Over 200 people, including current and former Brooklyn Museum workers and supporters, rallied outside the institution during a fundraising event tonight, February 25, to protest the recent sweeping layoffs impacting nearly 50 full- and part-time staff members.

Starting at 6pm, concurrently with the invitation-only Chairman’s Dinner, demonstrators held signs that read “Art Workers Won’t Kiss Ass” and “Say, Brooklyn Museum, Heard You Can’t Read a Contract!” Another sign collaged museum Director Anne Pasternak’s face with photos of President Trump and Elon Musk. 

The rally was organized by District Council 37 Local 1502 and UAW Local 2110, the two unions representing workers at the Brooklyn Museum, which decried leadership’s decision to cut workers across departments without attempting to negotiate with their respective bargaining units or offering buyouts or furloughs.

“Leadership needs to act — this is what this rally is about,” Liz St. George, an assistant curator in the Decorative Arts department who was affected by the layoffs and unit chair for Local 2110, told Hyperallergic at the rally. 

“We want them to respect our contract, which they did not, and they did not give us 30 days notice of reorganization, which they bargained with us in good faith over,” St. George continued. “We want them to respect workers here at the Brooklyn Museum and show that by not laying us off, we are the heart and soul of this place, and this place is nothing without the people that do the work on the ground.”

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum told Hyperallergic that the institution “continues its good faith negotiations with both unions.”

“We respect the rights of our union-represented employees to organize and rally,” the spokesperson said. “To be clear, we made the formal notification of layoffs on February 7 and we have been in negotiations regarding the terms related to these reductions since that date. And we will continue bargaining in accordance with our contracts.”

Hyperallergic reported on the expected layoffs on February 6. The next morning, Director Anne Pasternak confirmed the cuts during an all-staff meeting at the museum, informing employees of a $10 million budget deficit that she said necessitated “difficult cuts and strategic investments.” A total of 47 workers were laid off, over 10% of the museum’s staff, among them curators, educators, conservators, guards, and retail workers. 

In addition to the sweeping layoffs, Pasternak said other cost-cutting measures would include salary cuts of up to 20% for senior leadership and a reduction in the number of programs and exhibitions. In 2023, the most recent year for which financial filings are publicly available, Pasternak’s compensation stood at $1,012,633. Former Chief Operating Officer Kimberly Panicek Trueblood, who departed the museum last December for unclear reasons along with Chief People Officer Allison Avery, earned $369,054 that year.

The museum’s announcement, said a joint press release from the unions, came “after the museum spent millions of dollars on expensive events to celebrate its 200th anniversary.” A former curatorial staffer who was laid off and asked to speak anonymously said the timing of the layoffs was a “slap in the face.”

“After celebrating the 200th anniversary, which was hands on deck, for them to go through these layoffs in such a cruel manner … It tarnished the legacy of the museum and the spirit of what the museum says it’s supposed to respect,” the former worker said.

Among the attendees at tonight’s rally was Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who addressed the crowd as he called on the city to cover the museum’s deficit in its upcoming budget.

“I want to call upon the mayor of the city of New York City,” Reynoso said to protesters through a megaphone. “These museums are a public asset, they are here to do a public good people come in for free.” 

“These workers are on the chopping block and the budget can help us do something about it,” Reynoso said. 

Council Member Crystal Hudson of Brooklyn’s District 35, representing the Brooklyn Museum’s neighborhood of Crown Heights, was present at the rally along with other elected officials.

“We have an affordability crisis in New York City; people should care about anyone who’s at risk of losing their job,” Husdon told Hyperallergic. “The best possible outcome is the museum gets the money that it needs to avoid the layoffs and finds a way to avoid the layoffs sort of in the interim.” 

Rafael Ramos, a retired New York Aquarium employee wore a green DC 37 Local 1502 t-shirt and held protest signs in front of traffic 

“I came out here on my own time to support them,” Ramos told Hyperallergic. “My parents brought me here, I brought my kids here, and it’s just sad what they’re doing.”

Philip Guston, an Ashkenazi Jew, and Trenton Doyle Hancock, a Black artist with a strict Southern Christian upbringing, came from vastly different backgrounds. But a current show at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan reveals that their perspectives and sensibilities blend seamlessly. Both were maligned for their figurative, comic book-influenced styles: Guston by the elite art world that was scandalized by his abandonment of abstraction for figuration, and Doyle Hancock by the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when his mother burned his collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards and Dungeons and Dragons materials, believing that she was saving him from eternal damnation. In fact, when Doyle Hancock first came into contact with Guston, he had recently found the freedom he needed at college, away from his stringent home life, to explore new worlds of art. He told Hyperallergic that, at the time, he saw Guston “as another comic book artist.” As he honed his craft to become an editorial cartoon illustrator, he felt a kinship with Guston’s zany caricatures — and soon saw how he could continue his legacy of using comedic aesthetics to highlight the darkest aspects of American racism.

Both also confronted white supremacy in various ways throughout their lives: Guston, a proud antifascist, lived through the KKK’s reign of terror in Los Angeles; Doyle Hancock would learn that the fairgrounds of his home in Paris, Texas, the place of many happy childhood memories, were once crowded with onlookers who craned their necks to view the lynching of a teenage Black boy. Further, both question if they themselves are complicit: Guston through his depiction of himself as an artist wearing the Klan hood, and Doyle Hancock through his host of surreal characters who are simultaneously perpetrators and victims of supremacy culture. 

In this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian and Trenton Doyle Hancock come together with poet and critic John Yau, who has been writing about Guston for decades. With his deep knowledge of Guston’s life and work, Yau illuminates what almost seems like a cosmic connection between the two artists. 

In 2020, Guston’s work came into question over whether it was appropriate to show during a period of reckoning with racist imagery. It would be far from the first time that Guston’s work has been covered up or censored, whether it was by institutions attempting to avoid liability, the Catholic Church in Mexico being wary of standing up to authoritarianism, or anti-communist Los Angeles police units destroying his antiracist paintings. With fascism on the rise in America and around the globe, Doyle Hancock’s “confrontation” with Guston’s work shows the power of addressing white supremacy head-on, with all of its vile truths in view — and then, their power deflated, through comic relief. 

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston continues at the Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue and East 92nd Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through March 30. 

Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. This episode is also available with images of the artwork on YouTube.

In some ways, we’ve been here before. Maybe it wasn’t as fascist, but it was just as chaotic. In 2020, when COVID-19 precaution measures shuttered the doors of museums and galleries around the world, institutions were forced to consider: How do we keep our businesses afloat without being able to provide physical access to exhibitions and collections? Then, as now, chaos presented an unprecedented opportunity for institutions to get clear about their purpose and the people who matter to them.

Back then, the question was suddenly, “What should we do if no one can come to the museum?” — even though, long before COVID-19, not everyone could. As we know, predominantly White museum leadership reflected predominantly White audiences for decades. But when the visitors whom art institutions historically valued the most couldn’t step through their doors, almost overnight, notions of “access” became the new art-world darling. For those who already felt excluded from art spaces, and for those who had been doing the work to reduce barriers to entry, this suddenly urgent focus on barriers to entry was eyeroll-worthy — mostly because we know that merely addressing inaccessibility isn’t a quick fix. Disability justice seemed adjacent to conversations of “accessibility,” and people of color with disabilities, who are often sidelined in that conversation, continued to be impacted disproportionately.

Ask five DEIA consultants to define “access” and you’ll get five different answers. These conversations about how accessibility, or lack thereof, impacts audience reach, programming, and more are worthwhile. But ultimately, in the most stripped-down Webster’s dictionary sense, access in the art world is about providing all people with the opportunity to experience art by removing systemic and institutional barriers. It’s also worth noting that the “A” in “DEIA” (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) has a fluid way of coming in and out of the conversation — even though, I think, the D, E, and, I have always fundamentally been about the A.

