will be on view in the Central Pavilion exhibition of this year’s Venice Biennale, opening April 20.

Here’s some news we were all hoping wouldn’t be on our 2024 Bingo card: After a three-year hiatus, the “Vessel” in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards is reopening. Related Companies, the owner of the $260 million honeycomb-shaped tourist attraction, announced on Friday, April 12, that the heavily criticized structure will be accessible to the public at some point this year with increased safety provisions to address the series of suicides that initially led to its 2021 closure.

While no opening date has been confirmed yet, a spokesperson for Related Companies told the New York Times that changes in the spiral complex’s safety mechanisms will consist of cut-resistant “floor-to-ceiling steel mesh” installed on about half of its accessible area, in addition to barriers on four stairwells and adjacent landings. The first two levels of the 150-foot-tall beehive building will be completely open whereas the top area will remain closed. 

Hyperallergic has reached out to Related Companies for more information.

Created by designer Thomas Heatherwick and Heatherwick Studio, the Vessel has been the subject of intense scrutiny since its opening in 2019, spanning its questionable funding sources, inaccessibility for individuals with physical disabilities, and alleged lack of safety measures.

By January 2021, three people had jumped to their deaths from the structure, forcing Related Companies to temporarily close the site while it implemented new safety measures such as requiring visitors to enter with at least one companion and changing its free admission policy to a cost of $10 a ticket. Ignoring community calls to raise the height of the structure’s guard rails, the developers reopened the attraction in March 2021, only to close it again in late July following a fourth death by suicide.

“While we think it took Related four lives too many to make these physical adjustments, these are the changes we requested, which will allow for prioritizing the safety of everyone who visits the Vessel,” Manhattan community board chair Jessica Chait told the Associated Press.

The call for entries for the fourth iteration of The Bennett Prize, the largest prize award ever granted to women figurative realist painters, is now open. The grand prize is $50,000 and a solo exhibition, with an additional finalist receiving the $10,000 Schmidt Achievement in Figurative Realism Prize. A four-person jury will select 10 finalists whose work will be featured in an exhibition that will travel the United States. Women figurative realist painters are cordially invited to submit their work.

The Bennett Prize was founded by art collectors, curators, and philanthropists Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt. It seeks to propel the careers of women figurative realist painters who have not yet realized full professional recognition, thereby aiming to empower new artists as well as those who have painted for many years.

The call for entries for the 2025 Bennett Prize is open from April 15 through October 4. After a month-and-a-half of deliberation, the jury will select 10 finalists. The winners will be announced May 15, 2025, at the opening reception for the finalists’ exhibition at the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan, which will host the exhibition through early September. The show will then travel the country for two years.

The Bennett Prize is awarded by a four-member jury. For the first time, this year’s jurors are all women and include world-renowned artists Angela Fraleigh and Margaret Bowland; Gloria Groom, Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt, co-founder of The Bennett Prize. The jury will select 10 painters from among the entrants and from those 10, one winner and one runner up.

The prize is intended to help level the playing field for women artists. Works by women artists are collected and shown less frequently by galleries and museums and, when they are purchased, the prices paid are typically far less than those paid to artists who are men.

From the first two iterations of The Bennett Prize, the 18 finalists and two winners have seen up to a 45% increase in prices they command for their work, sold more than 100 paintings, and exhibited in 24 solo shows and 67 group shows. Fifty-five percent of finalists have gained gallery representation. Through The Bennett Prize, these 20 women artists have been featured in more than 50 published stories, 300 advertisements, and in 2,650 social media posts.

The prize is not open to hobbyists or students, artists whose work has been sold for $25,000 or more, or artists who have received an award, prize, or other recognition for their art in that amount or more.

For more information, visit thebennettprize.org.

The Pittsburgh Foundation and the Muskegon Museum of Art are proud partners of The Bennett Prize®

Faith Ringgold, a larger-than-life visual artist, quilter, storyteller, and activist, has passed away at age 93. Her death was confirmed by her family and ACA Galleries, which has represented her since 1995. She died in her home in Englewood, New Jersey, on Saturday, April 13. 

Ringgold was a beloved Black American artist, most famous for visually stunning “story quilts” tackling race, gender, and social justice struggles in the United States. With a career spanning seven decades, over 80 awards and honors, 20 children’s books, and major museum shows worldwide, she left a massive imprint on American art. 

Born Faith Willi Jones in October 1930 in Harlem, New York, she grew up around Harlem Renaissance artists, musicians, and intellectuals, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Sonny Rollins. In 1959, she completed her Master’s degree in art from the City College of New York, and embarked on a cross-Europe trip with her mother and two daughters, visiting Paris, Florence, and Rome. In 1967, she made one of her major early works, “American People Series #20: Die,” now on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Channeling Pablo Picasso’s 1937 “Guernica,” the 12-foot mural addresses America’s race relations in the 1960s: a chaotic scene of warring Black and White Americans, bleeding from knife and gun wounds. 

“I couldn’t paint landscapes in the 1960s — there was too much going on,” she explained in a 2018 interview with Hyperallergic. “This is what inspired the American People Series. For me it is important to make work about peril if it’s your story. One can find beauty in horror that you can share through your art and ideally effect change.”

She continued: “It’s important to me to express the ills of society that are widely accepted while also delivering the message without only seeing the ill. I try to show both the good and the ill. For example, Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ — all the bad and evil was depicted in such a way that you can deal with it. For me that is key.”

Another influential work was “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?” (1983), her first story quilt. Made of 56 square panels combining paintings and text, the quilt tells the fictional tale of Jemima Blakey, an independent Black woman from New Orleans embodying a total contrast to the artwork’s eponymous racially stereotyped figure. Jemima’s character and others in the story are based on women in Ringgold’s family. The quilt was first displayed at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1984.   

“I paint from my experience. This is what I know,” Ringgold told Hyperallergic in the aforementioned interview. “I am not a man or European and wanted to learn and express the lives of my sex and people — not others. So it is important to me to include my people in the conversation. These political and feminist works are more relevant today than ever — it’s important to keep the women’s movement and the social justice issues alive — keep it going.”

In 1988, she made “Tar Beach,” the first of five quilts in her popular Women on a Bridge series. The story’s child protagonist and narrator Cassie Louise Lightfoot flies over the George Washington Bridge on a Harlem summer night. “Only eight years old and in the third grade and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want to for the rest of my life,” Cassie says in the work, which Ringgold adapted into a namesake children’s book published in 1991. 

Throughout the decades, Ringgold continued experimenting with painting, fabric, sculpture, mask- and doll-making, and performance art. Her work was exhibited everywhere from the White House to Rikers Island prison. As an organizer, she co-led a group of Black members within the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC). The group pushed New York’s museums, among them MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney, to lower admission costs and increase representation of artists of color. The group is credited with persuading MoMA and several other museums in the city to institute a free-admission day.

“No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts,” she once said. “After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a Black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my Blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.” She achieved that and much more. 

It’s difficult to imagine a time when images of our faces were not only rare and expensive, but treated almost as sacred objects. But in 15th- and 16th-century Europe, portraits were often obscured behind curtains, affixed to folding diptychs, and slid behind mirrors where, hidden from everyday sight, they could be savored on special occasions. On view through July 7, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance explores this under-recognized tradition, tracing the practice from its origins in Ancient Rome through its later iterations as portable mementos, like the lockets we still wear around our necks.

“We know that these images were intended to be conversation pieces, intended to be enigmatic,” the show’s curator Alison Manges Nogueira told Hyperallergic. The exhibition features more than 60 objects, many of them painted covers that served as introductions to the portraits they obscured. “As you see more of them, you start to realize how special they are.” 

Hidden Faces opens with a double-sided portrait, a medium that features heavily in the show. Rogier van der Weyden’s circa 1460 artwork would have been rotated on a hook and chain, but here, it’s displayed on a pedestal where visitors can view it from all angles. The subject is Francesco d’Este, the favored son of an Italian duke. He holds a ring and hammer (either jousting prizes or symbols of his power), and the portrait’s reverse bears his family’s coat of arms. It’s a fitting introduction to the exhibition, which highlights these ancillary artworks’ function as tools to convey information about their patrons’ status and adherence to Renaissance virtues.

Accordingly, allegorical paintings of chastity and virility abound. The latter is sometimes expressed through the image of a scantily clad male form, a woodland creature common in Medieval European art and referred to as the “Wild Man.” He’s on full view — and near-naked — holding coats of arms in two 15th-century German portrait covers. Nogueira said these depictions symbolize the continuation of family lineage.

Unsurprisingly, women’s portrait covers were designed to project an entirely different set of virtues. In Dutch artist Hans Memling’s “Allegory of Chastity,” (1479–80), a female figure emerges from a mountain of crystalline rocks above a waterfall and two circling lions. The associated portrait’s whereabouts are unknown, but it may have portrayed a woman named Barbara, according to the catalog, as the namesake saint was covered in rock to protect her from her father.

While some allegories are easily interpreted, others are shrouded in mystery. Nogueira pointed to Lorenzo Lotto’s 1505 cover featuring a golden-haired woman reclining against a tree stump between two satyrs, with a hovering cherub pouring cool water onto her chest.

“It seems as though the image is depicting the triumph of virtue over vice, but it’s not entirely clear,” Nogueira said. “What tradition does the female figure come from? Does she come from love poetry from the 14th century? Does she allude to ancient literary traditions?”

Elsewhere in the show, other biographical hints verge on the petty. The verso of a mid-15th-century portrait of Guillaume Fillastre, a bishop and counselor to the Court of Burgundy, features a painting of thorny holly leaves and a Latin slogan translating to “I hate what bites,” a jab at the subject’s intellectual critics. In another by 15th-century Italian artist Jacometto, a Venetian woman wears a yellow scarf, a legal requirement to denote her profession as a prostitute. A Latin acronym painted on the reverse translates to “The whore dedicated herself to wantonness, license, lewdness,” alongside lines that likely allude to an Assyrian text meaning, “Though knowing full well that thou art but mortal, indulge thy desire, find joy in thy feasts. Dead, thou shalt have no delight.”

Hidden Faces marks the first time this type of Renaissance painting has been the subject of a museum exhibition. Personalized imagery such as coats of arms would have lost significance for subsequent owners, and some covers were treated only as protective shields, subjecting them to deterioration. Many covers are missing altogether. Still, scholars know the practice was widespread. Historical inventories cite covers’ existence, and in at least one case detailed in the show’s catalog, make special note of their absence.

As the centuries passed, hidden portraits morphed into portable mementos, sometimes distributed as wedding gifts. Nogueira noted that the concept of obscuring hanging artworks did not completely vanish, either: Gustave Courbet’s scandalous “The Origin of the World” (1866), for example, was first exhibited behind a curtain. The curator called the show’s Renaissance material “a sliver in a much larger tradition.”

One cover in particular speaks to the tradition of hidden portraiture — and to our current-day obsession with snapping photos of ourselves — with astounding clarity. Florentine artist Ridolfo Ghirlandaio’s “Cover with a Mask” (c. 1510), which once slid over the painting of the daughter of a famous Florentine merchant that is now hung next to it, bears the Latin inscription, “To each their own mask.” 

“It speaks to the idea that everyone has a mask — everyone’s wearing a mask — or the theater of life, the kind of philosophical notion of it. But there’s also the idea that portraiture is a kind of artifice,” Nogueira said. “Even more interesting in the context of the exhibition is that the cover is playful and self-referential — it’s speaking to the role of all portrait covers as well.” 

Luigi Zuccheri’s moody landscape paintings, now on display at Karma gallery, radiate an unnerving allure. In his impressionistic rural scenes a farmer carry stalks, fishermen edge toward the banks of streams, ramblers clutching walking sticks make their way on roughhewn paths. Typically these figures might betoken pastoral equanimity but Zuccheri, born in 1904 in the Friuli region of Italy, has introduced disruptive element — a menagerie of oversized creatures, plants, fruits, and vegetables that dwarf the humans with whom they share the canvas.

While the presence of grasshoppers, snakes, pears, and snails of near-monstrous proportions might hint at Surrealist motifs, a surer influence on Zuccheri would be the ex voto or devotional paintings by local Italian artists that he would have seen growing up or when studying painting in Venice. These folk paintings often depict the Virgin Mary’s intercession in the lives of common people; the image serves as a commemorative token, one commissioned by the person whose prayers were answered. The paintings, done in tempera, can be crude and lacking in perspective yet they stand as powerful emblems of emotion and faith.

Zuccheri trained in oil painting but in the 1940s he switched to tempera; all works in the show are tempera on wood, most dating between 1950 and ’55. The technique requires mixing pigment with egg yolk and water and was employed for centuries to paint the walls of tombs and churches. Almost as if he were one of the solitary figures in his own paintings, he collected stones from riverbanks to grind for pigment. He shared his tempera techniques with his friend Giorgio de Chirico, and in turn appears to have adopted the Metaphysical painter’s inclination to infuse the quotidian with disquieting shifts in scale and perspective.

In one canvas (all of the show’s works are untitled), a lone traveler, an expansive, Breughel-like landscape unfolding ahead, treads toward a distant town unaware of the massive tortoise trailing behind or the outsize bird above. Even as it recalls votive images marking a miraculous event, the scene suggests a world out of kilter, a slightly sinister realm where the uncanny may not be welcoming, and may in fact be menacing.

Zuccheri’s dark palette, rendered in thick brushstrokes that color the land a muddy ochre, the turbulent skies gun-metal gray and blue, amplifies this brooding effect. A figure perhaps struggling against the wind grips a broom beneath a glowering sky while impossibly large grasshoppers skitter at their feet; a house-size primrose flowers while people go about their tasks unfazed. The disproportionate relations between humans, fauna, and landscape spark, it seems, little alarm in his figures. In Zuccheri’s rustic domain the fantastical is domesticated; oddity is reality’s baseline, so a colossal crab is merely a generous feast soon to be consumed.

Luigi Zuccheri continues at Karma (188 East 2nd Street, Lower East Side Manhattan) through April 27. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

SAVANNAH, Georgia — Stepping into the entryway of the galleries at the SCAD Museum of Art, I stand in a waiting area. Without the exhibition title and text affixed to one wall, one could pass through this space without a second thought. Yet this room — with glossy linoleum floors, a few weathered folding chairs, and a smattering of plants and signage, which recalls a Changchun line subway station in China — establishes the importance of transience and journeying throughout the ensuing exhibition. In recreating sites of industrialization and migration, Cao argues for caution when presented with grandiose proposals for the future.

Beyond a curtained doorway lie two video installations. “MatryoshkaVerse” (2022) is a two-part projection exploring Manzhouli, a city at the intersections of China, Russia, and Mongolia, and a nexus of cultural and physical exchange. When the Sino-Soviet Treaty was signed in 1950, exchange between China and Russia was seen as mutually beneficial, with the Russian Communist Party going so far as to invest in more than 100 different Chinese infrastructure projects. However, that unmitigated optimism waned. The film documents Chinese border guards installing new wire fences, workers interacting with defunct railway equipment, and the Russian government dedicating a monument to Russian soldiers who died fighting against “fascism in the Chinese theatre.” Much like the relations between China and Russia, at the conclusion of the film, the camera looks upward and spins until it spirals out of control.