Since the pandemic, doors have reopened and museum attendance worldwide is back to, or surpassing, pre-COVID figures. But the urgency of accessibility remains. According to a 2024 American Alliance of Museums report, museum-goers still don’t reflect the evolving US demographics. And as DEI efforts crumble and institutions scramble to figure out how to do the “right” thing, we appear to be in a new wave of pandemic-level chaos. This time, though, access has less to do with audiences and more to do with keeping doors open to the inclusive workforce who stand to take the organization to the next level.

At the recruiting, human resources, and talent agency VERGE, my fellow Co-founder Julia V. Hendrickson and I are in constant and regular conversation with people from the global majority who are growing their careers in the art industry. We’ve gained insight not only into how to open the door to opportunities but also to build and maintain support on the other side of the door.

In a recent poll of job-seekers in the VERGE community, we learned that job-seekers of color are looking for workplaces that prioritize diversity, equity, and respect for individuality. But we also learned that these considerations are generally less important than values of mutual respect and community. Overall, those who answered the survey are looking for jobs that foster a sense of passion and pride for projects — preferring workplaces that stay true to their values and are collaborative, transparent, supportive, flexible, and provide opportunities to grow.

To be clear, a sustained focus on access — on keeping the doors open — does not mean that I condone the dismantling of the DEI efforts that seek to redress racial oppression. I know the value of these efforts firsthand, having earned a fellowship position at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art through the Office of Fellowships and Grants’ Minority Internship Program (a zillion years ago). As such, the recent closing of the Smithsonian’s Diversity Offices came with a special sting. That fellowship changed my career in the best way. It wasn’t called DEI back then, but the goal was the same. And for it, I’m grateful.

But if DEI is dying, there’s no reason to stop moving toward the accessibility that has always been at the core of the effort. And if arts organizations want to keep the door open to talented folks who could change the landscape for the better — while upholding the importance of pay equity, raises, inclusion, and opportunity for career advancement — they should address these four institutional considerations:

Be transparent about transparency: There is value in being candid about your organization’s values and purpose. Research has shown that a culture of transparency helps employees, and the organization, operate more efficiently. Get clear about the difference between transparency and privacy, and establish protocols for how, why, and when leadership will decide when to be transparent with employees about organizational goals, or pivots — and where do employees fit in? Transparency might be as simple as sharing an organization chart, or letting your team know that the board is revisiting a mission statement. Transparency is less about providing answers, and more about strengthening the team by ensuring they feel included.

Re-visit your mission statement: Ask yourselves: Is everyone still on the same page? Aside from what it signals to the outside world, your institution’s internal mission statement stands to assemble everyone around a shared goal. This is what the team advances toward, together. Taking a hard look at where your organization stands, and what it stands for, can bring clarity about keeping the doors of your institution open to talented professionals from the global majority — no matter what you call the effort.

Remember the benefits of being flexible: As employees’ lives are increasingly pulled in several directions, flexibility is increasingly key to their success — particularly for workers with disabilities, caregiving responsibilities, or barriers to transportation. This doesn’t mean anything goes, but it does mean considering policies that might meet employees halfway. For example, a 2024 report from researchers at Stanford University highlighted the ways in which hybrid work sets employees, and organizations, up for success. Could it be time to revisit your organization’s stance on “office time”?

Get clear about the opportunities for career advancement: A 2024 report by Museums Moving Forward highlights the fact that “the path to promotion and seniority is long and uncertain, with an average tenure of 12 years in an institution before a promotion.” But might talented folks stay longer, reducing high turnover, if the path to promotion and advancement — including fair raises and salary increases — was clear? What does advancement at your organization look like? Spell it out: What is required to get a raise, or get promoted? 

Last month, a spokesperson for the Smithsonian told Hyperallergic, “We are closing our Office of Diversity but retaining our efforts at visitor accessibility as it serves a critical function.” But swap out “closing our Office of Diversity” with “closing our doors because of COVID-19,” and we recognize that access is indeed a long game. As such, I’m trusting that as the Smithsonian replaces language referring to DEIA with the words “welcoming and accessible,” the other letters are still implied.

“In an ideal world, DEI was always striving towards obsolescence. We didn’t want the effort to be needed,” VERGE Co-founder Ola Mobolade told me in a recent phone call. As a recognized leader on the evolving global cultural landscape, the co-author of the ground-breaking book Marketing to the New Majority: Strategies for a Diverse World (2011), she is no stranger to the ways the ground beneath us has and will continue to shift. Together, we have spent countless hours unpacking what we’ve learned from the past, as we try to imagine what the future might hold and recognize that just as earlier iterations of similar efforts come to the end of their life cycle following backlash and political attacks — the Civil Rights Movement, the Equal Opportunity Act, Affirmative Action — it might only be a matter of time before the lid on this container is forced shut.

That said, though the packaging is changing, the desire for change remains the same. Yes, maybe times are changing. But Ola recently reminded me of the 1960s Sheldon Allman song, “Crawl Out Through the Fallout.” Sixty-five years later, it might be an anthem for this time. 

PITTSBURGH — In 1935, a 26-year-old largely self-taught painter named Gertrude Abercrombie accompanied her friend, the writer Thorton Wilder, to a lecture at the University of Chicago in her native Hyde Park. There, she would meet the lecturer who would become a lifelong influence and mentor of sorts: Gertrude Stein. An irascible American modernist who not only revolutionized poetry but cultivated a salon of artists as an émigré in Paris, Stein told Abercrombie, “You gotta draw better.” 

Drawing, however, was always secondary to painting for Abercrombie — it was her stark compositions with their idiosyncratic and personal visual vocabulary made up of recurring owls and cats, doors and moons, that made her such a fascinating figure within American surrealism. “Art has to be real crazy, real personal and real real, or it is nowhere,” Abercrombie once wrote. Hers certainly was. Unjustly marginalized since her death in 1977, which occurred due to an addiction to alcohol and after nearly two decades of producing few works, Abercrombie, and her arresting oeuvre will hopefully be discovered by a new audience in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s comprehensive retrospective, The Whole World Is a Mystery. 

Abercrombie wasn’t one to take Stein’s critique personally, and she fashioned herself into the “other Gertrude,” hosting her own salons in her Chicago brownstone. Luminaries of the bebop jazz avant-garde counted themselves members of this confraternity, including Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. Feted as the “Queen of the Bohemians,” the tall, skinny, and angular Abercrombie saw herself as a kind of jazz witch forging her dream visions into a strange, eerie, and occult body of work. 

As with any surrealist worth the designation, Abercrombie and her own psychic fractures were her greatest subject. “Self-Portrait, the Striped Blouse” (1940) — permanently housed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and painted in 1940, the last year that she produced work for the federal Works Progress Administration — is a mirror of Abercrombie’s self-perception. Shrouded in darkness, the thin and rectilinear artist is in the corner of a bare room, her hand resting in a bowl of grapes. Behind partially pulled-back red curtains is an unsettling field at nighttime, an alien-like green tree silhouetted by moonlight, the hazy blue sfumato imbuing the scene suggesting a nocturne before dawn. The mask-like face of Abercrombie ironically echoes the same empty features of Stein in Pablo Picasso’s celebrated portrait of 1905–06, and yet there is something to be said that here, the subject has rendered herself — an act of self-creation rather than mere observation. 

Part of the uncanniness of Abercrombie’s works paradoxically arises from the mutedness of her surrealism: Despite the occasional lions playing a game of chess, there are no melting clocks or locomotives emerging from fireplaces. The disquieting dream logic of an Abercrombie composition instead seems designed to unnerve more than to shock, a quintessentially American imagination that’s less Salvador Dali than it is David Lynch. For that matter, despite her own claims of having been influenced by Stein, the literary modernist Abercrombie most resembles is another Pennsylvanian poet: the hermetic, occult prophetess H.D. Like H.D., Abercrombie is an artist whose storehouse of images is personal and eccentric, for both are creators of a mythopoesis in some ways inscrutable and impenetrable — but all the more alluring because of it. “At least I have the flowers of myself,/and my thoughts, no god/can take that,” H.D. wrote in her 1917 poem “Eurydice.” Those words apply equally to the painter.

Born to traveling opera-performer parents in Austin, Abercrombie was raised for a few years in small-town Illinois before moving to South Chicago, living in Hyde Park before the University of Chicago would decimate the multi-racial working-class community in the name of urban renewal and gentrification. Committed to principles of interracial solidarity and gender equality, Abercrombie’s love of jazz (Gillespie famously called her a “bop artist”) as well as her adamant refusal to conform to domestic expectations in her two marriages earned her the aforementioned royal sobriquet. In keeping with the tradition of European surrealists like Max Ernst, her work was always political, albeit filtered through a distinctly American sensibility. As the exhibition guide notes, “Design for Death” (1946) was supposedly Charlie Parker’s favorite composition. In it, a ladder is propped against the trunk of a gnarled, blackened, and barren tree marked by moonlight on an otherwise ink-blue evening. A hangman’s noose is tied across a branch. Potentially inspired by Billie Holliday’s haunting rendition of the classic “Strange Fruit,” the reference to lynching in the painting is obvious, while the distortions and the strange lighting — mainstays of Abercrombie — render their subject appropriately nightmarish. 

Abercrombie’s influences are clear, but like any great artist, she forges this disparate tangle into something unique. Her shadows, lines, and contorted perspectives evoke Giorgio de Chirico, while her colors and smooth surfaces, as well as her placement of regular objects in incongruous settings, recall René Magritte, whom she specifically mentioned in interviews. “Strange Shadows (Shadow and Substance)” (1950) exemplifies her style. A tall and thin woman in a turquoise dress, presumably the artist’s double (she appears in many compositions), holds her hand aloft, but the shadow she casts is of a tree with an owl on a branch. Across from her, a smooth, white column with a blue glass placed atop it casts a shadow in the silhouette of a woman holding a glass. Stark and strange, the painting conjures her influences but is unmistakably Abercrombie’s, the autobiographical figure so common in her work infusing the painting with the witchy, occult, hermetic sensibility that she cultivated. 

Surprisingly, the artist Abercrombie reminded me of most wasn’t Joan Miró or Man Ray — not even Leonora Carrington — but rather a surrealist of a different sort in the children’s book illustrator Clement Hurd, celebrated for his pictures in Margaret Wise Brown’s classic Goodnight Moon (1947). Both have a fondness for deceptive simplicity and clean lines; both are conversant with the charged mysticism of powerful archetypes and of lonely fields on a moonlit night. Such a comparison isn’t to Abercrombie’s detriment, but rather to Hurd’s elevation. More importantly, it speaks to a certain shared Americanness between them — while Abercrombie never denied her similarity to the Surrealists, her own program was fundamentally hers alone, a rugged individualist on a psychic errand into the wilderness. What Abercrombie’s work exemplified was her own principle of the “point of contact,” the place where subjectivities collide, even if they aren’t mutually comprehensible. A point of contact makes a space for communication — not in spite of, but because of the mysteries of personhood. The Carnegie’s enigmatic exhibition, threaded through with Abercombie’s repeating motifs of night and the moon, ladders and doors, exemplifies such communication. It’s an experience that feels as much as having your Tarot read as it does a trip to the museum. 

Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery continues at the Carnegie Museum of Art (4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) through June 1. The exhibition was curated by Eric Crosby and Cynthia Stucki. It will travel to Colby College Museum of Art from July 12, 2025 through January 11, 2026.

MILWAUKEE — Benny Andrews was a painter, as well as an activist, an art educator in prisons, and an inspiration to many Black artists. He made figurative paintings utilizing a technique he called “rough collage,” where he selectively built up parts of the composition with paper or fabric. 

Prior to his death in 2006, at the age of 75, he organized a foundation to preserve his studio in Brooklyn and oversee his estate. Trouble at Ruth Arts, the exhibition space run by the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, was organized in collaboration with the Benny Andrews Estate. The exhibition is beautifully situated in this newly renovated space of brick walls and natural light. Most of the works are portraits. Paintings that more directly comment on race and politics, such as “No More Games” (1970) in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection, are absent here. Yet every aspect of Andrews’s life involved fighting and caring for his own community, and the portraits reflect this. 

Andrews was interested in art as a child, growing up in a sharecropper family in Georgia with nine siblings. After serving in the Korean War, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), receiving his BFA in 1958. It was at SAIC that he began incorporating found materials into his paintings; the earliest work in this show, “Janitors at Rest” (1957–58), presciently established his style for the remainder of his career. 

Andrews was one of nine Black students at SAIC in the 1950s. He was also one of the few committed to figurative work while Abstract Expressionism reigned. He wrote in an unpublished essay, included in the show’s handouts, that he was not popular and didn’t get invited to social events. Instead, he found kinship with the school’s custodial staff, who were Black and also from the South. Andrews would visit them, where they hung out in the men’s room, to chat and share a sip of whiskey. The custodians’ calloused hands and worn overalls, he said, felt familiar. The day he had his creative breakthrough, he had gone down the hall from his painting class to chat with them. “I went back to my class and started painting my idea of them,” he wrote. When the painting still didn’t feel right, he returned to the men’s room, where he grabbed hand towels and strips of toilet paper, “and like a crazed person, I ran to my class, put my canvas on the floor, spread torn pieces of towels and tissues … then painted furiously.”

“Janitors at Rest” is a smeary work, with stops and starts, and a scrappy composition that reflects the unleashed energies of its invention. Rough collage enabled Andrews to address his own background through the textures of the people with whom he identified. Scraps of cloth or crumpled paper became interventions in the history of painting, a subversive and insistent means of encompassing his own non-White, non-urban roots. 

An undeniable immediacy is evident in Andrews’s art. He balances positive and negative space, allowing each painterly move to have its own moment while leaving tension in the synapses. His figures, with their elongated limbs, convey a deeply considered range of human expression. The crumpled paper that forms the bag in “Bag Woman” (1978), and the bits of cloth that poke out of it, are risky devices that could easily fail. But instead, they offer a pop of unexpected, playful, material disruption. The paintings are fastidious and thoughtful, yet relaxed in attitude. There was not one painting in this exhibition that didn’t make me want to stay with it and soak in the artist’s unexpected means of building pictures. 

One notable compositional device, in works such as “For Colored Girls” (1977), or “Funeral” (1977), pairs individuals with vases of flowers. The flowers, hovering in the foreground or to the sides, appear like small blessings consecrated in bursts of color. The figure is often placed within an undefined background, allowing the forms and collaged textures to play brightly, as if on a stage. Andrews’s portraits stretch toward representing types as much as individuals (e.g., the mourner, the artist). “Viola Andrews Teaching Sunday School” (1989) shows his mother dressed in dark Sunday clothes, holding a Bible. Andrews renders her in a full-length pose, historically reserved for aristocracy. A fancy, floral purse dangles daintily from her wrist but her fist is clenched. She appears both kind and strong, at once a singular woman and a symbol of women who serve as church and community leaders. Andrews applies scraps of cloth to form her clothes, once again using rough collage to bind the elevated finesse of painting to the places and histories that inform his life, such as the make-do quilting practices of rural Black communities.  

A nearby wall displays multiple self-portraits. We see Andrews as a young man in his studio in “Studio” (1967). He faces a canvas, holding a brush. His torso is entombed in a pedestal, as if he and the studio are one. His friend Alice Neel is in the background, sitting naked on a plinth, reading a book. The ever-present flowers bloom from the wooden floorboards. Andrews is a tall, skinny guy with a beard. He stares at the canvas with the universally quizzical face of an artist contemplating his own work. This piece is surrounded by drawings, a small sculpture, and several other paintings of the artist in the studio, as well as a 1978 lithograph by Neel showing Andrews in a wrinkled work shirt. 