The second installation consists of two films: “Nova” (2019) and “HongXia” (2020). The first is a fictitious drama about a time-traveling scientist, while the second documents the rapid development of electrical component factories in Jiuxianqiao in the 1950s. These factories were constructed under Soviet oversight and influence, pressuring the newly formed People’s Republic of China into an era of rapid technological development, which resulted in drastically improved working and living conditions. Thousands of Chinese people, many of them well-educated, flocked to these factories to become a part of this bright, new industry. However, as electrical technology continued to advance at an increasingly fast pace, they were soon producing out-of-date equipment, and the factory was subsequently shut down, leaving thousands unemployed and unhoused. The promise of a better tomorrow came and went in less than a generation’s time — yet the infrastructure it created remains. Much of the film documents former employees’ hopes and desires while revisiting the now-abandoned and crumbling buildings in which they once lived and worked. Although many possibilities for rehabilitation or reinvention of these sites are discussed, none have been enacted.

Viewed today, these works serve as a cautionary tale in the face of AI technologies. Newly publicized technologies present more expedient workflows, smarter software, and less stressful work lives, but ring with false sincerity when set upon Cao’s historical backdrop. While the widespread adoption of AI technologies may yield benefits, this exhibition asks us to consider how long those benefits may last, and what will remain after they’re gone. The photograph “MatryoshkaVerse 02” (2022), for instance, features four figures in a verdant field, each beneath a suspended matryoshka doll. The seeming unreality of the floating objects brings levity to the photograph, a delightful inversion of expectations. Yet, the scene is not entirely idyllic. The sky toward which the dolls ascend and look is overcast. The blue sky beyond is shrouded and obscured. Focus on the future is not to be discarded entirely, but recognition of its unknowability is mandatory.

Cao Fei: At the Edge of Superhumanity continues at Savannah College Art and Design Museum of Art (601 Turner Boulevard, Savannah) through July 29. The exhibition was curated by Brittany Richmond. 

LONDON — In the charcoal drawing “Ma Soeur mon Epouse” (1975) the contorted body of a figure with a penis and breasts is devoured by a bird-reptile hybrid, the beak tugging at the carotid while a single eye gazes blankly forward. Sibylle Ruppert’s monsters are an amalgam of the abject, the sadistic, and the hallucinatory. These erotic references can range from the literal — one monster’s head entirely consists of the head of a phallus — to the stylistic: In certain works, she covers flailing human limbs, appendages, and digits with painfully bulging vascular detailing. Like her forebears and noted influences Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon, and Georges Bataille, Ruppert’s muse is sado-masochism — hence, her dedication of a ‘72 etching, on view in this show, to the Marquis. 

Frenzy of the Visible at Project Native Informant, the first UK solo exhibition of work by the artist, displays drawings and collages Ruppert made throughout the ’70s and ’80s. These works depict the human figure — albeit grotesquely disfigured — with accomplished draftsmanship. The musculature in her 1970s works, including “Ma Soeur mon Epouse,” “J’ecrasai le Ver luisant” (1979), and her largest work, a triptych titled “La Bible du Mal” (1978), recall the accentuated and sublime bodies created by Michelangelo, whose homoerotic sketches portray the human figure with rippling, heavily shaded muscles. Ruppert shares a sensibility with the Renaissance master, too — the latter’s melancholic sketch “Il Sogno” (c. 1533) was widely identified as an allegory for the human soul awakened to virtue from vice. Those vices are shown as twisting, thrashing human figures surrounding a tortured human soul. Ruppert’s work can be read as the inverse: in “La Bible du Mal,” for instance, vices surround, engulf, and even penetrate her human protagonists.

Frenzy Of The Visible posthumously celebrates an artist whose oeuvre was largely ignored in her lifetime, as is often the case with female artists dealing with transgressive subject matter. But it’s a fitting time for Ruppert’s work, which now finds itself amid a milieu of film and theory exploring the transhuman. One of her most significant influences, H.R. Giger, created the design work in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. Ruppert’s mechanic body horror is also suggested in the film Titane (2021), wherein a woman is impregnated by a car. Julia Ducournau’s accelerationist porno almost totally recalls the artist’s camp sketch “Hit Something” (1977), which depicts a human/motorcycle hybrid. The product is, as Comte de Lautréamont wrote in Les Chants de Maldoror (1869), “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” Ruppet’s inner world is a swirl of dark fantasies and private traumas that, in true surrealist fashion, emanate a compulsive beauty. 

Sibylle Ruppert: Frenzy of the Visible continues at Project Native Informant (48 Three Colts Lane, London) through April 20. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

An exploration into the generational impact of Britain’s eroding eastern coastline and intimate documentation of a three-person family in China are just two bodies of work that received this year’s LensCulture Portrait Awards.

The Amsterdam-based photography contest announced the 39 winners of its 11th competition on April 11. An international eight-person jury selected six winners across two categories, Series and Singles Images, each receiving cash prizes ranging from $500 to $3,500. The winning works will be displayed at the LensCulture exhibition in next year’s Photo London art fair and receive solo features in the organization’s online magazine.

“Portraits can be endlessly alluring, due to the simple fact that we, as humans, are endlessly curious about other humans,” said Jim Casper, who co-founded LensCulture in 2004. “How do others present themselves to us? What are their circumstances? How do they live, work, play, love, survive? How are we different from each other? How are we alike?”

The jury also selected eight photographers for special distinction awards and recognized 25 finalists. Their work can be viewed on LensCulture’s website. Read on to learn more about the winning artists and their work.

Series Winners

Max Miechowski — Land Loss (2023)

British photographer Max Miechowski earned first place in the Series category for his work Land Loss, which examines the generations of residents living along Britain’s eastern shore, one of the fastest eroding coastlines in Europe.

“I expected to find storms, rough seas, ruined houses falling into the waves. A sense of urgency from the people living on the edge of a landscape, where entire towns have been lost to the North Sea,” the artist said in a statement. “Instead, the land felt still, the waters were calm, and time appeared to move slowly.”

Zihan Wei — I Did Nothing Other Than to Tell Them to Smile (2022)

Second-place winner Zihan Wei used photography as a means to reconcile her relationship with her parents. The resulting images reveal the intimate awkwardness that permeated the project as she and her parents grew more comfortable with the camera’s presence.

In a statement, the China-based photographer explained that she began the series by attempting to engage her parents by playing pranks.

“When they refused to take these kinds of strange photos, I persuaded them by telling them: ‘It’ s a wedding photo.’ They had never taken wedding pictures in the past, so they were convinced. They thought, ‘Maybe this is art,'” Wei said in a statement.

Kairo Urovi — Light Are the Wounds Heavy Is the Wind (2023)

London-based photographer Kairo Urovi contends with identity and family diaspora through his ongoing project Light Are the Wounds, described as “a love letter to Albania and a powerful expression of trans resilience and visibility” on the artist’s website. In this series, Urovi’s black-and-white images explore the nuances of displacement in terms of geography and gender identity.

Single Image Winners

Erçin Ertürk — “The Bitter Face of War” (2023)

Turkish photojournalist Erçin Ertürk examines Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine through his vulnerable portrait of Sergey Raylyan, a Ukrainian soldier who was the victim of a 2022 car explosion when he and his fellow soldiers drove a truck into an anti-tank mine, causing him to lose his vision and ability to walk.

“This is the bitter face of the war that Russia has been waging on Ukraine for almost two years now,” said Ertürk. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, at least 10,000 civilians have been killed and more than 18,500 civilians injured, according to the United Nations.

Nadia Bautista — “Oriel & Juanma” (undated)

Queer Argentinian artist Nadia Bautista explores the many facets of love through her intimate project What is love for you?, illustrating the expansive ways in which individuals show love for one another.

“[L]ove is the company, the time and the affection that we express in different ways to those people we love. Celebrating their achievements, embracing their wounds, encouraging their desires and accepting them to be, in freedom,” Bautista explained in a statement.

Slava Lyu-fa — “Medina” (2023)

Russian photographer Slava Lyu-fa presents an unfiltered view of labor and single motherhood through his portrait of Madina, a dairy plant worker in Yakutsk, Russia. After her husband left during her first pregnancy, she ultimately went on to raise three children by herself. Madina has spent nearly 40 years working at the same dairy plant, where she “washes big trucks of milk in a large garage,” according to Lyu-Fa.

TAMALE, Ghana — Two remarkable journeys unfold amidst the gentle rustle of golden grasses as the first light of dawn illuminates the vast Northern area of Ghana. One group of natural dye artists embark on a ritual, venturing into the wild and delicately harvesting young indigo leaves. The other group crosses the White Volta River with a canoe to retrieve imported yarns to be transformed by age-old traditional techniques into narrow indigo-colored strips fit for loom weaving. One hundred and thirty miles further north, in the town of Bolgatanga, seasoned basket weavers eagerly await the arrival of elephant grass, harvested and dried in the central forest belt of the country. In these early hours, the pace is set for the artisanal skills ingrained in these communities to not only preserve cultural identity but also reshape the socio-economic landscape of the region for generations to come.

Northern Ghana comprises five regions: Savannah, Northern, North East, Upper East, and Upper West. The area is populated by over five million people, according to the last Population and Housing Census in 2021 conducted across the five regions by the Ghana Statistical Service. Nonetheless, Northern Ghana consistently records some of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. The 2016 Ghana Poverty and Inequality Report also concluded that the Northern regions have consistently experienced among the nation’s highest poverty rates with little improvement since 1992.

Some experts have labeled this situation an effect of policies targeting food production alone. However, Northern Ghana has adapted and remained resilient in the face of a lack of investment in infrastructure, industry, and educational resources.

Tijani Shaihu Muhammad Mudasir, an esteemed Islamic scholar in the town of Daboya located in the Savannah region beside the White Volta River, leads the rich tradition of indigo dyeing.

Descended from one of the three families renowned for pioneering indigo dyeing in the country, Mudasir spearheads the efforts to harvest indigo leaves, seeds, and flowers. This community-based enterprise — involving dyeing, loom weaving, and sewing — not only yields vibrant colors but also sustains the livelihoods of many of Daboya’s residents, Mudasir told Hyperallergic.

Working against the clock to preserve the plants’ pigment, Mudasir and his associate, Baidulahi Abdul Aziz, pound and shape the indigo leaves into balls after four-hour harvesting expeditions, which Mudasir says occurs almost daily. They leave the balls to the sun’s watchful gaze for two weeks and then stir them twice daily for four to five days with a blend of wood ash and mud balls until they achieve the desired hue.

Mudasir commented on minimal resources hindering the indigo dyeing industry’s ability to modernize and compete in the global market, particularly as unpredictable weather patterns and natural climate instability impact indigo plant growth, access to the community, and production output. He added that a “yarn manufacturing company and bridge over the river would attract more people to do business in Daboya.”

Meanwhile, in the Upper East Region’s capital city of Bolgatanga, stalks of dried veta vera, also known as elephant grass, are split, twisted, dyed, and knotted by men and women to create Bolga baskets, named after the city itself. Though traditionally used to sift and store millet grains, today these bio-degradable baskets are sold throughout Ghana and around the world in the form of interior decor items, planters, purses, baby carrier baskets, and shopping and laundry bags.

Farmer and climate activist Irene Konlan, originally from Bolgatanga and now living in the city of Tamale, is interested in highlighting Bolga bags as an alternative to single-use plastic. She told Hyperallergic that planting the veta vera grass in Bolgatanga would allow the weavers, who are forced to travel to nearby towns to source the straw, easier access to raw materials and change the economic circumstances of the city and the rest of the Northern regions.

“So many orders remain unfulfilled,” she explained. “And that farming angle could entice the youth who consider the basket weaving a skill for only the older generation.”

According to Konlan, the city’s three-month rainy period from May to August and the subsequent dry season from September to April supply a perfect case study.

“We enjoy the rainy season for a short while, and then the weather becomes so hot we practically have to sit under trees. Those periods slow productivity, especially as we are hit hardest by climate change and its accompanying heatwaves,” she said. “But, while the old people weave, others can plant, and the rest can sell.”

Putting her plan into action, Konlan has begun engaging the weavers she grew up around to plant the elephant grass themselves — a sustainable approach she believes will maximize the business model.

The revival of traditional crafts like indigo dyeing and Bolga basket weaving holds the promise of transforming the often overlooked and marginalized regions into vibrant economic hubs. By leveraging these local creations as avenues for sustainable livelihoods, and with the right strategic support and promotion, the centuries-old industries could emerge as key drivers of inclusive development, economic opportunities, and global investments in Northern Ghana.

On March 19, a late British artist’s museum-like apartment was given a new Grade II protection status through the United Kingdom’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The immersive home of artist Ron Gittins, whose clandestine creativity was discovered after he passed away at age 80 in 2019, is currently being prepped for public enjoyment with the help of his family and Historic England, DCMS’s public branch for cultural preservation.

Dubbed “Ron’s Place” by his niece Jan Williams and her partner Chris Teasdale during their journey to preserve it, the apartment where Gittins resided from 1986 until his death is on the ground floor of a Victorian-style building in Birkenhead, England. The artist had express permission from the landlord to decorate the space as he pleased — a privilege he made the most of, though he rarely allowed guests to visit. With Shakespearean theater and Ancient Roman and Egyptian history as his primary inspirations, he indulged his imagination through murals, sculptures, and mixed-media artwork across his flat.

In one room, a large sculpted Minotaur head engulfs the fireplace as paintings of Greek philosophers look down from their perch beneath the cornices. Another room boasts a lion’s head as its fireplace, intricate paintings on every wall, and various papier-mâché figures slouching in chairs. Gittins painted Ancient Egyptian motifs from floor to ceiling in the apartment’s main hallway, and the bathroom is aquatic-themed with large fish, stingrays, dragonflies, and other critters painted on the blue walls and ceiling. In addition to artwork, the apartment is also chock-full of paraphernalia, costumes, collected materials, and musical instruments.

Gittins is remembered as both overtly flamboyant and largely private, and he lived with some mental health problems that resulted in on-and-off estrangement from his family. After his passing, his family was astounded to find his flat stuffed with over 30 years’ worth of hoarded belongings, from memorabilia and art supplies to trash and recyclables he couldn’t part with. Williams and Teasdale, both artists themselves, knew that beneath the clutter was a treasure worth preserving. They worked to clean the space and continued to rent it through 2020 so the landlord could make necessary repairs.

With support from several patrons and heritage groups, the pair embarked on a crowdfunding campaign to get Ron’s Place both protected and appreciated as a vital example of Outsider Art, later assembling the Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust (WACCLT) to purchase the three-unit building where the apartment is located.

Now that the WACCLT and Gittins’s family members can rest assured that Ron’s Place isn’t going anywhere, they have begun essential restorations to prepare the apartment for public view and foster a creative community around the artist’s legacy.

“I believe Ron would be made up and very proud at all the attention he’s receiving, and thrilled his work is being recognised and appreciated,” Williams said in a statement. “He only kept it secret because you’re not really supposed to turn your rented flat into a Roman villa complete with epic concrete fireplaces, are you?”

I keep hearing people call the Whitney Biennial “safe.” It’s usually art-world people and critics, who tend to say it every two years, as if the museum has ever intentionally sought controversy or embraced radical politics. That’s never been the case. For that reason, there’s nothing safer than calling the Whitney Biennial “safe.”

This year especially, the moniker is ill-fitting and glib. The 2024 Biennial places a striking emphasis on video work, vastly distinguishing itself from previous iterations. I found this fundamental difference refreshing. And as a curatorial decision, I dare say it’s decidedly unsafe. Essayistic, performance-based, and contemplative, many of the video works here demand time, and far more than cursory attention. This Biennial is not for the casual walk-through visitor, and definitely not a show your young kids will enjoy. 