Four glass cases in the exhibition display archival materials, including photographs, magazine clippings, show cards, essays by Andrews (published in the New York Times and other publications), and studio artifacts. On top of each table are copies that visitors can take home. This approach keeps the artist’s own words and life more immediate, almost paralleling his collage strategies. One essay discusses the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s now infamous 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind. It contained no work by Black artists. Andrews picketed the show and cofounded a coalition to demand art world equity and inclusion. He and others would later protest the Whitney Museum’s 1971 Contemporary Black Artists in America for its lack of Black curatorial involvement.

Andrews was a fighter who achieved success and sway in the art world, with many shows and museum acquisitions. But his work seems less known today than some of his peers, such as Romare Bearden, Howardena Pindell, or Faith Ringgold. Perhaps this is because his practice veered from political commentary to portraiture. Or his use of found materials and adherence to figuration impinged on the trends toward abstraction and pure painting. Despite this, his influence feels palpable, directly or indirectly, on subsequent generations of Black figurative artists. 

The title for this exhibition, Trouble, comes from Andrews’s studio journal entries dated 1965–72. “Trouble,” he says, is an expression of being alive. To be in trouble is to embrace the struggle and vulnerability of the process, a wall text explains.  “Try to do what you want to do,” he wrote, “and try as much as possible to do it for yourself.” 

Benny Andrews: Trouble continues at Ruth Arts (325 West Florida Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) through March 7. The exhibition was organized by Ruth Arts and the Benny Andrews Estate. 

In an attempt to thwart impending eviction, Elizabeth Street Garden is suing New York City, arguing that it should be allowed to stay put under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA). 

The Elizabeth Street Garden, a neoclassical sculpture garden and green space in Manhattan managed by its namesake nonprofit, was served an eviction notice last October as part of a city plan to develop an affordable housing complex for low-income and LGBTQ+ seniors on the plot. The garden secured a temporary stay of eviction last fall, delaying further legal action until this month. 

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, February 18, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, lawyers for Elizabeth Street Garden’s Executive Director Joseph Reiver argued that the garden is a “single unified sculptural work of visual art.” Under VARA, which grants creators of public artworks the right to “claim authorship” over them and prevent their destruction or modification, the garden’s lawyers claim that the space is protected. 

Attorney Steve Hyman told Hyperallergic that Elizabeth Street Garden’s neoclassical design “is further enhanced by human activity, making it a unique social sculpture that warrants protection under [VARA].”

Reiver’s lawyers argued in Tuesday’s complaint that the garden was a work of art collaboratively authored by Joseph Reiver and his late father, Allan, a gallerist who arranged the statues in a specific way, planted trees according to the garden’s neoclassical design, constructed pathways and gates, and curated the flowers that grow there.

Last spring, a federal judge in Iowa prevented the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) from demolishing a land art installation by artist Mary Miss under VARA until the case was settled for nearly $1 million last month. 

Reiver declined to comment on the pending litigation.

Elizabeth Street Garden’s October eviction notice followed over a decade of disputes with the New York City Housing Authority. Because the plot had once supported a public school, the city retained ownership of the land, renting it out to Allan Reiver as part of a 1990 month-to-month lease agreement.

A City Hall spokesperson told Hyperallergic that the lawsuit was “a gross attempt to mislead the public and steal public land.”

“Haven Green will provide 100 percent deeply affordable senior housing in a neighborhood with limited affordable options,” the spokesperson continued, referencing the proposed housing complex, “while also offering over 15,000 square feet of public space, including a garden and public art.” 

The garden’s escalating attempts to stay put coincides with a growing senior housing crisis in New York City. According to a report by the nonprofit LiveOn NY released last July, more than 300,000 seniors are on the waiting list for affordable housing, marking a 50% increase since 2016. 

But Reiver told Hyperallergic in October that the city’s plan was pitting green space against affordable housing in what he called a “false choice.”

“I’ve been working day in and day out to get affordable housing in this neighborhood, just not at the expense of this [garden],” Reiver said. 

Reiver has proposed that the city redistribute the housing funds destined for the Elizabeth Street Garden plot to other sites slated for luxury housing development. The garden has identified alternative sites they said could create 705 units of affordable housing, as opposed to Haven Green’s 123 units, and leave the garden in place. 

If the city succeeds in taking over the garden, the lawyers wrote, the action would be “prejudicial to the honor” of Joseph Reiver. 

Though Allan Reiver had no formal artistic training, the lawsuit said, he was a self-taught artist who created a legitimate work of Outsider art. Before he intervened, the complaint reads, the lot was a “junkyard,” which lawyers compared to a blank canvas.

Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a nonprofit that supports landscape heritage stewards, told Hyperallergic his organization first recommended Elizabeth Street Garden seek VARA protection in 2019.

“It’s a very important work of Outsider art,” Birnbaum said. “There’s nothing like this … It is a destination, and it is an artistic expression that is unlike anything else in New York City and beyond.”

Most people know of the late Wayne Thiebaud as an Americana painter with a marked affection for confection, but a new exhibition opening next month at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco aims to capture the entirety of Thiebaud’s career as an artist, teacher, and, in his own words, an “obsessive thief.” From March 22 through August 17, Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art will unite the artist’s popular paintings of sumptuous candies, desserts, and more with influential works of art directly from his personal collection. It’s also billed as the first show to explore in-depth the artist’s “reinterpretations” of masterpieces by his artistic influences.

The exhibition highlights the intersection of the artist’s roles as an avid collector, lifelong learner, and educator at the Sacramento Junior College and the University of California, Davis. Approximately 60 of Thiebaud’s works across his six-decade career are included in the show, which will feature 132 pieces in total.

Through multiple loans from institutional and private collections as well as the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation (the exhibition’s biggest lender), the show began coming together in 2022 and the catalog was completed and printed in 2024.

Timothy Anglin Burgard, curator-in-charge of the American Art Department at Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), told Hyperallergic via email that Thiebaud collected original works by the likes of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Paul Cézanne, Giorgio Morandi, Richard Diebenkorn, and many others throughout his lifetime.

“Many of these works implicitly provided a counterpoint to modernism’s marginalization or rejection of artists deemed to be outdated, and explicitly served as sources of inspiration and challenge,” Burgard continued.

“Thiebaud’s art collection also enabled him to join an extended community of artists, both living and deceased, and to engage in a dialogue with their artworks,” Burgard said, adding that the artist’s copies allowed him to channel the methods and motivations of those before him.

Thiebaud’s 2000 copy of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884” (1884–86) and other work lifting or conglomerating from the likes of Jacob van Hulsdonck, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edgar Degas, Edward Hopper, and painters of the Hudson River School will be displayed alongside printed renditions of the originals he explicitly references, outlining how the artist “steals” directly from European and American art history.

Emphasizing Thiebaud’s fervor for not just emulating Old Masters by embodying their processes but also passing along his and his predecessors’ knowledge to generations of artists to come, Burgard shared a quote attributed to the artist:

“I think we have a misconception about where painting comes from. It’s not a hermetic activity. It doesn’t come from an individual. It’s a communal, commemorative, very layered activity that comes from groups of people. If you think of painting’s history, you find these enclaves of people who worked together, who helped each other, who depended on each other. You need confrontation, you need critical interrogation.”

Thiebaud maintained his studio practice up until his death in 2021 at the age of 101.

It’s 31 degrees outside, but the wind makes it feel like 19. When I arrived at the New York Supreme Court Criminal Term at 100 Centre Street around 10am last Friday, watercolor pencils and sketch paper in hand, there weren’t many people there except for a handful of journalists wielding cameras. I found this relatively sparse turnout strange until I overheard a woman say that they had started lining up at 5am and were already inside the courthouse. I hurried across the street, surprised at how quickly I got through security, camera in tow ready to take pictures of the scene I would find outside after the hearing — people hoisting hand-painted signs, prayer-style cards of “Saint Luigi,” and bright-green plushies of Mario’s twin brother in the Nintendo franchise.

My heart raced as I pushed the elevator button to the 15th floor. A Hyperallergic accreditation allowed me to slip past the metal police barricades into the press area, where two lines had formed, one for photographers and another for reporters. A sign outside the courtroom door read “Part 96.” My nerves were taking a toll on me, and I sensed that the other journalists could tell it was my first rodeo. But I was in, and there was no turning back.

Lining the hallway, people sitting on the cold ground typed away on their computers. The olive-green floor stretched for what seemed like miles, and a strawberry-blond cop paced back and forth, ready to assert his dominance at the first opportunity. I hadn’t noticed the crowd gathered at the end of the marble hall: Luigi Mangione supporters, mainly women aged 18 to 35, some donning the accused UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter’s signature burgundy court sweater.

My attention shifts back to the press line when I hear someone in the pool of photographers crying hysterically and insisting they get the space to take photographs. I found myself sympathizing with them — everyone wants “the shot,” and this work is clearly not for the faint of heart. I overheard someone say that Chelsea Manning was among the crowd of supporters; 20 minutes later, I saw her enter the restroom as members of the press yelled her name for a photo. The hallway is getting hotter by the minute, the crowd of crammed bodies like bees generating heat in a hive. Only a few more minutes until they’re supposed to let us into the courtroom.

It’s now 1:16pm. Photographers tap their fingers on their cameras, tapping on the metal barricades. I can’t tell whether it’s boredom or, if they, like me, feel like their heart might jump out of their chest. The heat is becoming overwhelming, and I try hard not to focus on my dipping blood sugar after skipping breakfast and discarding my tea prematurely. 1:44pm: Luigi’s lawyer, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, enters the 15th floor, and walks past the increasingly eager supporters, who cheer for her as she marches down the long hallway and past the press. Cameras flash, and reporters yell out seemingly random questions, none of which she answers. Her face is soft, and a slight smile stretches across her face in mauve lipstick. She’s not much taller than me, but she radiates with the energy of someone over six feet.

We’re in now. The stress is far beyond anything I expected. Luigi’s lawyers are seated in the front; Karen paces the room. I spot the famous courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosenberg, who was given a seat in the jurors’ box. I find a seat in the last row, where my view is obstructed by police and reporters, but I make a mental note of the space. Finally, after 15 minutes, Luigi enters the room. He’s shackled like the Joker in a Batman film, but his face looks like a marble sculpture you’d see at The Met.

I tremble as I pull out my pencils and attempt a sketch as fast as possible. Before heading out that morning, I had contemplated bringing a copy of my aunt’s pending UnitedHealthcare medical bills as a canvas to draw on, but I decided against it — I didn’t want any unnecessary attention drawn to me — and resorted to paper and a few dollar bills. 

A towering female cop obscures my view, leaving me with just a glimpse of Luigi’s shoulder and a sliver of the bulletproof vest he was sporting. I scribbled lines across sheets of paper, trying to find my composition. Luigi’s lawyer asks for them to remove the shackles, arguing that her client poses no threat, but the judge denies the request “for the safety of those in the room.” Karen Agnifilo is like a bull. When it’s her turn to speak, she seizes the opportunity to express her frustration at a new HBO documentary, Who is Luigi Mangione, which she claims contains information she still had not accessed herself. “They paid actors to read his alleged journal. They didn’t even sound like him,” she argued. The judge stopped her before she could go any further.

And then the screams began. I could hear what sounded like hundreds of Luigi supporters screaming outside the courtroom: “Free Luigi!,” they whooped and hollered. 

Then, just like that, it was over — 20 minutes max. He got up and walked out the same way he came in. Everyone seemed to absorb every inch of his physical existence. I hear a woman behind me say: “He smiled at me, did you see?! He smiled at me!” Luigi never smiled at anyone.

The Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, has terminated an exhibition of works by Afro-Latino, Caribbean, and African American artists after the Trump administration allegedly withdrew the show’s funding amid crackdowns on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. 

Before The Americas, curated by Cheryl D. Edwards and four years in the making, was slated to open on March 21 and set to include 40 works exploring migration, colonial challenges, and interconnectivity in the African diaspora in the Americas. These included works by the late Alonzo Davis, who founded one of the first Black-owned contemporary art galleries in the United States, and Mexican-American sculptor Elizabeth Catlett. 

“This would have been the first show that they would have had this many African American artists in their galleries at one time,” Edwards told Hyperallergic. 

Edwards, who was commissioned to curate the show in 2021, told Hyperallergic that on February 10 museum leadership informed her that the Trump administration had labeled the exhibition as a “DEI program and event” and withdrawn funding for the show earmarked by the Biden administration. 

The Art Museum of the Americas, which holds a collection of more than 2,000 items related to Latin American and Caribbean art, is an arm of the Organization of American States (OAS), a diplomatic body focusing on human rights, democracy, security, and development in the Western Hemisphere. The United States is one of 34 nations that belong to the organization.

The Trump administration has not yet appointed a new head of the US Mission to the OAS, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued updated missions and priorities for its participation in diplomacy including “eliminating our focus on political and cultural causes that are divisive at home and deeply unpopular abroad.”

When Edwards offered to fundraise for the show through private donors, she said, the museum declined. 

“This is not a fundraising issue,” Edwards told Hyperallergic. “This is an issue of silencing DEI visual voices … and discrimination based upon race, caste, and class.” 

According to internal emails reviewed by Hyperallergic, the US government was the primary sponsor of the exhibition. As of Monday, February 24, the museum lists no upcoming exhibitions in 2025 on its website.

The OAS, US Mission to the OAS, and the Art Museum of the Americas have not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Edwards said that she was designing the exhibition catalogue when she was informed that the exhibition was “terminated and defunded by the current administration of the United States Government and excluded and labeled as a DEI program and event.”

“This is exactly what I was told,” Edwards noted. 

Artist and gallerist Michelle Talibah, whose painting “One” (1979) was part of the show, told Hyperallergic that the exhibition’s cancelation was an “abrupt dismissal” of the museum’s mission to promote cultural exchange and a “shocking affront” to the integrity of the museum and OAS.

“At a time when institutions of cultural and historical significance are facing systemic dismantling, we are also witnessing the erosion of free expression and artistic freedom: casualties of forces determined to distort narratives and manipulate an uncertain future,” Talibah said.

Edwards said her exhibition was connected to the OAS’s 2016 Plan of Action for the Decade for Persons of African Descent in the Americas resolution, which outlines activities to “promote awareness of the situation of people of African descent in the Americas.” In the plan, the resolution encourages the Art Museum of the Americas to showcase artworks by artists of African descent. 

“This is an exhibition of unification,” mixed-media artist Claudia “Aziza” Gibson-Hunter, whose painting “You Got to Give Up the Stuff that Weighs You Down” (2022) was slated to be included in the show, told Hyperallergic over email. 

“With the centuries of erasure, there are still aspects of the ‘before’ that seep through to the work of artists of African descent even today,” Gibson-Hunter said. “To have this exhibition censored [is] another vicious cultural act that future generations may attempt to deny because it might prick some sense of guilt.”

“The termination of this exhibition raises broader concerns about artistic freedom and oppression,” another participating artist who requested to be identified anonymously, citing credible immigration concerns, told Hyperallergic. 

“To what lengths will this government go to silence POC, Black Trans, and Queer voices? Diversity, equity, and inclusion are not threats; they are fundamental values that enrich, acknowledge, and embrace the reality that we live in a society that is made up of many different people,” the artist said. 

Edwards said she is hoping to show the exhibition at an alternative location later this year. 

One of the greatest gifts an artist can give the viewer is a sense of the artist as a person — their lives, loves, losses, and the mundane details that amount to their worlds. This is a great moment for getting to know your artist, with shows featuring the always impressive Sylvia Sleigh, whose friends and lovers literally bared all, as well as the beautifully personal mixed media works of Paul Gardère, the celebrated visual and textual world of Christine Sun Kim, and more.  —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor

Kenneth Tam: The Medallion

Bridget Donahue, 99 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through March 8

“The message is clear — tides of technology wielded for personal enrichment rather than societal improvement will obliterate us with cold ease.” —Lisa Yin Zhang

Read the full review here.