Head Curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli even hired five additional curators for film, sound, and performance works. As I walked through the exhibition, the prominence of these media had me wondering if painting was “dead” again and I’d just missed the memo. And where’s all the photography? There’s hardly any. 

But that’s not the only reason we can’t so easily call the Biennial “safe.” Another is that it undeniably touches on every urgent political issue in American society today, from reproduction rights in Carmen Winant’s photo collage of abortion clinic workers and LBGTQ+ struggles in Sharon Hayes’s interview with a group of queer elders to race and colonialism through excellent video works by Isaac Julien, Clarissa Tossin, and others. 

Nor can we claim that it completely avoided the P-word, as Demian DinéYazhi’’s clandestine, flickering “Free Palestine” neon text somehow managed to catch curators by surprise and avoid removal from the show. Sure, the statement is pretty mild. But does anyone expect newbie Whitney Director Scott Rothkopf, who entered the job just five months ago, to bang on the table during a board meeting and bellow at his billionaire trustees, “We must talk about Palestine”? Not in a million years.

In late 2018, in response to a staff letter calling for the resignation of the Whitney’s then-vice chair and tear-gas industrialist Warren B. Kanders that was first published on Hyperallergic, then-Director Adam Weinberg declared the museum as a “safe space for unsafe ideas,” with the immediate caveat that the “Whitney is first and foremost a museum. It cannot right all the ills of an unjust world, nor is that its role.” It was a public admission that some ideas are still too unsafe for the Whitney.   

The same holds true today. And the curators of this year’s Biennial certainly seemed to favor quiet reflections on the issues of the day over confrontational art. Nothing here wants to punch you in the gut, shake you up, or motivate you to run outside and burn down a police station. It’s as quiet as it gets, to paraphrase the title of the 2022 Biennial.

As a survey of American art — or, at least, of what American art galleries sell — the Whitney Biennial holds a mirror to society. If this year’s works are “safe,” it’s because they reflect the tameness and resignation of our culture at large more than that of the Whitney alone. When the best we can do is a repeat of Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, maybe we deserve this whisper of a Whitney Biennial. Disunited, frightened, and worn out, it is us who prefer to play it safe.  

‣ Elsa Delmas and the investigative team at Le Monde visualized the physical impact of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, detailing the schools, hospitals, and places of worship that have been destroyed through photos, videos, and statistical maps. The results are gut-wrenching:

‣ Muslims across the world celebrated Eid al-Fitr on Tuesday. In Gaza, the day passed without the normally joyous festivities. In a story for BBC, David Gritten and Rushdi Abu Alouf speak to Palestinians there, many of them children, about the holiday in the midst of Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza:

Sarah Amer, an 11-year-old girl from Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighbourhood, said she would usually go to the amusement park during the festival or be invited to parties by her aunts and cousins.

“This is a holiday of war. How can we rejoice and celebrate when there are people being killed, prisoners, and wounded?” she asked.

“My friends… are missing now and I do not know where they are,” she added. “I miss those moments when I would meet and play with them, celebrate and chat and sing together.”

‣ The United States is building a 19-structure, billion-dollar embassy across 40 acres in Beirut. The price tag and scale are oversized compared to the US’s other international outposts. Habib Battah explores the phenomenon for the Middle East Research and Information Project:

No specific reason has been offered for building such a massive compound in Lebanon. According to the State Department’s website, the “primary purpose” of any US Embassy is to “assist American citizens,” visiting or living in the host country.[1] But such explanations are belied by Lebanon’s relative size and economic status. Rather, the new embassy, like that of Baghdad, speaks to longstanding US military interests and activity in Lebanon and the wider region.

‣ In light of the news that Arizona is reviving a draconian 1864 anti-abortion law from before it even officially became a state, the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump gives us a brief history lesson on some of the other laws that were active at the time:

Consider, though, the other prohibitions that surround the initial Howell language. A bit before that, for example, the code establishes what constitutes a murder or a manslaughter. In Section 34, it also creates the category of “excusable homicides.” Those include situations such as when “a man is at work with an axe, and the head flies off and kills a bystander” or “a parent is moderately correcting his child, or a master his servant or scholar.” Only when that correction is “moderate,” mind you. Exceed the bounds of moderation correction, and you’re subject to more severe charges.

‣ Pope Francis has become known for his (relatively) progressive policies, like blessing same sex couples and siding with science on climate change, but last week, the Vatican issued a startl-ng declaration about trans people in its 20-page “Dignitas Infinitas.” The document lists violations of human dignity and mostly names standard Catholic fare — poverty, war, abortion, etc. — but a few additions are new, namely, sex changes and “gender theory.” Vox‘s Li Zhou delves into the Vatican’s sinister attack on trans rights.

The document’s treatment of trans people continues this pattern by emphasizing the need to acknowledge every person’s human dignity while offering “limited dignity” to trans people, DeBernardo said.

In particular, it argues that gender-affirming procedures threaten the dignity that a person is born with at conception, claiming that such medical care interferes with “the need to respect the natural order of the human person.” The document also broadly denounces “gender theory,” which includes “argu[ing] that a person’s gender can be different from the sex that person was assigned at birth,” NPR’s Jason DeRose explains.

“​​That ‘Dignitas Infinita’ rebukes gender transition interventions as a rejection of God’s plan of human life implies that those individuals who have elected to transition … have violated divine will,” said Chesnut.

Jason Steidl, a professor of religious studies at St. Johns University who specializes in Catholicism, put it more bluntly. “This is the Newsmax version of Catholic theology,” he said.

‣ Roseanne Barr is back at it, white wine in hand. There are few surprises in her latest stream of word vomit, besides, “Our Trump is here being the DJ, and I’ve just danced, and everyone is amazed.” Perhaps he was playing Elton John? Barr follows this remark with another jump scare: “Please drop out of college because it’s going to ruin your lives.”

‣ Package thieves are getting smarter:

‣ A trolling comedian heads to City Hall, where he mocks New York City Mayor Eric Adam’s insistence on adding more and more cops to the subways. He aptly notes that these officers seem to just be standing around playing Candy Crush:

‣ The Bob Ross documentary footage his estate didn’t want you to see …

‣ Finally, an honest review of the eclipse:

‣ Gen Z has such a magical way of narrating cultural history:

‣ A Manhattan chicken shop foregoes an in-person cashier for a remote one, who literally Zooms into work from the Philippines. The shop owner calls the decision “cost effective,” but it seems likely that this dystopian new method is just a way to avoid paying NYC minimum wage. There are so many questions, but one thing is for sure — the comment section is livid:

‣ No one foams milk better than someone with 5+ identities in their X bio:

‣ Hell hath no fury like an arts and craft girly scorned:

Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

Archaeologists in Pompeii have uncovered exceptionally preserved frescoes depicting legendary subjects of the Trojan War myth in a banquet hall on a known residential and commercial block in the ancient city.

One painting depicts the god Apollo, equipped with his symbolic lyre, attempting to seduce Cassandra. According to myth, Apollo gave Cassandra the power of foresight in an effort to win her affection. When he failed and was unable to revoke the divine gift, he applied a curse so that no one would believe her prophecies. Thus, Cassandra couldn’t prevent the Trojan War, which began when her brother Paris (also known as Alexander) abducted the beautiful Helen of Troy, who was married to Spartan King Menelaus. Some accounts state that Helen fell in love with Paris and went willingly. The god Zeus taking the form of a swan to seduce Spartan Queen Leda, a popular artistic reference depicting Helen’s parents, appears in another fresco.

The paintings are associated with the Third or Ornamental Style of Roman wall painting, known for small, finely painted figures and subjects that seem to float within monochromatic fields adorned with intricate borders. Popular 20 BCE through around 60 CE, Third Style frescoes were designed to mimic framed works of art or altars through illusions resembling carved beams, shaded pillars, and shining candelabras — all of which were painted on flat walls.

Pompeii’s Archaeological Park Director Gabriel Zuchtriegel explained in a public statement that the paintings were likely executed on dark backgrounds, rather than the typically colorful ones seen in other rooms across the Vesuvian city, because they obscured carbon residue left by lamps hung along the walls.

“Here people gathered to feast after sunset, the flickering light of the lamps made the images seem to move, especially after a few glasses of good Campania wine,” Zuchtriegel added.

This particular banquet hall was part of a high-status residential property within Pompeii’s Regio IX (Region 9) and funneled into an open-air courtyard toward a staircase leading to the site’s first floor. The archway of the staircase had a large amount of construction materials beneath it, indicating that the home was undergoing renovations at the time of Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 CE.

Editor’s Note, 4/15/2024, 12:59pm EST: An earlier version of this article misidentified Spartan King Menelaus. This has been corrected.

In his second book of poems, Palestinian scholar Ahmad Almallah seeks a language that captures the afterlives of the mother tongue. The 2023 collection, his second to date following Bitter English (2019), blurs the borders between languages, the living and the dead, presence and absence.

“What does not getting used to it do for me?” he asks in the book’s eponymous poem, “Border Wisdom.” By which he means not getting used to the violence that Palestinians — in this case, those living in the occupied West Bank — have been subjected to every day for the past 76 years. The daily abuse, limited mobility, systemic incarceration; the grotesque humor of occupation soldiers and the way Arabic in their mouths degrades the body by degrading language.

What would it mean to instead get unaccustomed to coexisting with your humiliation, to denormalize rituals designed to break you, to become unwise if wisdom means resigning oneself to continued violence? There can be no wisdom under occupation, no living under borders, no border wisdom. 

But the collection doesn’t proceed from a rhetoric of refusal. Rather, it lingers where it hurts the most: in indeterminacy, at the edge of what he refers to in “The Name Elegy” as the “real,” where lack is both claimed and refused. “I own no language,” he writes. Neither Arabic nor this American English, both of which he uses throughout the collection.

This decision is at odds with his previous book, in which he deliberately abandons his mother tongue for English following 10 years of forced exile in the United States; legal complications related to visa issues prevented him from returning to his native Bethlehem. Written in the wake of his mother’s death, Border Wisdom stages the clash between English and Arabic on the page instead. It embraces the fissures between language, identity, and ownership, as well as the brittleness of their ideological alignments.

Yet what I appreciate the most is that while writing from an in-between position, Almallah resists fetishizing the liminal. He is fully conscious of the impossibility of being whole and the fraught performance of belonging that the diasporic self, in its split nature, can never truly escape. In “After Ten,” he reflects on the decade of separation between himself and his homeland: “There I was, after my ten years of absence, wrapped in a Palestinian scarf, playing the part.” 

Which is why translation, he argues, should disturb fantasies of linguistic containment. “They are done often in the service of convenience. I prefer to be inconvenienced,” Almallah writes, foregrounding the discomfort and agency in mistranslation. Certain things, like grief, can’t be translated. The poems in the collection that Almallah wrote after his mother’s death could only be written in Arabic. Perhaps wisdom exists in the refusal to prioritize comprehension in the name of consumption. A kind of translation that, instead of glossing over its losses, centers them.

Also scattered throughout and at the end of the book are abstract line drawings, which, not unlike asemic writing, gesture towards meaning while remaining illegible. These lines mark the reading experience with the gesture of a hand, an arbitrary border materially demarcating the page.

At the core of this collection is an ethos I can only approximate through a series of questions: When a mother tongue and a land gradually abandon us, what replaces them? How do you grieve from a diasporic position? When do you book a return ticket after a loved one has passed? Can Palestinians ever mourn? And because mourning is forever deferred, postponed until justice is achieved, how do you forge a relationship to memory in the absence of rituals designed to process loss?

In their proximity to death, Almallah’s poems offer a witnessing that keenly questions its own ability to witness and a reminder that sometimes poetry must defer to objects or to the land itself. Chairs feel proud without bodies sitting on them, he writes in “The Disappearance.” Freed from the weight that molded them, they exist on their own and interfere with the arrangement of the living. In Almallah’s poems, objects are sentient and what we remember isn’t contingent on our own remembering. Everything exists regardless. “The orange pipes breathe and the walls keep breathing land,” he writes in “(On the Way Between).” Perhaps to own no language is to abandon the logic of property, and let things claim themselves as they will: “water, water, water.”

The problem with poets is that they see everything: the end, the needles, the mother as another. And the brilliance of this collection is that it forges an ethics of grief that challenges human containment, estranging the act of living from the first person and divorcing lyricism from its habitual “you.” Between Arabic and English and without slipping into nostalgia, Almallah crafts a place from which to write where sentiency extends beyond human conventions. And what is more defiant than claiming that what you have lost has also lost you? Than reversing the direction of grief, whereby the living are indebted to the dead and the dead too insist on claiming the living? There is nothing the occupation can do about that. 

Border Wisdom (2023) by Ahmad Almallah is published by Winter Editions and available online and at independent bookstores.

TULSA, Okla. — What would you do if you thought it was your last day?

Philadelphia-based artist Lex Brown asks this question time and time again in her hour-long science-fiction musical Carnelian (2023), a film following three mythical characters —Necyria, Orachrysops, and Bicyclus — over the course of one day as they anxiously prepare for an impending unknown catastrophe they refer to as “the Boom.” Through eight songs written by Brown and co-composed by Samuel Beebe, the trio grapples with the complexities of institutional power structures embedded in politics, the environment, social dynamics, and technology.

The film made its theatrical debut at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema on Thursday, April 4 on the first night of Sovereign Futures, a four-day arts and culture symposium organized by curator Allison Glenn. The symposium delved into Oklahoma’s Afro-Indigenous history across multiple sites in and around Tulsa, a region still contending with its violent history of genocide, displacement, and terror against its Native American and Black communities.

“This screening brought together a lot of different threads,” Brown told Hyperallergic, adding that while the film was made from a host of experiences including the COVID-19 quarantine, Tulsa held a special significance, given her familial ties to the region. On both sides of her family, Brown is related to survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — one of the worst racial terror attacks in United States history during which White mobs attacked and killed hundreds of Black residents living in Tulsa’s Greenwood District, a neighborhood where the city’s entire African-American community resided at the time as a result of Jim Crow segregation laws.

“There were just different waves of personal history, locational history, family history, and artistic history that were all rolling and intermingling with each other,” Brown explained.

Each character embodies a specific natural archetype. Necyria, who represents fire, is portrayed as a recumbent, passive individual, lethargically resting on a couch while her counterpart Bicyclus, symbolizing air, periodically disappears while toying with a peculiar instrument known as a chronometer. Opposite these two forces, Orachrysops, who represents Earth, is depicted as stubborn and materialistic, obsessed with someone (or something) known as the “Great Leader” and a conspiracy theory program called Omnesia Radio.

Carnelian was first presented a year ago as a multichannel video installation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s List Visual Arts Center. Later, it was adapted as a 40-minute live production accompanied by a full jazz band that debuted at Philadelphia’s Fringe Festival in September. 

Brown, who is already working on her next project (an opera), explained that she hopes she will have more opportunities to present the work going forward.

She also wants to return to the city in the next few months to visit the rodeo in Boley, one of the remaining all-Black towns of Oklahoma that are located about an hour’s drive from the city.

“I think in the same way that Tulsa as a place brings together so many complex, unresolved histories, there was an interesting counter theme for me personally running through the weekend,” she said.

Much as one might visit a prospective apartment at various hours of the day to gauge the quality of light, I staked out Shana Moulton’s solo exhibition Meta/Physical Therapy at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to understand its audience. 