Rudy Burckhardt: A Painting Exhibition

Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 11 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through March 8

“Through his directness, modesty, and scrupulous attention to detail, Burckhardt’s representation of the oddness of the ordinary is unrivaled.” —John Yau

Read the full review here.

Sylvia Sleigh: Every leaf is precious

Ortuzar gallery, 5 White Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through April 5

“There’s something wonderful about Sleigh’s paintings that feels like showing up to a nudist colony where people are fine letting it all hang out.” —Hrag Vartanian

Read the full review here.

Paul Gardère: Vantage Points

Stuyvesant-Fish House, 21 Stuyvesant Street, East Village, Manhattan
Through June 6

“Gardère’s techniques and materials merge with his subject matter to sketch out a portrait of his life” —NH

Read the full review here.

Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night

Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, West Village, Manhattan
Through July 6

“Kim revels in translation not just between languages or systems of notation, but between concepts and feelings or experiences.” —LYZ

Read the full review here.

The effect of nude men on canvas must’ve been particularly titillating to American audiences of more than 50 years ago. It offered them a glimpse at what had previously been a forbidden pleasure — looking at the naked bodies of contemporary men. Over half a century later, the internet has flooded our minds with countless pics of dicks, chests, testicles, buttholes, hairy limbs, and other symbols of masculinity, if not men. Inevitably, Sylvia Sleigh’s canvases come across differently. 

This small survey of the Welsh-American artist lingers on her best known portraits of men from the 1960s and ’70s, presenting us with images of attractive people, often with voluminous hair on their heads and bodies, who leisurely lounge for the viewer.

In an early painting from her life in the UK, “At the Cafe” (1950), Sleigh depicts herself with her partner, critic and curator Lawrence Alloway, looking at the audience with an air of anxiety that dissipates in later work. The small canvas demonstrates her affinity with other British artists of her generation, including Lucien Freud, who created similarly psychological portraits that made the subjects look introspective. 

By the time of her better known nude male paintings, like the large “Allan Robinson” (1968), her moody style gives way to a more supple line that draws the subject, who is also an artist, at ease, as he stares at us with a neutral expression that seems to give us permission to explore his body with our gaze.

Many of the paintings clearly evoke older Old Master poses, such as “Triple Portrait of Philip [Golub]” (1971), which captures the son of Nancy Spero and Leon Golub in the manner of Anthony Van Dyck’s “Triple Portrait of Charles I” (1635–36). Using a royal style for a young muse, Sleigh upends the expectations of traditional portraiture, much as she does by swapping men for women in traditional compositions. In “Court of Pan (After Luca Signorelli)” (1973), she recreates a Renaissance fresco that was destroyed in World War II, and inserts her husband, the young Golub, and others in a cast of characters that include a court of musicians, the god Pan, and even a Medici. 

Musician Paul Rosano, one of Sleigh’s regular muses, appears in a number of these paintings, while artist Felicity Rainnie, one of the nude women on display, is in two works, one of which shows her fully clothed with Rosano. 

Overall, the impact of each work is uneven. Some, like “Double Image: Paul Rosano” (1974), look rich in their associations and meaning, while others, like the later work  “Sean Pratt as Dorante from ‘The Game of Love and Chance’” (1996) is less enticing, offering us a more conventional artwork without the experimentation we find elsewhere. 

Everywhere, you’ll notice that while the figures may seem at first to be the expected focal points of her compositions, the backgrounds often reveal the real sophistication of her paintings. In “Felicity Rainnie Reclining” (1972), the background practically overpowers the nude, creating a sense of tension that works, while in “October: Felicity Rainnie and Paul Rosano” (1974), the figures are no competition for the riot of color and line behind them, so much so that I wished they got out of the way.

Sleigh played with our expectations of the nude by shifting who we expect the subjects to be, and peopling her paintings with her immediate circles of friends and peers. She blurs the line between private and public, offering up her spouse in moments of vulnerability, but also fellow artists, colleagues, and the children of friends. We are often told by recent art history that her works are important because she treated male and female forms in a similar way, but what undergirds her paintings, as seen here, is a sense of trust and respect for her subjects, who are named and elevated into art history. She doesn’t idealize these people, preferring to allow their suntan lines, veiny pricks, or distinctive hair to appear with the same care as their eyes and limbs. For her, challenging what came before means letting those we adore be their glorious selves. There’s something wonderful about these paintings that feels like showing up to a nudist colony where people are fine letting it all hang out. 

Sylvia Sleigh: Every leaf is precious continues at Ortuzar gallery (5 White Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through April 5. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

Street artist Winston Tseng was behind an anti-Elon Musk ad that led to a viral frenzy when it was installed various in sidewalk ad spaces within a mile of the White House two weeks ago. The ad, satirically attributed to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), read “Help Eliminate Elon” and featured a large red X crossing over an illustration of Musk doing the Nazi salute.

“In the spirit of transparency, I should disclose that USAID paid me $69M (in condoms) for this ad,” Tseng said in an email to Hyperallergic, riffing on Musk’s misunderstanding of the US’s provisions for international HIV prevention and treatment.

Tseng’s use of the USAID logo was apparently convincing enough for thousands online to chime in, including North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, who shared a video of himself in front of the fake ad in a “government advertising box” at 400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, lambasting it for “targeting individuals” and saying “it better not be funded by [USAID] or endorsed by them!”

“The president is asking serious questions about where taxpayer dollars are going, and whether or not it’s the best and highest use,” Tillis continued, lauding Musk and Trump for “doing right by those taxpayers.”

Tillis’s post amassed over 74,000 likes on X and prompted some 6,000 user comments ranging from concern for Musk’s safety and calling for legal action to lambasting the ad as another example of “wasting our money.”

Tillis’s response was nothing out of the ordinary for Tseng, who noted that he thinks “most of the outrage is performative, and people don’t actually care once they realize it’s just a random artist’s work.”

“They’d rather pretend it’s from ‘the evil Democrats’ or ‘the deep state,'” he continued. “Right-wing influencers and media outlets tend to use my work to engagement farm, and that’s all Senator Tillis is trying to do, too. My work tends to attract that increased enthusiasm and rage.”

The artist has a long history of parody ad campaigns and wheatpastings satirizing current events and societal issues. No entity is off-limits, either — he’s used luxury and retail brands, the Christian church, sports teams, Netflix, Airbnb, BlueSky, McDonald’s, PornHub, Planned Parenthood, Target, and even Sesame Street as vehicles for his political punchlines.

“The ad takeovers in commercial spaces usually only last a few days or so, but there have been some that have stayed up for weeks somehow,” Tseng explained. “Wheatpasted ones can be even shorter lived, generally less than a day.”

All of that to say, not only has the ad been removed from the 400 Massachusetts Avenue NW spot, but the entire structure itself is now gone.

RIDGEFIELD, Connecticut — A Garden of Promise and Dissent at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum blooms with ironic vitality while the world outside is ensconced in snow. In it, 21 artists explore gardens through the lenses of material and politics, resulting in a mélange of paintings, sculptures, and installations examining the perpetual cycle of life and death. Made of everything from paint, porcelain, fabric, and living plants to metallurgy and video technology, these works frame gardens as a site of nurture and control, tradition and innovation. 

Some of the works on view mirror the asymmetry in our human-nature relationship, interrupting the unconscious and wayward dynamic between civilization and Mother Earth. Evoking the brutality of human intervention, for instance, Athena LaTocha (Hunkpapa Lakota and Ojibwe) overlays lead and steel sheet metal on an ink-washed conifer photograph in “Before the Sun Sets” (2024). Similarly, Jill Magid’s “A Model for Chrysanthemum Stem Elongation where y is 52” (2023) depicts a neon yellow blossom atop a long stem, pointing at how the flower industry harnesses evolution for profit.

These artists alter an architecture of power that positions maleness above nature, instead elevating and equating femininity with the natural world. In opposition to controlling the earth, “Nuwa (Gold)” (2023) by Cathy Lu is an anthropomorphic gold-painted, holey ceramic tube embedded with raisined grape vines, evoking a supplicant prostrating with hands pointed heavenwards in a reference to goddess feminism. Meg Webster maintains this enlightened directionality in “Solar Grow Room with Facing Seats” (2024), encouraging coupling among plants while commenting on how technology enables human disconnection from life itself.

Alina Bliumis’s Planned Parenthood (2023) series further explores natural reciprocity through a painted floral series set in matching velvet frames. Responding to Roe v. Wade’s reversal, she depicts nature’s abortion pills — from pomegranate and creeping cedars to acacia and savin flowers — as a pro-choice offering. Positioned physically outside the museum, “Perceived Happiness as the Ultimate Revenge” (2019) by Gracelee Lawrence is a fiberglass sculpture of a woman laid out on her stomach, personifying revenge body from the neck down while sporting an alien, kale leaf-like head with upward-reaching arms — suggesting she presents perfectly but feels vegetative.

If Lawrence’s figure suggests the cultivated female form, Rachelle Dang’s “Seedling Carrier” (2019) reveals the actual machinery of horticulture, via a wire-covered house that is painted white and set atop a natural wood pallet with milky clay seed pits strewn in and around it. The hapless ejaculation of pip seeds and the cage-like shroud over the house frame do a lot of work to critique the careless and prison-like experience of domesticated women. Equally abstract, “Buffalo Bird Woman” (2024) is Teresa Baker’s (Mandan/Hidatsa) pat topographic honoring of horticulture: In the bright blue Astroturf work, she outlines the shape of her grandmother’s garden with yarn and willow.

Even in their more playful approaches, these artists challenge our control of nature. Max Hooper Schneider’s electro-plated Dendrite Bonsai (2023) series transforms shrub assemblages — one like the hair of Rugrats‘s Cynthia, the other carrying six erect ears of corn — into artificial spectacles. Meanwhile, Brandon Ndife’s “Shade Tree” (2022/24) fossilizes leisure furniture — including a tree stump evoking the one in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree (1964) — into a monument to environmental loss, with both artists revealing how we reshape nature for our entertainment and comfort. 

The exhibition succeeds in presenting gardens as deeply contested spaces where human ambition meets natural law. Through diverse media and perspectives, these artists reveal how our relationship with nature mirrors broader social dynamics, particularly gender politics and environmental exploitation. From LaTocha’s metallic impositions to Lu’s devotional forms, from Lawrence’s hybrid figure to Dang’s hothouse critique, A Garden of Promise and Dissent fosters a rich colloquy about power, care, and resistance. In doing so, the show fills a critical lacuna in our understanding of gardens, revealing them not simply as ornamental spaces but as living laboratories where we experiment with tradition and progress, control and surrender, destruction and renewal.

A Garden of Promise and Dissent continues at the Aldrich Museum (258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Connecticut) through March 16. The exhibition was curated by Amy Smith-Stewart.

Editor’s Note: The writer’s travel between New York City and the museum was paid for by the museum.

In Universal Language, director Matthew Rankin transforms the environs of his native Winnipeg into a tight-knit Iranian hamlet. Advertisements and street signs appear in Persian script, and Farsi is the primary language spoken (although the government of Québec, nearby in the topsy-turvy geography of the film, still sternly insists on French). Townsfolk hawk wares from makeshift stalls set against Brutalist municipal blocks. Flocks of wild turkeys wander snowy streets. In one truly resplendent moment, glazed donuts mingle with brass samovars and beaded tablecloths at a candlelit Tim Horton’s (a doughnut chain started in Canada), tended to by a politely arch proprietress who seems straight out of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s beloved 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us.

No explanation is offered for this surreal backdrop, and it’s just one of the many quirks in Rankin’s world — including a mall atrium in which no one is allowed to stand for more than 10 seconds, and a forgotten briefcase left untouched for so long that it’s begun growing moss — from which several interconnected storylines slowly take form.

But the argot of the film is more than just a punchline. Farsi shapes Universal Language, imbuing it with a tone of deadpan earnestness that’s gamely shared among the large cast of mostly nonprofessional Iranian-Canadian actors. The Persian community of Rankin’s Winnipeg-Tehran hybrid is built like a closed circuit of mutual dependence and trust, and viewers will inevitably find themselves, to some degree, on the outside looking in.

Universal Language begins at an elementary school, where a strict and punishing instructor is teaching a French class. When one boy can’t see the board well enough to read a passage, the teacher threatens to dismiss class indefinitely until he is able to do so, setting off a series of incidents as two sympathetic classmates strive to solve the problem and set off a chain reaction of community concern, rarely explaining their motivations to adults. 

Rankin has insisted in interviews that his film is not political, which likely helped it reach theaters at a moment when distributors are notably wary of “controversial” projects. But Universal Language is so intent upon its worldbuilding that, sooner or later, the more profound implications take hold. Seeing familiar placenames in an ostensibly unfamiliar script is a reliably good gag, but it’s hard to forget that some White North Americans have long considered such realities an assault on their way of life. Like the United States, Canada is currently in the throes of Islamophobic violence and a conservative backlash that is blatantly xenophobic at its core. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently resigned after a wave of dissent, partially attributable to a housing affordability crisis many Canadians see as the result of over-lenient immigration.

Universal Language’s commentary on the psychic frailty of White Westerners today is telling — and vulnerably self-implicating on the part of its director. Rankin himself plays a minor character in the film, one of very few who is clearly of non-Iranian ancestry, though he speaks fluent Farsi just like everyone else. He’s the outsider in the movie, arriving belatedly by bus from Montréal, where he spent the past year producing Francophile government propaganda. Back in the city where he was born, Rankin’s character wanders aimlessly in search of his mother. He eventually finds her living with a young Iranian family whose patriarch, Massoud (co-writer Pirouz Nemati), seems like Matthew’s Persian doppelgänger. This metaphorical replacement becomes literal in the climax of the film when the two men switch bodies. Outsider becomes insider, and vice versa. After the switch, the characters recognize each other for the first time, not as competitive adversaries but as codependent equals. 

Though I don’t blame Rankin for his tight-lipped approach, it feels important to call Universal Language what it is: an absurdist comedy about the Great Replacement Theory. The white nationalist conspiracy has lately leaped from the depths of the internet straight into the Trump White House.

In Universal Language, Rankin wryly depicts the total realization of this racist fear, to glorious effect. Far from a fracturing of Canadian society, his film renders its Winipeggers more mutually invested in one another’s lives than any modern Western city could be. With a whole community coming together — knowingly or not, through the daisy chain of favors — to help buy a struggling student a new pair of glasses, and reunite a lost son, it’s a joyous depiction of emphatically unalienated people. Perhaps the universal language to which the title refers is neither Farsi nor French, but the acts of attentiveness and care we are clearly capable of showing one another, yet rarely afford to those we consider strangers. 

Universal Language (2024), directed by Matthew Rankin, is now screening in theaters.

Peruvian authorities said a person caused irreversible damage to a historical six-ton Inca stone in Cusco’s historic center early Tuesday morning, February 18. 

According to the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, the suspect carved fragments out of the 12-Angled Stone, a marvel of Inca architecture and a tourist attraction, in six visible places. The 12-Angle Stone lines the highly trafficked Hutan Rumiyoq Street, near the Andean city’s Plaza de Armas.

The alleged perpetrator is believed to be a Peruvian national. Authorities said he was under the influence of alcohol or drugs during the incident and in an altered state, and has since been arrested. 

Named for its polygonal shape consisting of 12 distinct angles, making it appear more like a puzzle piece than a geologic object, the stone supported the palace of the sixth Inca ruler, Inca Roca. Roca reigned from 1350–1380 and led efforts to expand the empire nearly two centuries before the Spanish conquest.