I first encountered Moulton’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, Cynthia, about 15 years ago via her cult-hit video series Whispering Pines (2002–ongoing), of which this work is part. The first instantiations were characterized by a mystical, psychedelic flair that counters its heavier existential themes. Moulton’s career has only moved upwards and outwards since these earliest screenings and performances. And yet, I had to work to forget Cynthia’s history while sitting in the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, the museum’s black-box performance space, instead focusing my armchair anthropologist’s eye on watching those around me observe the work. Retirees and international tourists drifting through for the afternoon, those seemingly in the know, my young son: All were, in a word, enraptured, as Cynthia made her MoMA debut. I can’t recall the last time I saw a museum audience sit through a work’s entire duration — here, around 15 minutes — not to mention more than once, and remarkably absent the company of their phones. 

So, what does this say about Cynthia? 

As Meta/Physical Therapy opens, Cynthia, resplendent in a floral housedress, receives a package: an Amazon box, that icon of American convenience culture. She struggles to find a place for its contents, a rather generic-looking teal-green ceramic vase, in an electric pastel-hued room — a full-scale, video projection-mapped theatrical set — filled with other kitschy, mass-market trinkets. Fitted with cheap, retail-style shelving, a snake plant, and a plush, amorphously shaped chaise, the room feels at once like a late-model gynecologist’s office and a new-age sex shop — a space whose aggressively soft design sensibility demands that one should simply relax, even as its purpose inspires anxiety. Cynthia steps off set for a moment and reappears wearing a sort of remote-controlled heating apparatus around her neck, one we can only assume she mail-ordered. With a push of a button, an office-style ergonomic laptop table appears, and she lounges on the chaise, frantically Googling “Where should I put my vase?” A streaming page of search results — an endless glut of content related to various ailments, menopause, and middle age — physically overwhelms her, giving way to the hallucinatory journey that follows. 

The audience gasped and laughed in recognition as Cynthia performs an increasingly absurd set of physical rituals seemingly designed to glean insight into — and seize an emotional handle on — her position as a woman who recognizes her age as it is shockingly mirrored back to her by distinctly alienating capitalist forces: Cynthia digitally dissolves into thin air more than once throughout the piece. I was instantly reminded of Dara Birnbaum’s imploding woman in her ubiquitous 1978–79 piece “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” which is, incidentally, part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Sound plays a crucial role in Moulton’s work: Audiences of a certain age will instantly recognize composer and longtime collaborator Nick Hallett’s manipulation of the opening bars from Radiohead’s Y2K synth anthem “Everything in Its Right Place” (2000), which he positions against Sarah McLachlan’s shrilly yearning “Sweet Surrender” (1997) to both situate Cynthia in time — she and I probably shared a cigarette at the Lilith Fair — and suggest a more literal narrative arc in the search for pop-lyrical meaning. Everything does have a place as Cynthia, refusing to be waylaid by her own human condition, finally builds herself a shelf to house her vase. A small win.  

Throughout the month of April, MoMA is presenting a series of activations of the Kravis Studio with Moulton and Hallett performing live — a return to IRL programming for Cynthia, who was last seen in New York in Whispering Pines 10, which was screened online by the New Museum in 2020. The pandemic’s profound sense of collective fear and social alienation — not to mention that of the Internet — was nothing new for Cynthia. Years on, Meta/Physical Therapy is a celebration of the post-traumatic healing power of community, as Cynthia convenes with what is likely the largest, most wide-ranging, and ever-shifting public to encounter her in physical space. Cynthia remains as charming as ever, and Moulton’s ultimate strength here, as a performer and an artist, lies in her ability to create the conditions for ritual engagement as viewers gather together, whether on demand or on the spot. 

Shana Moulton: Meta/Physical Therapy continues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through April 21. The exhibition was organized by Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate Curator, with May Makki, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance. Performances are produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Associate Director and Producer, with Olivia Rousey, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Programs.

LOS ANGELES — “What’s your more?” asked Nora Turato throughout “pool 6,” her LA Frieze Week performance at Sprüth Magers gallery, her voice adopting the resonant tone of a motivational speaker. Different characters soon emerged in the artist’s theatrical monologue: a woman obsessed with affirmations, a macho health nut afraid to consume seed oils. Performance is one result of Turato’s unconventional practice: The artist collects found text for year-long periods to form what she calls “pools,” accumulations that she reconfigures into artwork. For her solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, it’s not true!!! stop lying! (all works 2024), she focuses on the language of self-optimization found in disparate digital sources, from wellness influencer videos to tech advertisements. Across painting, video, and performance, she unveils the frenzied, emotional underpinnings of consumption, transforming collective angst into her own creative product. 

Enamel paintings and large text painted on entire walls replicate the sleek look and insistent, often colloquial tone of contemporary advertising geared toward self-improvement — sans the merchandise. The monochrome backgrounds and sparse layout of these pieces echo marketing strategies that pitch various services — usually technological ones — as solutions to workaday struggle (“sleep / it’s good for you!,” which features the eponymous phrase, could be an ad for Airbnb). In “this isn’t me / i need some healing,” the phrases are split between the top and bottom of a four-part steel panel. The simple text inhabits the point of view of an imagined consumer, while the blank space at the center visually implies the absence of a product. In a reflexive gesture, Turato repositions the consumer’s words as the actual commodity — now a luxury item, a painting.

In performance and video works, the artist becomes a stand-in for many online wellness personalities, interweaving their voices into whirlwind monologue. During the performance, Turato, wearing a black top and jeans reminiscent of Steve Jobs’s wardrobe, emphatically claimed that “suffering is an alignment problem” and that “forever chemicals … in Lululemon leggings” cause seizures. In the video of “pool 6” on view in the show, words from her monologue appear synced with her voice, printed over a digitally rendered sky resembling a Microsoft screensaver. Turato distinguishes between the various characters she plays with short pauses and subtle changes in pitch and rhythm, but they all share fraught relationships with their bodies — and all obsessively attempt to solve these problematic attachments. One says “I love you” into her mirror each morning; another avoids all “perfluoroalkyl compounds.” “pool 6” dramatizes their frantic alienation by dissociating words from their initial speakers, a process that turns isolated expressions into unsettling entertainment. 

Turato’s virtuosic ability to illuminate the strange, pervasive anxiety present online belies her more troubling deconstructions of artwork, individuality, and commerce. The artist blurs the distinctions between the consumer and the consumed, turning the “feed” — its creators and content — into an artistic commodity. The resulting artwork counters its own cynicism by illuminating a communal struggle for embodiment — even if its original voices seem misguided. At the Frieze fair, such nuance may get lost. After the performance, I talked with a collector who had flown in for the fairs. “She’s right,” the collector said. “You shouldn’t drink tap water.” 

Nora Turato: it’s not true!!! stop lying! continues at Sprüth Magers (5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles) through April 27. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

Welcome to the 229th installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, artists kick off their day with a morning perreo, take their work to the streets of their working-class neighborhood, and devise ways to escape the “too much thinking” phase.

Want to take part? Check out our new submission guidelines and share a bit about your studio with us through this form! All mediums and workspaces are welcome, including your home studio.

Yali Romagoza, Manhattan, New York

Describe an average day in your studio.

I like to wake up early. I am a morning person. I arrive at the studio in the morning and play a perreo song by Karol G, Ivy Queen, or Tokischa; I dance; that is my meditation. I usually work on several projects simultaneously as I do interdisciplinary work where media and genres intersect, from performance to installation, photography, video, and costume making. No day is the same as the other. I often don’t listen to anything when working; I enjoy the silence, making me feel very present. When I’m done for the day, I clean no matter how tired or messy the space is. I can’t work in a cluttered space; it makes me anxious and lose focus. So much is already happening inside my head.

How does the space affect your work?

As an artist who has worked primarily in performance and with the body, I find it exciting to have a space to explore object making and have the opportunity to display it and see it instantly.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

I am part of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) community as a studio member. EFA has a creative and risk-taking community that has inspired me, and I feel honored to be a part of it. The neighborhood is exciting and eclectic since we are close to Times Square; a lot is happening constantly. It has a special meaning for me since I used to walk through these streets in the fashion district looking for fabrics and materials on my work days in the fashion industry back in 2011–13. It’s like I’ve come full circle. All my passions, art and design, finally found each other.

What do you love about your studio?

I love that it’s a white cube and that I can play with having a new solo exhibition every month.

What do you wish were different?

Next time I’ll choose a studio with a window.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

The body.

Tyler Kline, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Describe an average day in your studio.

I live on a block in the Kensington Badlands of Philadelphia and art is transforming the block, which Rocky lived on in the original movie, into a working-class arts neighborhood. I paint, draw, and make digital design in my apartment, and I have a project space on the ground floor with a storefront that I use as a community arts space, gallery, and studio. I am never not making or daydreaming of art. I paint murals on the block, paint the exterior of properties, and maintain a community garden set up by New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC). I listen to the radio as I create, Temple Jazz 90.1 — they play Rufus Harley and Moondog and other under-recognized titans of sonic spacescapes.

How does the space affect your work?

I work on multiple projects at once and do some of my larger fabrication at Nextfab, a shared maker space down the way. The ambient dembow and reggaetón sounds of the neighborhood, as well as the cinematic structures of the El train, early 20th-century modernism of the Rowhouse neighborhood, and Philly working-class Irish Catholic and Puerto Rican roots in the depths of a tranq epidemic inform everything I create. I used to have a studio a couple blocks away, but since moving here and pairing with entities like Mural Arts Philadelphia, NKCDC, and neighbors, I have been able to tap into a transformative power of art; confrontation and nurturing of sorrow, and abundant hope create one of the most inspiring atmospheres in contrast to the opioid epidemic embattling these streets.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

I socialize and plan with Kensington neighbors, activists, and curators; the community garden on the block anchors the crossroads of Tusculum and Kensington Avenue, out on the sidewalk listening to stories of the neighborhood’s history, and creating new narratives of an artist-led future.

What do you love about your studio?

I love my studio’s ability to act as a 24/7 receiver and transmitter of electromagnetic dream poetry field vibrations.

What do you wish were different?

I wish the neighborhood were not used as a containment zone by the greater city of Philadelphia to push and dump the marginalized, ill, forgotten, cheated, and abandoned as the rest of the city gentrifies.

What is your favorite local museum?

Taller Puertorriqueño.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

Minerals.

Catherine Benda, Marquette, Michigan

Describe an average day in your studio.

I work daily — but don’t keep a set schedule. My most productive times are between 10am and 3pm. I usually work in the quiet. I like working with multiple mediums, and then focusing on one thing and running with it. During the pandemic, I did make a Spotify playlist called Pandemic Dance Party to get me motivated. Every once in a while, I still play it.

How does the space affect your work?

My studio is off my kitchen with a separate outside entrance. I used to dream about a studio away from home, but this suits me much better. I can have several projects going on at once. I can walk away when I need a pause to get my head out of the “too much thinking” phase. I believe working from home has made me more productive and has allowed me to really focus on process.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

Right outside my studio door is a garden and ski trails. This allows me to really step away from my work in any season and connect with nature. I am also part of a vibrant artist collective, a diverse group of working artists. We meet monthly for discussion and critique, and I host meetings and have studio visits.

What do you love about your studio?

I love that this space is accessible to me 24/7. I love that I don’t have to drive to get to a studio. I love that I have a huge north-facing sliding door to a garden and sauna.

What do you wish were different?

A bit bigger space maybe and a bit more privacy. Having my studio so close to the center of the house makes it easy for me to get interrupted or distracted.

What is your favorite local museum?

I currently live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and my nearest favorite museum is the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). I grew up in Detroit and the DIA was a regular part of my outings.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

I am currently working with paper thread and paint.

Nicholas Galanin and Lorraine O’Grady are among 28 visual artists to receive the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. In its 99th year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has tapped 188 individuals for this year’s cohort, 68 of whom are visual artists, photographers, filmmakers, architects, or fine arts and new media researchers. The fellows were selected from a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants whose submissions were peer-reviewed. The fellowships come with cash prizes usually ranging between $40,000 and $55,000.

Born in Boston and based in New York, 89-year-old artist, writer, and critic O’Grady left her career in translation to pursue art at the age of 45. O’Grady’s text-and-time-based practice examines Black female subjectivity and diaspora, and she will be reviving an old persona of hers in a new body of performance work. O’Grady’s first retrospective took place in 2021 at the Brooklyn Museum, and her solo exhibition at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, is on view through May 25.

Based in Sitka, Alaska, Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂) intends to develop workshops and further his artistic practice rooted in cultural connections and the notions of land ownership in order to “create a greater discourse on Indigenous art,” per a statement from the foundation. Last year, Galanin received recognition for an outdoor sculpture at Brooklyn Bridge Park — his first public artwork in New York City orchestrated through the Public Art Fund. The artist was also recently celebrated in a solo retrospective of new and existing work at SITE in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Launched in 1925, the Guggenheim Fellowship is intended for mid-career professionals who have already demonstrated “exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts” with promise for equally impactful future endeavors. Former United States Senator and philanthropist John Simon Guggenheim and his wife Olga created the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1922 in honor of their late son who died at age 17 before he began college.

Additional fellows of note include Atlanta-based artist Jessica Blinkhorn, whose upcoming project examines the intersection of disability, desirability, and sexuality, and photographer Sara Bennett, a former public defender who captures currently and formerly incarcerated women and their stories. Critic Christina Sharpe and scholar Tavia Nyong’o, who has contributed to Hyperallergic, were also awarded general nonfiction and theatre arts and performance studies fellowships, respectively.

Below is the full list of arts and film Guggenheim fellows:

Architecture, Planning, & Design

• Paul Hardin Kapp

Film-Video

• Itziar Barrio
• Jessica Beshir
• Garrett Bradley
• Lilli Carré
• Jude Chehab
• Ariana Gerstein
• Juan Pablo González
• Ben Hagari
• Shadi Harouni
• Baba Hillman
• Crystal Kayiza
• Won Ju Lim
• Loira Limbal
• Raúl O. Paz-Pastrana
• Jennifer Redfearn
• Shengze Zhu

Film, Video, and New Media Studies

• Jonathan Sterne

Fine Arts

• Sónia Almeida
• Kim Anno
• Anna Betbeze
• Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn
• Rebeca Bollinger
• Ben Thorp Brown
• Mike Cloud
• Lewis deSoto
• Adama Delphine Fawundu
• Nicholas Galanin
• Guillermo Galindo
• Antonietta Grassi
• Léonie Guyer
• Bang Geul Han
• Lotus L. Kang
• Nicola López
• Park McArthur
• Harold Mendez
• Taji Ra’oof Nahl
• Lorraine O’Grady
• Lamar Peterson
• Anders Herwald Ruhwald
• Carrie Schneider
• Jennifer Sirey
• Arvie Smith
• jackie sumell
• Dyani White Hawk
• Susan York

Fine Arts Research

• Claire Bishop
• Laura U. Marks
• Alexander Nagel
• Amara Solari
• Krista Thompson

Photography

• Sara Bennett
• Matthew Brandt
• Carlos Diaz
• Joanne Dugan
• Lisa Elmaleh
• Lucas Foglia
• Dylan Hausthor
• Katherine Hubbard
• Tarrah Krajnak
• Rachelle Mozman Solano
• Gina Osterloh
• Arthur Ou
• Ahndraya Parlato
• Greta Pratt
• Margaret Mary Stratton
• Leonard Suryajaya
• Ada Trillo

The Floyd Bennett Field! Public Arts Festival features 24 established and emerging artists whose dynamic works span generations and disciplines. The festival is an immersive celebration of Southeast Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field through a playful reimagining of space, architecture, and visual storytelling. Original works from renowned artists Derrick Adams, Peter Burr, Eto Otitigbe, and Ryan Hartley Smith will be video mapped to the 11,000-square-foot façade of two monumental historic airplane hangars, creating an unforgettable visual experience.

Focusing on themes of adaptive reuse and creative reimagining, the art festival centers on the airplane hangars, revered historic structures currently undergoing revitalization to become hubs of innovation and potential. Symbolically rebuilding the dilapidated façades for future use, they serve as canvases for artistic interventions and digital storytelling.

The featured artworks explore the concept of restored spaces as vehicles for fresh concepts, employing abstract visual elements and thematic exploration. By embracing the nuances of history, the video mapping blurs the line between altering the structures’ reality and projecting an augmented realism.

A weekend-long celebration of art, architecture, history, and open space draws diverse audiences from NYC and the region to enjoy groundbreaking digital art, live music, a silent dance party and live video performance, a makers market, food trucks, and activities for all.

For more information, visit jbrpc.org/arts.

Big Apple brainiacs can test their knowledge of New York history and geography this week at one of the city’s largest trivia events. After a four-year hiatus, the Panorama Challenge is returning for its 13th edition at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park this Friday, April 12. Although the event is sold out, organizers are currently compiling a waitlist in the event of no-shows.

The annual event is led by Brooklyn’s City Reliquary Museum, a nonprofit institution in Williamsburg tracing the history of New York’s five boroughs through relics and archival materials, in conjunction with the Municipal Art Society (MAS), a local preservation and urban planning advocacy nonprofit. This Friday’s competition will take place at “The Panorama of the City of New York” — a 9,335-square-foot model of the city originally commissioned by urban planner Robert Moses 60 years ago for the 1964 World’s Fair.

Regarded as one of the most successful attractions at the fair, “The Panorama of the City of New York” drew thousands of curious viewers at its debut, charging audiences 10 cents for a nine-minute indoor ride providing a bird’s-eye view of the massive model. Built to a scale in which one inch equates to 100 feet, the city replica was initially constructed by a team of more than 100 workers contracted by West Nyack architecture firm Raymond Lester and Associates and has since been periodically updated to reflect New York’s changing landscape.

This year’s trivia challenge will be hosted by city tour guide Jonathan Turer, who has led the event as quizmaster for nine previous editions. “Awkwafina,” “SNL & Staten Island,” and “Fame” are among the topics, in addition to other New York City subjects. There will also be a special halftime quiz and a performance by 7-train enthusiast Harmony Hardcore, who was crowned Miss Subways 2023 at the City Reliquary Museum’s last annual pageant.

“It’s such a challenge to write the trivia questions,” Turer told Hyperallergic, adding that he is always astounded by participants’ knowledge of the city. “Every year, I think [the questions] will be too hard and every year there are teams who get nearly perfect scores. It’s amazing to me.”

The key to a winning team is diversity, Turer added.

“Every year there’s pop culture, history, geography, sports, theater, public transportation — so many different topics,” he said. “If you don’t have people from multiple generations and varied specializations it’s hard to place in the top three. I always tell people that’s the best way to prepare: to recruit well.”

Doors will open at 6pm, and the trivia challenge is scheduled to begin at 7pm. From 5:30pm to 7pm and 9pm to 10pm, attendees can access free transportation via shuttle buses between the Queens Museum and the Mets-Willets Point subway station on the 7 train line. Hyperallergic has also reached out to the Queens Museum and the City Reliquary Museum for additional information.

Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson’s first New York City solo public artwork has arrived in Manhattan. Seven 18-foot-tall figures surround a bronze female form in Seed, on view in Madison Square Park through September 22. The installation’s weathered steel sentinels are the artist’s tallest sculptures yet. 

“They transform the nature of a hectic and scary city, in a sense, to a place that’s really safe,” Simpson said at the work’s unveiling today, April 10. She explained that they mimic the energy of the park, a place people go to reconnect with their humanity. “They become these protectors of what they’re looking out for, so that [the inner sculpture] can close her eyes. So she doesn’t have to be worried or on.” 

Seed stands on Madison Square Park’s eastern lawn named for American artist Sol Lewitt in front of the historic whitewashed Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State and Sony headquarter buildings, a stark backdrop for the rusty red protectors and their turquoise bronze masks. Simpson first crafted the latter components in clay before casting them in bronze, as she did the central sculpture, which she adorned with a guiding star and raised dots representing sunlight on the woman’s skin. The artist’s rippling finger marks are still visible on everything transferred to bronze.

Simpson is familiar with creating large-scale metalwork, but she was surprised at New York’s ability to transform Seed’s scale and nature, noting that the cityscape not only dwarfed her installation but made it appear more organic than she had anticipated.

“Sometimes the most powerful things can be incredibly intimate,” Simpson told Hyperallergic. On the morning of the unveiling, commuters beelined through the park below the towering skyscrapers above. “This space is so full. I feel like even though they’re massive to me, they’re actually quite delicate and small. This is actually an intimate scale in this place.” 

The seven sentinels are cut from 10 by four-foot steel sheets. Simpson didn’t waste an inch; the works could be disassembled and reattached into perfect rectangles, a sort of massive jigsaw puzzle. She punctured the sheets with ovals and angular shapes, forms she attributed to her unconscious replication of the geometrical Pueblo visual language she grew up with.

Chief Curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport of the commissioning Madison Square Park Conservancy explained to Hyperallergic that over the next five months, the protectors’ weathered steel patina will become more uniform in color, and the columbine, wood mint, wild strawberry, and other native plants surrounding the central form will grow taller and taller. Simpson wanted this effect, which she said will allow the figure to “sink.”

“We all change with life, you know?” Simpson told Hyperallergic. “I live in the desert Southwest. My skin and who I am translate the fact that I live in a dry, hot, sunny environment. Our relationship to place transforms the way we live. I think it’ll be really beautiful.”

Seed continues in northern Manhattan’s Inwood Hill Park, where two eight-foot-tall bronze sentinels look toward the Hudson River and the woods. Madison Square Park Conservancy worked on Simpson’s project with the Lenape Center, which Kamin Rapaport said identified Inwood Hill Park as a meaningful site. According to legend, Dutch colonialist Peter Minuit “purchased” what is now known as the island of Manhattan from the Lenape people there for just a few beads and other trade goods, marked by a rock and accompanying plaque. Simpson’s two sentinels, gazing out onto the nearby river, are planted into the ground a few feet away.

What does it mean to be an American artist or poet? In recent years, I have seen two group shows focusing on artist communities that addressed this question, both at the Grey Art Gallery (now the Grey Art Museum). The first was Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle in 2007, curated by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna. Centering on the nine issues of Berman’s avant-garde magazine, Semina (1957–64), the curators brought together work by a diverse group of mostly West Coast artists and poets who had published in it (John Altoon, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, and others). Duncan and McKenna reminded viewers that this loosely affiliated, anti-establishment group represented a viable alternative to the dominance of the New York art world and the rise of Pop art and Minimalism, and what many saw as the commercialization of art. 

The second exhibition was the Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 in 2017, curated by Melissa Rachleff, which focused on 14 artist-run and co-operative galleries. Like Semina Culture, this show homed in on a diverse community of artists who sustained each other in the face of the art world’s inhospitality. As Grey Art Museum director Lynn Gumpert and independent curator Debra Bricker Balken walked through Rachleff’s extensive, eye-opening show, and the different communities it presented, they began thinking about all the American artists who had moved to Paris after World War II, and how many returned and became central figures in the downtown New York scene. What about the others? Where did they go, and why? 

Bricker Balken and Gumpert responded by curating the landmark exhibition Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, at the Grey Art Museum. As Gumpert writes in the foreword to the exhibition’s indispensable catalogue:

Digging deeper and deeper, we were astonished to find that there had been no major show or publication addressing this topic. What had inspired so many American artists to take up residence [in Paris] in the late 1940s and the ’50s? 

While there is no single answer to this question, James Baldwin does put it into perspective. Gumpert notes, “According to Baldwin, in a piece he wrote for the magazine Partisan Review: [it was] from the vantage point of Europe [that the American] discovers his own country.” Baldwin left the United States because of racism, which was institutionally authorized and deeply embedded in American culture. We learn from the catalogue that others left for similar and equally distressing reasons. 

The first works to catch my attention were the sculptures of Shinkichi Tajiri. Sadly, I was not surprised to learn that after serving with the 442 Regimental Combat Team and receiving the Purple Heart for valor in WWII, he was “subjected to relentless discrimination” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and relocated to Paris in 1948, never returning to the US. Later he settled in the Netherlands, where he had a successful career. 

Welded together from iron wire and machine parts, Tajiri’s “Wounded Knee” (1953) is the first modern sculpture to reference the deadliest sanctioned mass shooting in American history, when US Army troops massacred nearly 300 Lakota men, women, and children. The work, which Tajiri made “to purge himself of the horrors of war” resembles an abstract sentinel, whose hollow, porous outer body evokes an armored warrior unable to protect himself. The artist was friends with the African-American sculptor Harold Cousins, and taught him to weld. Cousins, too, never returned to the United States. Both artists should be better known in this country. 

The exhibition goes a long way in representing the early work of artists I want to know more about. I was happy to see the paintings by James Bishop, Norman Bluhm, Ed Clark, Shirley Goldfarb, Carmen Herrera, and Shirley Jaffe from the first years of their careers. With more than 130 works by nearly 70 artists, including early geometric abstract paintings by the filmmaker Robert Breer and funky fiber pieces by Sheila Hicks, we can sense the vibrancy and openness of the Paris scene for Americans, and how much was happening, despite the lack of strong commercial support. 

More than 400 servicemen went to Paris to study art on the G.I. Bill, but many women moved there as well, as did several Black artists, also benefitting from the G.I. Bill. Not surprisingly, the racial and gender diversity in Paris was not mirrored in the ascending New York art world. 

I learned more about Ralph Coburn, a close friend of Ellsworth Kelly who introduced the latter to Jean Arp’s use of chance in composing his work; Kimber Smith, who rejected what Clement Greenberg characterized as the “huge painting” that many other American abstract artists would embrace; and the sculptor Claire Falkenstein, who said she was interested in “exploding the volume,” and is one of the most accomplished and experimental sculptors of her generation. Each of these artists deserves a longer and closer look. 

The exhibition offers a lot to ponder. Why did Al Held take the hand out of his painting and commit himself to impeccable surfaces and illusionism? Was it internal forces or external pressures that caused him to change? Why aren’t Bishop’s early paintings, which anticipate Mary Heilmann’s seminal “RYB” works, better known? Why is Norman Bluhm still waiting to be rediscovered? Although he never severed his connection to Abstract Expressionism, as did many others, he went on to transform its vocabulary of gestures and drips into something that was voluptuously his own by the mid-1970s. 

The outlier in this group is Peter Saul. His paintings don’t look like anyone else’s, either in Paris or New York, which is no small accomplishment. In his nascent vocabulary of cartoony, disembodied limbs, commercial goods, uniforms, bathtubs, animals, and weapons, we can discern his first connections between capitalist profit-making and the deep-seated roots of violence. Like Bishop, who was his roommate when they were students at Washington University, Saul kept the social aspect of the art world at a distance. Bricker Balken quotes him as saying: “The professional art world seemed like working in an office building.” It is good to remember that not everyone wanted to join the club. 

This history — one in which New York is not the center of the art world — is important to remember. One response to being American that runs contrary to mainstream society is to not assimilate. That is what the Americans who moved to Paris had in common. Not all of them stayed true to that ideal. Bishop and Saul were among those who did. 

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 continues at the Grey Art Museum (18 Cooper Square, Noho, Manhattan) through July 20. The exhibition was curated by Lynn Gumpert and Debra Bricker Balken.

LOS ANGELES — It does not take an art degree to understand that context changes meaning. While the challenges of being an artist anywhere are worthy of discussion and making art is not a contest of who has the sadder story, there is something almost miraculous about the emotional depth and visual resonance of artwork made in the most unfathomable circumstances. Such circumstances form the backdrop of the current exhibition at Galerie Lakaye, Art Under Siege: Lesly Pierre Paul and the Students of His New Vision Art School, on view through May 11.

Artist Lesly Pierre Paul hails from the Grand Rue neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a historical arts district known equally for its poverty and creative production. With no formal training, he began making art at the age of 19, slowly building his reputation, exhibiting locally and internationally. In 2017 he decided to use his success to give back to his community, founding the New Vision Art School, a nonprofit that turns to the arts as a way to continue local traditions and keep the neighborhood’s children out of gangs. 

Haiti has long struggled with gang rule, a situation that has recently reached “apocalyptic” proportions, as the nation’s two largest gangs, G9 and GPep, vie for political power in a country that currently has no elected officials and a heavily outgunned police force. Coupled with a malnourishment crisis and almost no guarantee of any form of security, let alone job prospects, gang involvement seems to provide the only semblance of stability for many Haitians. Yet in a morbid double-bind, joining a gang ensures participation in extreme forms of violence and carries a high risk of death.

A sense of the resulting powerlessness many people feel is clear in the exhibition, which brings Pierre Paul’s work together with that of his students. In his “Queen Elizabeth in Meeting with Baron & Legba in Dark World” (2024), for instance, Queen Elizabeth II, a worldwide metonym for colonial rule, is reimagined as a colorfully painted Black woman carrying a Louis Vuitton purse. Poised between Baron, a lascivious Voodoo Loa who welcomes mortals into the afterworld, and Legba, a Loa who serves as an intermediary between humanity and God, the painting points to the inordinate power the world elite hold over life and death. Yet the Queen’s vacant stare suggests that she and her fellow rulers are unaware of, or perhaps even unconcerned with, the repercussions of their actions on those beholden to them. 

Many paintings speak to the importance of love throughout politically tumultuous times and pair symbols of life alongside those of death. In “Loyal Love” (2023), Pierre Paul depicts a male skeleton presenting a female skeleton with his heart as they preside over a cemetery replete with tombstones and flowers in full bloom. This theme continues in “Baron & Brigitte in the Universe” (2024) by New Vision Art School student Kervens Chavannes, which also takes place in a cemetery. The Baron stands alongside his wife, Maman Brigitte — a powerful Loa associated with justice whose origins are tied to the Celtic goddess Brigid. Yet another painting of a couple by Pierre Paul, “Loyal Love in Their Universe” (2024), depicts lovers wearing royal crowns and holding a “Black Lives Matter” sign. The prominent emphasis on loyalty in these paintings conveys the importance one’s intimate relationships assume when you are, quite literally, ensuring each other’s survival.

While the beauty and artistry of the paintings above is striking, some of the more raw and visceral works by younger students are the most inspiring, and harrowing. “Sun and Angel Smiling Down on Boy with Lost Hand” (2024) by 14-year-old Danielo Dimanche provokes the question of how the boy, seen with a bleeding stump of a wrist, his detached hand falling into a container below, lost the hand. Was it an accident or gang-related torture? Despite the subject matter, Dimanche maintains optimism, depicting the sun and an angel smiling down on this boy. 

Currently both Pierre Paul and the New Vision Art School have an uncertain future. They are raising funds to move the school out of the capital and into safer rural regions. In my correspondence with Pierre Paul, he expressed grave concern about the state of Haiti, and is looking into options to leave “until things calm down.” While the artists’ survival and safety are more urgent than the school’s, it has already shown alternate paths to young people and its continued existence can only further its mission. Its importance in providing a safe haven to the children it serves is best evidenced by 10-year-old artist Vaïna Ciaradjie St-Preux’s text accompaniment to her bright, colorful painting “Queen Mermaid in Love with New Vision Art School” (2024): “I LOVE YOU NEW VISION ART SCHOOL.”

Art Under Siege: The Art of Lesly Pierre Paul and the Students of His New Vision Art School continues at Galerie Lakaye (1550 North Curson Ave, Hollywood, Los Angeles) through May 11. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

First, let me say that I have seen filmmaker Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) thrice. I’ve seen the Rebuild of Evangelion (2007–21) films twice, mostly recently when Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time released in 2021. All of these hours spent watching were in my home, alone, using Netflix or other third-party methods. But now, for the first time ever, an American can (legally) watch End of Evangelion (1997) in a theater, just as Japanese audiences did in July 1997. And I can now say that I’ve seen End of Evangelion four times in total.

For those uninitiated, End of Evangelion is the finale to the 26-episode series Neon Genesis Evangelion. The last two episodes we were left with originally were so ambiguous — drastic changes in animation style, minimalist dialogue, the entire cast ominously repeating “congratulations” at the conclusion — that they prompted rumors that the studio, Gainax, had run out of money. (The more plausible reason was a rushed schedule.) This film is an alternate ending to fill in the gaps. And, despite a generous budget, it is via a similar visual ambiguity that Anno so successfully portrays anxiety and social isolation. In one of many possible interpretations (including allegories about trans identity and gender) the film is about a boy learning to trust others.

End of Evangelion can be methodically, uncomfortably slow, with monochrome palettes and interminably long shots, such as the opening hospital scene, which depicts a character masturbating next to someone. But it can also feel excessively fast, as during a pivotal fight sequence choreographed to Bach’s “Suite No. 3 in D major,” animated to visceral technical precision. Even knowing how it ends, it breaks my heart every time. Imagine: the heroic bloodshed of John Woo merged with the interiority of Andrei Tarkovsky. Both of these modes of pacing are crucial to underline the major themes of loneliness and depression and how protagonist Shinji Ikari develops to overcome his struggles with them. 

Listening to the soundtrack of End of Evangelion might be the best way to understand it, specifically “Komm, süsser Tod,” composed by Shiro Sagisu with English lyrics by Mike Wyzgowski. The lyrics come from a poem Anno wrote to serve as the song’s basis, which opens: “I’m uneasy. I’m afraid of being disliked by everyone. I’m afraid of being hurt. But I’m even more afraid of hurting other people.” It feels like the epitome of what the franchise is about: people build walls around their hearts to protect themselves from being misunderstood. Part of what makes Evangelion as a whole so compelling is how it features so many types of relationships and spotlights the lengths people will go to connect with one another. 

End of Evangelion is a masterful coming-of-age story disguised as a mecha anime filled with aliens, government conspiracies, religious iconography, and abundant esoteric dialogue. It is no wonder that 25-plus years later, audiences turn to sci-fi anime made in the late 1990s to early 2000s (Ghost in the Shell (1995), Serial Experiments Lain (1997), Cowboy Bebop (2001)) to find a shared sensibility of wonder and sorrow.

End of Evangelion is screening at the IFC Center until April 11 and will screen at BAM April 18 and 25.

The Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal ruled that the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in the city of Hobart must admit all paying visitors to Kirsha Kaechele’s installation “Ladies Lounge” (2020–ongoing), which previously only admitted women.

The April 9 judgment came to a head after a male visitor filed a complaint against the museum last month alleging discriminatory practices since he paid the full admission fee and was denied access to the art displayed inside “Ladies Lounge” because he doesn’t “identify as a lady,” per the suit.

“‘We are deeply disappointed by this decision,” said a MONA spokesperson in an email to Hyperallergic. “We will take some time to absorb the result and consider our options. We request that the artist’s privacy is respected at this time.”

Kaechele’s participatory art exhibition, luxuriously furnished and accessorized with inky green curtains, the museum’s most prized artworks, and male butlers serving champagne, was once open to “any and all ladies” and purposefully excluded male patrons as a response to Australia’s history of limiting women’s access to certain public spaces until recent decades.

The male visitor who took issue with this practice, Jason Lau of New South Wales, alleged that the museum and exhibition were breaching Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act of 1998 by denying him access to the gallery when he went to the museum on April 1, 2023. Lau alleged that he was not permitted to see various treasures from the museum’s collection that were hosted in “Ladies Lounge,” including original Picassos and international antiquities.

After the tribunal hearing on March 19, Kaechele told the Guardian she was “absolutely delighted” about the case. She argued that “men are experiencing ‘Ladies Lounge,’ their experience of rejection is the artwork” during the hearing as her power suit-clad entourage of over 20 supporters sat silently on the benches, folding and refolding their legs in unison and “pointedly reading feminist texts.” Kaechele and her entourage marched out of the courtroom to singer Robert Palmer’s 1988 pop anthem “Simply Irresistible.”

Now, MONA has 28 days to “cease refusing entry … by persons who do not identify as ladies.”

“Ms. Kaechele’s intention was clearly to address past wrongs of access by advantaging women generally as opposed to addressing or redressing current substantive inequality of opportunity,” Tribunal Deputy President Richard Grueber wrote in his judgment. Grueber also underscored that while neither he nor Lau immediately registered the behavior of the artist’s entourage as distracting, he considered it to be “at the very least inappropriate, discourteous and disrespectful, and at worst contumelious and contemptuous.”

It remains unclear if the museum intends to close the exhibition after the judgment. Prior to the hearing, Kaechele told Australian television outlet the Project that “‘Ladies Lounge’ would have to close, because the requirement would be that it opens to men, and that’s not happening” when asked what would happen if the ruling sided with Lau.

The Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) has been prohibited from proceeding with the demolition of Mary Miss’s “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” (1996) land art installation until further notice by Stephen Locher, a federal judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Iowa. The decision to grant Miss’s bid for a temporary restraining order came Monday, April 8 — the same day DMAC intended to begin dismantling the work.

After months of advocating for the protection of her deteriorating ecological installation project at Greenwood Park, Miss filed a legal complaint against DMAC on April 4 alleging that the Center failed to both “reasonably protect and maintain the project against the ravages of time, vandalism and the elements” in violation of its 1994 contract with her and to include her in the process of its decision to demolish the work.

“I am pleased and relieved by Judge Locher’s decision not only for what it has done for ‘Greenwood Pond: Double Site,’ but because it reaffirms the rights of all artists and the integrity of their legacies,” Miss said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic. “Let’s use this opportunity to reach an outcome of which we can all be proud.”

DMAC Director Kelly Baum notified Miss last October that the installation, consisting of various wooden, metallic, and concrete landscape features that integrated viewers with the Greenwood Pond’s ecology, was in a state of disrepair and had to be closed to the public in order to undergo a “complete structural review.” Miss stressed the importance of the work to Baum at the time and told Hyperallergic that she felt blindsided by the Center’s decision in January to move forward with demolishing the artwork as a matter of “public safety.” The Center cited its commitment to the city of Des Moines after blaming the artwork’s dilapidation on the “ephemeral” materials Miss used for the project as well as the harsh Iowa climate.

Miss’s legal complaint not only alleges that the Center violated its contract with her but also that it breached the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 through the “destruction of a work of recognized stature, and any intentional or grossly negligent destruction of that work.” 

Judge Locher’s decision underscored that Miss had established a threat of irreparable harm if the demolition proceeds as the installation “can never be restored,” and agreed that the Center failed to obtain written consent from Miss to “intentionally damage, alter, relocate, modify or change the work” as outlined in the artist agreement, noting that the city has never “ordered, directed, or otherwise ‘required’ the Art Center to remove the artwork.”

A spokesperson for the Center told Hyperallergic that DMAC “respect[s] the court’s decision, and will be pausing plans to remove the artwork from Greenwood Park,” adding that portions of the walkway declared “dangerous and unsalvageable” will remain enclosed in protective fencing.

A secondary hearing is slated to take place within the next two weeks.

In an attempt to banish Western cultural influences, authorities in the Republic of Chechnya are banning music they deem too fast or too slow.

The Chechen Ministry of Culture formally announced the new musical restrictions on April 3, specifying that all musical, vocal, and choreographic works are now required to correspond to a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM) to “conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm.” 

Music listeners in the 6,700-square-mile autonomous Russian republic would be prohibited from consuming songs and compositions ranging from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” (2008), Dua Lipa’s “Houdini” (2024), and even the national anthem of Russia. The decision is just the latest in the country’s crackdown on civil liberties, including women and LGBTQ+ rights, since authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov came into power in 2007.

“We must bring to the people and the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people: customs, traditions, our adats, nokhchalla – features of the Chechen character, which includes the entire spectrum of moral, moral and ethical standards of life of the Chechens,” culture minister Musa Magomedovich Dadaev said in an official statement.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, announced yesterday, April 9, that it has appointed Tahnee Ahtone (Ahtoneharjo-Growingthunder) as curator of Native American Art with support from the Mellon-Wingate Leadership in Art Museums Initiative.

Ahtone, who is an enrolled citizen of the Kiowa Tribe and a descendant of the Seminole and Mvskoke Nations, has over 20 years of museum experience and was a member of Hyperallergic’s 2021–22 Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators cohort.

“I started on February 19, 2024, by developing a tribal relations roster and working on projects centered around the new [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act] regulations. We are eager and looking forward to the possibilities of engaging the local community and tribal nations at large in the gallery’s future rotation,” Ahtone told Hyperallergic in an email.

As a Hyperallergic fellow, Ahtone penned three articles about her curatorial practice and the cultural and historical importance of a series of Kiowa Tribe murals created in the late 1980s. The murals were presented to the public for the first time in an email exhibition illuminating the large-scale works of late Kiowa artists Parker Boyiddle Jr., Mirac Creepingbear, and Sherman Chaddlesone, throughout which Ahtone contextualized their depictions of Kiowa oral histories of creation, spirituality, and contemporary expression.

During her virtual fellowship event, Ahtone emphasized the importance of Native sovereignty and stressed that institutions must include tribal governments when working with cultural and artistic materials related to their communities. The Nelson-Atkins Museum was criticized in 2015 for its organization of the exhibition Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after Aaniiih Nation curator Joe Horse Capture wrote in Indian Country Today that the show had no Native partners involved, only Native consultants. The museum also faced criticism in 2020 after its security team allowed police to station on its premises during a nearby Black Lives Matter protest.

Previously, Ahtone has served as the director and curator of the Kiowa Tribal Museum in Carnegie, Oklahoma; a Tribal Nations liaison and curator at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City; and a curator at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Mashantucket, Connecticut.

Ahtone also co-curated the exhibition Lighting Pathways: Matriarchs of Oklahoma Native Art, on view through April 28 at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

The ArtFields Competition & Festival in Lake City, South Carolina, turns what was once one of the state’s most prosperous agricultural communities into a living art gallery that shows some of the best art of the Southeastern United States.

A record-breaking 450 artworks, ranging from paintings and sculptures to installations and new media works, will be displayed in local venues, including renovated warehouses from the 1920s, art galleries, restaurants, boutiques, and other businesses. Over 300 additional artworks created by South Carolina student artists will also be on display. Over $100,000 of prize money is awarded each year in this celebration of art and community.

This year, ArtFields is unveiling brand new artist studios — a dedicated location for artists to hone their practice, explore new ideas, and find community. We’re proud to unveil this space, Acline Studios, as the first of its kind in Lake City. Included in the renovated space are individual studios for artists to rent, a gallery for exhibitions and community programming, and art equipment, starting with a soda kiln.

The nine-day event also features live music, a Portrait Contest honoring student-athletes as models, the Makers Market where artisans sell their handmade pieces, Plein Air Competition, and more. Don’t miss the explosion of art in Lake City this year.

The competition artwork is on view from April 26 through May 4 in Lake City, South Carolina. ArtFields is a community arts organization with year-round art initiatives aimed at celebrating the immense artistic talent of the Southeast.

For more information and to plan your trip, visit artfieldssc.org.

Following an international search process, Simonetta Moro has been named the new President of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). Dr. Moro succeeds IDSVA’s founder, George Smith (2006–2024).

Since 2012, Simonetta Moro has served as IDSVA’s Director, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Professor of Art, Philosophy, and Visual Studies. IDSVA fuses interactive online education with intensive global residencies in Rome, Spannocchia Castle (Tuscany), Venice, Berlin, Paris, Athens, Madrid, Marrakech, Mexico City, and New York City. IDSVA’s visiting and core faculty comprise world-leading philosophers, artists, and scholars. 

Prior to coming to IDSVA, Dr. Moro taught at The New School (Eugene Lang College and Parsons School of Design) in New York City, where she also chaired the Visual Art concentration and served as interim Chair of the Arts department.

Dr. Moro’s studio practice combines visual representation with theoretical production. Her work focuses on painting, drawing, and mapping practices. Her international and United States exhibitions include: White Box Gallery, New York; Galleria del Carbone, Ferrara, Italy; BRIC Art House, New York; Center for Architecture, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the American Academy in Rome, Italy, where she was a Fulbright Fellow; the Harris Museum, Preston, UK, and is featured in numerous publications, such as Katherine Harmon’s The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), and You Are Here NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016). Moro’s extensive research in cartographic aesthetics informs her acclaimed book Mapping Paradigms in Modern and Contemporary Art: Poetic Cartography (Routledge, 2021). Her recent publication, The Vattimo Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), includes contributions from 53 leading international scholars writing on the lexicon of preeminent Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo. 

Moro is a native of Italy and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna with a thesis in art history. She obtained a Master’s in European Fine Arts at Winchester School of Art in the UK, and a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK. In 2003, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and then settled in New York City, where she currently resides. 

According to founding president George Smith, “Simonetta Moro is known throughout the art world and the world of ideas as a gifted artist-philosopher. Her vision of the future inspires poetic thinkers everywhere. Her extraordinary art practice and powerful and caring philosophical voice leads the way for the artist-philosophers of tomorrow.”

I had the honor to work with President Smith for twelve years as the program director of IDSVA, and it is with great excitement and humbleness that I take on the role of the next President of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. I look forward to advancing the vision that established IDSVA as a new model and a new philosophy for higher education to meet the challenges of the 21st century as a student-centered institution without walls focused on the promise of artist-philosophers to create new systems of knowledge. It’s never been more important to pursue this educational project than now, and I am thankful to have the opportunity to carry it into the future.

Simonetta Moro

Welcome, Dr. Moro!

To learn more, visit idsva.edu.

In 1969, sending art over the telephone seemed far-fetched. It required extensive back and forth coordination, specialized engineers, and a great deal of time. Once all the necessary equipment was in place, an 8-by-10-inch image took six minutes to come through Xerox telecopiers, an early fax machine. To work with these obstacles, an artist needed immense enthusiasm for what a technologically connected future would look like. But Stan VanDerBeek had no shortage of optimism when he devised this project for his 1969–70 artist residency at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He wrote in 1966, “It is imperative that we (the world’s artists) invent a new world language … an international picture-language” designed for virtual transmission to connect all of humanity. The product of this telephonically delivered vision, “Panels for the Walls of the World” (1970), is the centerpiece of his three-floor retrospective, Transmissions, at Magenta Plains.

When VanDerBeek initiated his project, telephone art was in the air (literally): John Giorno had launched his Dial-A-Poem project only months before, which allowed callers to tune into a randomized recording of avant-garde poetry for free. Artists dreamed of creating a world in which their expression, as VanDerBeek wrote, could “go and be anywhere — all in the same time.” VanDerBeek has been criticized for his outmoded utopianism, and indeed, the resulting mural (along with many of his collage works on view) embodies the heavy-handed activist aesthetic of the 1960s. Images of the Vietnam War, President Nixon, sexual liberation, and the Black Power movement paper the surface alongside newspaper clippings of the day’s headlines and advertising slogans: “Bus Policy Opposed By Nixon,” “Call Roto-Rooter,” “Marriage means lifelong slavery.” A cacophony of life, death, and perfume ads, transmitted across the same frequency, VanDerBeek’s collage captures the rise of an “international picture language” of an altogether different sort.

But the process by which the artist realized “Panels for the Walls of the World” reaches beyond the well-trodden terrain of 1960s visual soup. To view the mural as a “completed” whole, decades after VanDerBeek’s premature death, is to misunderstand his intention of remaking “the artist as a ‘communicator’ in his community,” someone who initiates “a ‘feedback’ process, or dialogue.” Repeatedly in his letters and notes for the work, he stresses that “the mural is a form of ‘process art,’” where “much of the ‘art’ is in the act of doing it for both the artist and viewer.” “Panels” was meant to be sent piece by piece, in constant communication with receivers who would assemble it on their own walls, photograph it, and send it back with their concepts to be incorporated into the image’s development. Through technology, the work radically reimagines the role of an audience in art.

Like the best of the artist’s work, “Panels for the Walls of the World” is an exercise in self-transcendence, an attempt at vaulting cognition beyond the body’s traditional borders. While this exhibition doesn’t change my belief that, above all, VanDerBeek was a genius of experimental cinema (do not miss his 1957 film “Astral Man” on the gallery’s lower level!), the exhibition reminds viewers that it would be foolish to dismiss his multimedia work as technologically obsolete.

Stan VanDerBeek: Transmissions continues at Magenta Plains (149 Canal Street, Chinatown, Manhattan) through April 20. The exhibition was organized by Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek of the Stan VanDerBeek Archive in collaboration with Chelsea Spengemann, Executive Director of Soft Network, with exhibition design by Darling Green.

IRVINE, California — Inside the Beall Center for Art + Technology, a trio of office chairs huddle together, as if holding a meeting. Their gathering is short; after a few seconds, the chairs break apart, roving past stacks of blank, white paper. Enchantingly, they move without any assistance from humans. Motors, motion detections, sensors, and sturdy, treaded wheels help them chug along a black vinyl mat.

Katherine Behar’s solo exhibition, Ack! Knowledge! Work!, is a study of automation in the era of artificial intelligence. These ergonomic chairs — as well as a pair of Amazon Echo Dots and an automatic hand sanitizer dispenser — represent machines that threaten the job security of humans in white collar positions. At first, the devices appear to function flawlessly without any oversight, but upon further reflection, the artworks emphasize the necessity of human intelligence in the future of labor.

“Anonymous Autonomous” (2024), the self-powered office chairs, attest to this with their aimless meandering. Their main task is to avoid the stacks of blank paper, which bluntly convey the absence of thought. These aren’t sentient robots, nor are they advanced algorithms capable of machine learning. They simply pantomime labor, just like many bored office workers after they’ve fulfilled their daily email quota.

Latent knowledge lurks in “Shelf Life” (2018) and “Data Cloud (A Heap, A Mass, A Rock, A Hill)” (2016), both composed of bulbous resin sculptures tiled with computer keyboard buttons. The repetitive rows of “QWERTY” incubate ideas that could be transmitted if the keys were pressed, but here in the gallery, their potential remains untapped. 

Behar considers what would happen if machines were treated like people with “Indispensable” (2024), an interactive hand sanitizer dispenser that releases wisdom instead of antibacterial liquid. At first glance, the dispenser seems to be separate from the exhibition, a relic of the gallery’s COVID-19 protections. A closer look reveals a video screen inside the machine. When users cups their hands and place them below the sensor, the machine offers a palm reading. 

“Indispensable” is always cheerful, but its attitude is actually controlled by an interactive kiosk a few feet away. The kiosk screen shows four thumbs gradated from red to green, and asks users to rate their experience. The more positive the feedback, the happier the dispenser. If the survey is too negative, the dispenser becomes sarcastic and hostile, mimicking the poor attitude a service worker might exhibit after dealing with difficult customers all day. 

The video “We Grasp at Straws (Take One)” (2024–ongoing) is Behar’s most abstract depiction of labor. Five dancers, clad in motion-capture suits, move against a green-screen backdrop, caressing and grabbing at long, white pool noodles. At the beginning, their gestures are inscrutable, but the second act clarifies that they are avatars that make up each digit on a hand. Their poetic movements translate to clumsy fingers that struggle to grasp a single stalk of straw. The dancers’ skill, expertise, and labor to mimic an incompetent appendage creates an ironic juxtaposition. 

Behar’s work suggests that while the machines will carry on the tradition of the office drone, they are useless without human oversight. There’s no measure of productivity or success, just empty gestures. For those who fear that machines will make us obsolete, comfort can be found in the fact that these complex machines are still pretty dumb. Rest assured, the white collar worker will push paper until the end of time. As Cathy would say, ack!

Katherine Behar: Ack! Knowledge! Work! continues at the Beall Center for Art + Technology at the University of California, Irvine (712 Arts Plaza, Irvine, California) through April 20. The exhibition was curated by Jesse Colin Jackson.

VALLADOLID, Spain — In Teresa Lanceta’s weavings, the cyclical nature of human history is translated into warps and wefts. The Spanish artist and historian has produced conceptually and materially rigorous textile works since the 1970s that frame weaving not just as an artisanal technique, but as a pivotal cultural and political practice with far-reaching consequences. El sueño de la cólcedra, her solo exhibition at the Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español, is a lyrical, site-specific investigation into the ways that textiles shaped Spain during the 13th and 14th centuries, a time when the Iberian Peninsula was a rich but embattled home to Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities.

Lanceta has a unique context for this ongoing project, which she began in 2022: The museum is located in a former monastery, and the chapel where her work is installed — previously known as the Capilla de los Condes de Fuensaldaña — was itself a burial place during the 14th century. The exhibition’s title, translating as “The dream of the quilt,” references a funerary textile that the Castilian King Alfonso VIII was buried with when he died in 1214 in Burgos. The piece is one of several important historical textiles that Lanceta researched and reinterpreted from the pivotal turning point in Spanish history when the northern Christian kingdoms began their “Reconquista” against the Muslim forces that had ruled much of the peninsula for centuries. Another is the Pendón de las Navas de Tolosa, a famous textile said to have been taken as loot by Alfonso VIII after he won a major battle against the Almohad leader Muhammad al-Nasir. Elements from the Pendón’s original design are incorporated into a series of colored pencil drawings in which Lanceta has superimposed illustrations of injured soldiers with severed limbs.

I think that Lanceta is interested in this moment because it continues to shape the country’s sense of national identity: In 2019, the right-wing political party Vox launched its first campaign from northern Spain directly citing the “Reconquista,” for example. However, the era’s violent power struggles reflect a broader historical continuum that she has long analyzed in her work. That she has done so primarily through weaving and textiles is one of the most transgressive elements of her practice. When she was beginning her career in the early 1970s, weaving was not widely accepted in the realm of fine art, much less using it to grapple with themes like the Spanish Civil War. 

Words, writing, and reading are crucial to Lanceta’s practice, perhaps unsurprisingly given the etymological connection between “textile” and “text.” In one area of the exhibition, the artist has recorded herself reading poems that she wrote about three 13th-century noblewomen who were each betrayed by their husbands. Visitors can listen to her soft but resolute voice by pressing buttons on a table where other materials are displayed, including colored pencil drawings from 2023 that echo the delicate embroidery of her nearby hanging tapestries and lines from poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, Sandra Santana, and Anne Sexton. The installation’s table groupings present Lanceta’s complex associations across time and space and multifaceted production in concise, digestible chapters.

Lanceta’s work is full of layered references and threads of meaning that take time to unravel; in visiting El sueño de la cólcedra, I’ve only scratched the surface. But she also produces inventive, visually striking objects that are simply stunning to behold. Her tapestries hanging in a centuries-old burial chapel vividly remind us just how intimately textiles accompany us, living against our skin in daily life and shrouding us after our deaths.

Teresa Lanceta: El sueño de la cólcedra continues at the Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español (Calle Jorge Guillén, 6, Valladolid, Spain) through June 9. The exhibition was curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa.

During cinema’s Silent Era, thousands of performers were employed in Japan to accompany film showings with live narration, commentary, and voice work. The advent of the talkies naturally caused this profession to wane — but it didn’t disappear entirely. Today, around 15 individuals keep the tradition of the benshi alive. This month, audiences across the US have a rare opportunity to see them display their skills thanks to the Art of the Benshi tour, a series of screenings organized by UCLA’s Film & Television Archive and Yanai Initiative. Benshi Ichirō Kataoka, Kumiko Ōmori, and Hideyuki Yamashiro will be narrating a lineup of both US and Japanese silent films along with musical accompaniment.

I saw Kataoka and Ōmori perform during a similar event at UCLA in 2019, and I took the opportunity provided by this tour to speak with them over Zoom about how they became benshi and the modern-day conventions and challenges of the role. UCLA professor and Yanai Initiative director Michael Emmerich was on hand to translate.

Kataoka grew up knowing of the craft of benshi, but thought it had gone extinct until Midori Sawato visited his high school theater club with a demonstration when he was 18. “I realized, wow, not only are benshi still performing, but it’s really astonishing,” he remembers. “I was absolutely captivated by the performance and wanted to try it myself.” To that end, he approached Sawato and became her apprentice.

“Sawato was not the sort of master who gave a lot of instructions,” Kataoka recounted. “In the Japanese context, when you apprentice with somebody, it’s not necessarily about teaching technique. She didn’t give me pointers about how to use my voice or portray characters. She just wanted me to watch her perform and absorb what I could, and then I would start performing on my own. It was about more fundamental things: What do you think a silent film is? What are benshi doing? She was passing along a way of thinking.”

Ōmori’s introduction to the work came when she caught a television program about benshi featuring voice actor Vanilla Yamazaki. “I was completely blown away by the performance,” she says, “and was shocked to learn about this marvelous form of culture in Japan that I hadn’t known about.” A radio personality and vocal performer by trade, she wanted to add benshi work to her repertoire. Rather than apprentice, she commuted from her home in Kansai to Tokyo to take a class on the topic from a benshi. She also studied silent film itself, attending repertory screenings at a nearby theater. Though initially interested only in working with animation and Western films, this experience gave Ōmori a new appreciation for early Japanese cinema.

Such appreciation is vital. All over the world, saving silent film is a pressing issue — it’s estimated that more than 90% of all movies made before 1929 in the US are irretrievably gone. Benshi are part of the preservation effort in Japan, and their involvement can go beyond exhibition. During their heyday, for instance, many benshi would record their performances. Benshi like Kataoka then scour antique dealers and shops for such records to find inspiration for their own work. He’s turned over nearly 4,000 of these records to the University of Bonn, which is now working on digitizing them. 

Such research also sometimes leads Kataoka and other modern benshi to uncover clips of films that had been thought lost. In 2016, he saw a film reel in an online auction that turned out to be “Our Pet,” a short from 1924 starring early child screen actor “Baby Peggy.” He “snapped it up,” and donated the film to USC; it plays as part of the Art of the Benshi tour with Ōmori’s accompaniment. Similarly, in a Kyoto antique store, Kataoka discovered fragments of the earliest cinematic adaptation of the perennially popular Japanese story of the 47 Ronin, directed by Shōzō Makino and released around 1910. Archivists combined the footage with other extant material to make the most complete version of the movie yet.

There’s enough demand for benshi to keep the few contemporary practitioners engaged, but what the work entails varies among them. They could be narrating a short or feature, and the film may or may not be the main attraction. As Ōmori explains it: “I might be at a small theater where other people are doing other sorts of performances. There could be rakugo, which is a kind of comic storytelling, and I’ll come out during interludes to do short 10-minute pieces.” 

As a full-timer, Kataoka performs once or twice a week, while this is just one kind of gig Ōmori takes on. Silent film showings aren’t too common in either the US or Japan, and not every screening is accompanied by a benshi. Kataoka explains that tastes vary among Japanese cinephiles. Some enjoy benshi accompaniment, while others prefer the “purer” experience. Interestingly, Kataoka notes that it’s not uncommon to have screenings that are truly silent, with neither narration nor music.

This tour also marks an exceptionally unusual instance in which benshi are working outside Japan for any notable amount of time. Kataoka is by far the benshi who performs internationally the most, and even then, he says he doesn’t tend to do so more than two or three times a year.

While benshi work is tied to an older form of cinema, its practice has changed over time. Ōmori says that “each age needs its own style. We have to engage audiences and help them connect with the films in a way that’s appropriate to this moment.” Thinking about what’s different now, Katoaka adds, “Older benshi weren’t trying to perform the characters; it was a lot more about the narration. Today benshi tend to be closer to actors, trying to act out what the characters are feeling.” 

Content is also a concern; one near-universal element of silent film appreciation is cringing at the invocation of outdated or even objectionable stereotypes. A benshi must tactfully address these elements, presenting them in a way a modern audience can understand. Sometimes, though, the gulf between past and present is more mundane. Ōmori notes: “If a police officer appears, their uniform would have been immediately familiar to people watching the film at the time, whereas people today might not recognize it. You look for things that might require a little bit of explanation. You say, ‘Oh look, here comes the police.’”

This gets at how important the preparation stage is for the art, as benshi script their narration ahead of time. Both Kataoka and Ōmori stress how crucial this is. Kataoka explains: “If you’re taking a film that at the time had a clear message or theme that isn’t going to resonate now, you need to find something else that will resonate. Sometimes it’ll be a matter of finding something that originally might not have been crucial and bringing it out.” Ōmori adds that such intensive writing distinguishes benshi from other forms of Japanese oral storytelling. “With rakugo or kōdan, there are new works, but they traditionally draw on existing scripts that have been passed down for a long time, and performers learn them and tell them in their own way. It’s unusual that benshi each write their own scripts.”

Ōmori also gets into how the staging of a benshi performance is unique. Usually, “the performer is at the middle of the stage, everybody’s focused on them. But the benshi is over on one side of the screen, and the musicians are on the other side. It’s important to maintain a good balance between film, narration, and music. You don’t want to get in the way of the film, but you also don’t want to sort of retire, to disappear.” As she puts it, a good benshi transforms the audience’s experience of the film. 

Both Kataoka and Ōmori express their hope that those who attend the Art of the Benshi tour will enjoy it. Ever the scholar, Kataoka also talks about his hope to use these travels to study how benshi worked in Japanese immigrant communities in the US in places like Hawaiʻi and California. Watching benshi work is singular, a fascinating intersection between cinema and ancient storytelling conventions. I’m glad that even a few people remain to keep the art alive.

The Art of the Benshi tour plays in various venues around the US through April 21.

An employee at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany, was fired from the museum’s installation team after he was found to have hung his own artwork on the gallery walls after hours on February 23.

Though this was an inherently victimless crime, the 51-year-old freelance artist is currently being investigated by local police for “property damage” because he drilled two holes into the wall to hang his painting in the hopes that it would lead to his artistic breakthrough, the police told German news outlet Süddeutsche Zeitung, which first reported the story.

The article indicates that the former employee had access to the museum and was able to bring in and display his artwork unnoticed. According to the Guardian, he installed his painting in the museum’s modern and contemporary art section, allowing the approximately 23-by-47-inch work to share a room with Warhol pieces for eight hours before anyone noticed. The institution has not yet made details about the content of the artwork public.

The museum didn’t immediately respond to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment, but a spokesperson told the Guardian that they wouldn’t comment further to prevent inspiring copycats. Adding insult to injury, they said the museum “did not receive any positive feedback on the addition from visitors to the gallery.”

Banksy pulled the same stunt at several museums in the early aughts, including installing his version of the Mona Lisa with an acid smiley-face at the Louvre in Paris in 2004 — which he later auctioned off for tens of thousands of pounds. While Banksy and the former Pinakothek employee both remain nameless to the press at this time, it’s clear who came out winning here. At least now the latter has more time to dedicate to working toward his artistic breakthrough?

Given New Yorkers’ reluctance to set foot west of the Hudson River, it’s no surprise New Jersey’s arts and culture scene doesn’t get enough credit in the tri-state area. Artist Christine Romanell is determined to change that. From her workspace in the large Manufacturer’s Village studio block in East Orange, Romanell has organized the first-ever Garden State Art Weekend (GSAW), taking place from April 19 to 21 across over 100 arts and culture venues statewide.

“I’m shamelessly ripping off Upstate Art Weekend,” Romanell admitted to Hyperallergic, saying she and her husband had visited the New York event multiple times since its first run in 2020.

“Curators and gallerists say they’re going to travel two hours to get upstate, meanwhile we’re only 15 minutes away [from NYC] and it’s like we’ve fallen off the cultural cliff,” Romanell continued. “It’s a little frustrating sometimes. We know that a lot of people won’t cross the river for just one artist or institution, so we thought we’d make a weekend of it so that it’d be more enticing.”

Manufacturer’s Village will serve as GSAW’s central venue with dozens of artists showcasing their work during open studios. Other participants range from Jersey staples like the Newark Museum and the Montclair Art Museum to smaller spots such as the Wonder Room antique shop in Mendham Borough and the event space and makers’ marketplace Propagate Studio in the tiny town of Stewartsville (population 683).

Samantha Matthews, the artist behind Propagate Studio, told Hyperallergic that she learned about GSAW through Instagram and felt she had to participate. “I love this concept of featuring creative spaces throughout our state because sometimes, people only think of certain areas when they think of the New Jersey arts scene,” Matthews said in an email. For the inaugural GSAW, Matthews will host an art supply thrift shop, open studio, ’70s drag bingo, an introduction to tarot class, and a candle-making workshop, among other sessions.

A half-hour away in Bedminster, visitors to the Center for Contemporary Art can participate in the institution’s “Art Throwdown” spring fundraiser, in which teams are challenged to make an original artwork in one hour from three items inside a mystery box.

At Seton Hall University in South Orange, the school’s Walsh Gallery will show its ongoing exhibition Contemporary African Spirituality in Art featuring the work of 25 African and African-diaspora artists.

“We already know New Jersey as a state with a lot of creative energy,” Walsh Gallery Director Jeanne Brasile, who sits on the Manufacturer’s Village board, said in an email. “This weekend will create a critical mass to bring attention to the artists and art venues that call New Jersey home.”

On the GSAW website, descriptions of what’s on throughout the weekend and instructions on how to register (if necessary) are available alongside a venue map for those who want to create their own plans, but Romanell has created day-trip itineraries as well.

A team of researchers hypothesize that a kite-shaped rock found off the coast of South Africa may actually be one of the world’s earliest known works of animal art due to its resemblance to an endemic stingray species.

In a new paper published in the journal Rock Art Research, co-researchers Charles Helm and Alan Whitfield argue that the rock is an example of an ammoglyph — a term coined by Helm in 2019 to describe human mark-making on sand that has been preserved by compacted sedimentary layers deposited by wind.

The rock was found in 2018 by citizen scientist Emily Brink along the Southern Cape shore less than 20 miles from the Blombos Cave, an archaeological site where the earliest drawing by a human was discovered among other examples of human behavior in the Middle Stone Age. The specimen is unremarkable at first glance, but its unusual shape does bear an uncanny likeness to the blue stingray species, which is endemic to southern Africa’s coastal waters. Helm, Whitfield, and their team of seven researchers speculate that due to its shape and size, the stone was made by tracing the outline of an actual blue stingray in the sand.

The researchers note that in addition to accurate proportions, the stone possesses a rather detailed “tail stub,” the base from which the stingray’s lethal barbed tail emerges, though the tail itself is missing. They theorize that blue stingrays posed a serious threat to Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherers along the coast and traumatic encounters may have encouraged them to omit or symbolically remove the barb and tail from the tracing.

“We don’t (as yet) have the capacity to distinguish between natural versus anthropogenic breaking off of the tail portion, but we can state that there is no evidence of it having happened recently,” Helm said in an email to Hyperallergic. “The rest is speculation!”

To avoid chipping the hardened sandstone during analysis, the researchers used optically stimulated luminescence to determine the age of the stone and found that it was most likely between 119,000 and 124,000 years old. If they are proven correct and the stone is indeed a depiction of a stingray, that would make the specimen some 85,000 years older than what we currently recognize as the oldest known work of animal art. That work is a remarkable 45,500-year-old cave painting of a warty pig drawn to scale which was found in 2017 in the Leang Tedongnge cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Considering the stark difference between the two and the time between their creations, the researchers posit that tracing may have been a stepping stone toward more advanced representational imagery. There’s always the chance that it’s just a uniquely shaped stone, but only time and additional research will tell.

The Whitney Biennial opened its 81st edition in New York City to the public less than a month ago, with works by 76 artists, including the members of two collectives. Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the marquee exhibition isn’t just a harbinger of formal and thematic trends in the contemporary art world. Historically, it’s also been perceived as a sign of who “makes it” in a field that’s infamous for leaving out so many.

We set out to analyze some of the demographic characteristics of this year’s cohort versus those of the previous edition in 2022, focusing on age, place of origin and current location, educational background, and pronouns. Much of this information was shared with the museum voluntarily by the artists. We independently tracked down some of the missing data points, such as where artists went to school, since the museum curiously told us that this isn’t something they keep track of. Data specialist Ryan Buggy helped analyze and visualize the different data points.

So how does Even Better Than the Real Thing stack up? Read on and click through our interactive graphs to learn where 25% of participants got their MFAs, which generation is best represented (hint: they like their avocado toast), and more. You might find a few surprises.

Age and Generation: the Whitney Millennial?

Call it the Whitney Millennial: In the 2024 edition, artists born between 1981 and 1996 beat out every other generation combined, making up 60% of the group. This year’s show is notably younger than the previous one, in which Millennials were still the largest individual generational category but Generation X and Baby Boomers lagged not too far behind.

The youngest artist in the 2022 group was born in 1995, making them 26 or 27 years old at the time; the youngest artist in 2024 was born in 2000, making them 23 or 24 today. The oldest living artist in the current Biennial is in their early 80s — that’s older than the eldest participant in the previous edition, who was in their mid-70s. But there are only two artist estates represented in this year’s Biennial — those of Mavis Pusey (1928–2019) and Edward Owens (1949–2009) — compared to five estates in the 2022 show.

The most popular birth year in the present Biennial is 1990 (equivalent to 33 or 34 years old); in 2022, it was 1982 (39 or 40 years old at the time).

Geography: What Is “American” Anyway?

The Whitney Biennial is described as “the longest-running survey of American art.” But what does “American” mean, exactly?

This year’s show has more international representation in comparison to previous years: While the 2022 and 2019 iterations were largely made up of artists who were born in the United States (approximately 72%), US-born participants comprise just 53% of this year’s cohort, which features artists from 25 other countries and territories, including Canada (four), China (three), India (three), and the United Kingdom (three).

For comparison, the 2022 iteration represented 15 other countries and regions. Despite this diversity, the overwhelming majority of participants — both from the US and beyond — come from cities.

While there is greater variety in where participants were born, more than 60% of the artists listed the US as their current place of residence, with New York City and Los Angeles being the most popular locations, jointly accounting for 30 of 76 artists, or almost 40%. The Biennial does appear to have gotten less NYC- and LA-heavy, though: In 2022, 61% of the artists lived in one of the two cities.

Nearly all participants who said they currently live in the US are residents of coastal states, with the exception of 10 artists based in New Mexico, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio.

Education: School Is Still Worth It

Unsurprisingly, it looks like artists still need to go to school to get into the Biennial. In the past two iterations of the exhibition, only three participants did not go to college, and almost 70% of artists attended graduate school. And in both editions, the majority of artists had a graduate degree — mostly a Master of Fine Arts (MFA), long considered the holy grail for a career in the visual arts, though the question of whether artists really need the degree is somewhat divisive.

In the current Biennial, the most popular schools for MFA programs were the University of California, Los Angeles (five); Columbia University (five); the California College of the Arts ( four); and Yale University (four) — together representing just under one-quarter of all artists in the show.

Yale lost its spot as the primary MFA school this year, but in the previous biennial in 2022, the school accounted for six artists’ MFA degrees. It was followed by the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) (four); the University of California, Los Angeles (four); and Bard College (three). While these schools were more popular than the rest, they still didn’t make up a majority. In both 2022 and 2024, most Whitney Biennial participants attended other universities for their MFAs.

Pronouns: Not Male and Pale Anymore?

The Whitney publicly listed its participants’ pronouns for the first time this year, and one grouping proved overwhelmingly represented: More than half of the 70 artists who disclosed pronouns use she/her. Hyperallergic followed up with the remaining artists and received data for all but one, and she/her is still the most popular (55%), followed by he/him (20%), and they/them (13%).

Other artists reported she/they, he/they, no pronouns, and any/all. When grouped together with they/them, nonbinary pronouns were more frequent than he/him, with around one in four artists using them.

In conclusion, the 2024 Whitney Biennial is younger, more international, still predominantly bi-coastal in the US though less NY- and LA-centric, and most of the artists use she/her pronouns.

Re-Discovering Native America: Stories in Motion with The Red Road Project highlights contemporary narratives from Indigenous individuals and communities across the country. Founded in 2013 by Danielle SeeWalker and Carlotta Cardana, The Red Road Project seeks to provide a platform for Native Americans to share their stories in their own voices, challenging historical accounts that often overlook and misrepresent their perspectives. Showcasing photographs and stories collected between 2013 and 2024, the exhibition aims to redirect the narrative surrounding contemporary Native America. The collection offers a glimpse into the lives of community activists and leaders who walk “the red road,” a symbolic expression in many Native communities for living purposefully on a path of positive change.

The show at Bedford Gallery also introduces a new set of photographs and stories collected during a special Bay Area residency in February 2024, highlighting the unique stories of Indigenous people in Northern California and, specifically, the Bay Area.

In addition to the collection of photographs, a selection of sculptural works by celebrated Native artists Danielle Boyer, Tyler Eash, Chelsea Kaiah, Brent Learned, Dallin Maybee, Carmen Selam, and Anna Tsouhlarakis will be on view. 

The exhibition runs April 13–June 23, and the gallery, located in Walnut Creek, California, is open Wednesday–Sunday, 12–5pm.

For more information, visit bedfordgallery.org.

When I broke the story about the whereabouts of Richard Serra’s controversial sculpture “Clara-Clara” for Hyperallergic last week, I hoped that it would spur action by the City of Paris, which owns the work. It appears that it has. The office of Carine Roland, the deputy mayor of Paris in charge of culture, told the French publication Le Monde they were looking into “three possibilities in the historic heart of Paris” for “Clara-Clara.” It is a welcome and exciting update since last week, when I asked the City of Paris about the status of the sculpture and was told they were “actively working on its relocation.” A spokesperson for the City declined to provide details about Le Monde’s report but promised an update soon.

I am one of few people who has seen “Clara-Clara” since it was removed from the Tuileries Gardens in 2009 and put into storage in the industrial outskirts of Paris. I was shown the sculpture on a tour I was given at the Fonds Municipaux d’Art Contemporain (FMAC) in Ivry-sur-Seine, through my research at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) where I’m now an adjunct professor of Architecture. Art, particularly works commissioned for public spaces, should be appreciated by the public. Of course, Mayor Anne Hidalgo and the current government of Paris inherited this work, which was acquired in 1985, but they have a responsibility as its steward to take it out from the back lot of FMAC, restore it, weld it back together, and re-install it in a worthy location.

I was not the only person hoping for this potential outcome. Aurélien Véron, a councilman for the City of Paris and spokesperson for Groupe Changer Paris, a conglomeration of Republicans, centrists, and independents, took to X to inquire about where “Clara-Clara” was prior to the publication of my article. “Lost, stolen, hijacked?” he posted, adding, “Why not let Parisians benefit from it? It would be a beautiful tribute to the artist.”

In a phone conversation with me this morning, April 9, Véron told me he was disappointed that the City of Paris did not acknowledge Serra’s death or respond to his request for information.

“Initially I was a bit shocked by the fact that the City of Paris didn’t mention the death of Richard Serra while detaining a major artwork of a major artist, artwork that disappeared 15 years ago,” he said. “Nobody knows where it is, nobody answered at City Hall.”

Véron added that he belongs to the same cultural commission in Paris City Council that is led by Carine Roland, “but we don’t exchange at all. There’s no bilateral exchange.”

The councilman has a few ideas of where “Clara-Clara” could be re-installed. Paris’s third largest park, Parc de la Villette in the northeast corner of Paris, is no stranger to modern art. Designed by French architect Bernard Tschumi, who served as Dean of Columbia University’s GSAPP from 1988 to 2003, the 137-acre park’s vast lawns are dotted with contemporary art installations and cultural venues. “Such an artwork would be consistent with the spirit of La Villette and the new philharmonic by Jean Nouvel,” Véron said.

Another potential spot for “Clara-Clara” could be in front of the Chateau de Vincennes, the magnificent 14th-century castle in the city’s east, or the business district La Défense, as a new counterpoint to Paris’s historical axis. Véron says the sculpture could be re-aligned to the historical axis and visitors “could see the Tuileries and the Louvre in the perspective of ‘Clara-Clara.’” 

Perhaps most centrally, the sculpture could go in the plaza in front of the Centre Pompidou, during the upcoming five-year renovation of the museum. “It could land there next year, for one or two years to let visitors, tourists, and people from Paris, turn around it, and walk along on this big plaza that will be empty because of the closure of the museum,” Véron said.

“[‘Clara-Clara’] is a huge, massive, important work that had two great stages in life — one in the Tuileries Gardens 15 years ago, and one with the Grand Palais with Monumenta,” Véron stressed. “It should not have disappeared that way.”

Millions looked skyward today, April 8, as the moon eclipsed the sun from Mexico’s Pacific Coast to Canada’s eastern shore. Those who traveled to the around 115-mile-wide path of totality experienced between three and five minutes of darkness, but viewers outside the stretch had plenty to look at, too. Below, we’ve compiled some of the most breathtaking press photographs of what’s been dubbed the Great American Eclipse.

The total eclipse made landfall in the resort town of Matazlán, Mexico. As it continued its 1,500-mile-per-hour journey northward, the skies darkened in Mexico City, where one onlooker donned a unique take on the eclipse glasses that proved impossible to find in the days leading up to the celestial event.

The path of totality encompassed a wide swath of Texas, as well. One photo captured the final moments before the moon overtook the sun above Fort Worth, when viewers could observe the “diamond ring effect.”

For those lamenting not traveling to the path of totality, the next large North American eclipse will take place in 2044, when the moon will overtake the sun in Canada, Montana, and North and South Dakota.