Presently, the diorite block is part of the foundation of the Archbishop’s Palace of Cusco and Museum of Religious Art. 

The 12-Angled Stone is part of an Inca architectural tradition of sturdy exterior walls that utilize precisely interlinking multi-ton blocks, modified only by other rocks or bronze instruments to fit perfectly together in an inward-sloping wall. 

Jorge Moya Coháguila, director of Cusco’s Decentralized Directorate of Culture, said in a press release that the agency will ask the prosecutor’s office to sentence the suspect to up to six years in prison, the maximum possible for an “attack on culture.” 

Local cultural authorities said in a press release that to prevent future damage to heritage sites in the city’s historic center, they will form a working group of representatives from the National Police of Peru, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and Cusco officials to create an action plan. 

In a press statement, Peru’s Ministry of Culture condemned the act of vandalism.

“We call on all citizens to join our cause in defense of these valuable assets and to denounce any act that threatens our cultural heritage,” the statement said, calling the 12-Angled Stone “ a “cultural and historical asset of enormous value to [Peru].”

The MFA Art Practice (AP) program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) approaches artmaking holistically: artists in the program are not defined or separated by medium or discipline. We view process as a kind of critical thinking.

MFA AP artists from diverse backgrounds engage in research-based practices and are encouraged to converse and collaborate across subject matters using a combination of traditional and non-traditional media, technologies, and techniques. The School of Visual Arts aims to create a global community of artists and cultural producers who look beyond a consensus-driven approach to how we define what’s important in contemporary art.

Each year, a carefully selected, small group of MFA candidates gathers at SVA’s NYC campus for three intensive summer residency periods. During these residencies, students work closely with a distinguished faculty of artists, designers, writers, critics, and curators.

Faculty include Angel Abreu, Xavier Acarin Weiland, Haseeb Ahmed, Robin Cembalest, Jeremy Cohan, Deanna Evans, Lia Gangitano, Beatrice Glow, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Katya Grokhovsky, Allison Hewitt Ward, Iviva Olenick, Phil Rabovsky, Stefan Saffer, Heather Schatz, Sarah G. Sharp, Jacquelyn Strycker, Keioui Keijuan Thomas, Nicolas Touron, TUG Collective, Andrew Woolbright, and Department Chair David A. Ross. Faculty member Miatta Kawinzi’s show “Numma Yah” at SmackMellon was named one of Hyperallergic’s Best New York City Art Shows of 2024.

Spots are limited and applications are considered on a rolling basis. Applicants must provide undergraduate transcripts (BFA, BA, BS, or international equivalent), a portfolio, a writing sample, a statement of purpose, and letters of recommendation.

Schedule a meeting today with an MFA Art Practice representative to learn more about the program and application process.

For more information, visit sva.edu.

Strewn about a dark room are objects that recall the wreckage of a plane. As I investigated the scene of the catastrophe, I saw cloth bags holding battered metal beams and headlights or, even more ominously, nothing at all, their mouths frozen open like gaping voids. Glowing forms resembling melted milk cartons provide the only light source. The beaded tan-and-black carpet, made of interlocking carseat covers, rattled and slid unnervingly underfoot, crunching like protesting snow. At the center of the disaster is something that recalls an impromptu streetside shrine composed of a lone shoe, a gold watch, a hanging Guanyin charm, and cast epoxy-resin molds of coffee cup lids illuminated like candles. Amid these items is a metal badge that reads “Licensed Taxicab.” 

Kenneth Tam’s exhibition The Medallion at Bridget Donahue takes up the devastation of those whose lives have been shattered by the plummeting value of the medallion, a permit to operate a taxi that is unique to New York City. Marketed by the Bloomberg administration as a way to “own a piece of New York,” these medallions seemed like a way to achieve the American Dream; more than half of those who scrimped, saved, and went into debt to attain them are immigrants. Once worth about $1 million each, rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft sent values careening; in 2021, they were worth around $80,000 apiece. 

On the far side of the room is the kind of wide-format screen that sits atop a taxicab. The title “Dissolved personal archive (2015–2024)” (2025) suggests that the images in this fast-moving slideshow are drawn from life — I spotted parks, galleries, domestic settings, even personal details like what I thought were backpacks branded with the Center for Art, Care, and Alliances logo — but a closer look reveals them as AI-generated. In each slide, the human figures disappear into Refik Anadol-esque plumes of digital vortices; one generated figure seemed almost to resist this disintegration, staggering a few steps before collapsing. The message is clear — tides of technology wielded for personal enrichment rather than societal improvement will obliterate us with cold ease. Nonetheless, the experience is unsettling.

The two-channel video “The Medallion” (2025), projected on opposite walls, continues this critique more elegiacally. In some shots, people contort their bodies as if swept into a slow-motion tragedy; in others, they are submerged, struggling toward a light-saturated surface, as if reaching for salvation. In this submarine context, the word “medallion” takes on an almost mystical connotation, suggesting sunken treasure or pirates’ booty. Of course, taxi medallions were just about as valuable, vaunted, and rare, until they weren’t. 

The projected video also features a close-up interview with a man who poured his savings into acquiring a medallion before they hemorrhaged in value. It kept him up at night, he said; the debt, the interest had him flipping from one side of the bed to the other. On the floor in front of the video is “Anxiety Clock” (2025), a patch of those carseat beads rigged up to glow red and flash between random numbers and nonsense symbols, like a hellish DMV where your number will never show.

Kenneth Tam: The Medallion continues at Bridget Donahue (99 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through March 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

The fan kicked on with a loud drone. A giant red hand flopped forebodingly over the tape meant to protect artworks from viewers, before lunging at me with an accusatory finger. As it filled with air — and while I caught my breath — the hand drifted calmly to a cream-colored rock, tapping it lightly, as if to say, That’s you. You’re dense as a rock. When it comes to Christine Sun Kim’s All Day All Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art, one could say that the word “viewer” falls a bit short. The exhibition is almost interactive in its potential to agitate (as exemplified by the admonishing finger of the above work, “ATTENTION,” 2022, by Kim and Thomas Mader). Through acts of translation that are alternatively hilarious, furious, and moving, Kim makes the air hum with the previously unperceived dimensions of ordinary things, from the physical pressure of bureaucratic power to the linework of movement to the music in everyday situations. 

Those of us who understand multiple languages are fluent in the ways one can bounce off another, revealing latent qualities in each other and the world writ large. Kim, who is Deaf, often translates between American Sign Language (ASL) and American English in her works, which include drawings, sculptures, videos, and paintings. In the video “Palm Reader” (2020), for instance, she and Mader, a conceptual artist and frequent collaborator of Kim’s, animate the signs for various words related to authority, such as “state,” “constitution,” and “rule.” They demonstrate that each takes the form of a fingerspelled letter tapped at the top of the palm and then the bottom, recalling the doubled action of an official stamping an inkpad and then a document. This manifests the way that governments and other authoritative agencies invisibly but forcefully exert bureaucratic pressure via physical acts. 

Indeed, Kim’s art not only foregrounds the ostensibly obvious but often under-considered fact that communication draws upon a vast universe of signs and formats, from facial expressions to graphs to etymologies — it also activates that knowledge in viewers. I found myself copying the motions of “Pointing” (2022), in which she translates the minute motion of fingers against the palm into black masses of charcoal that seem to bounce off the edges of the paper. These intimate drawings are blown up into massive wall murals, suggesting to me the kinetic energy of people in a room. As I turned, I saw the whirling eddies of exchanges between couples, friend groups, and strangers as they moved around each other on a crowded night.

Kim is particularly adept at the often disregarded communicative registers of humor and gossip. In the series Degrees of Deaf Rage (2018), for instance, she uses diagrams of mathematical angles to represent the feelings induced by various situations, punning on the words “right” and “reflex,” which describe both a type of angle and a kind of reaction. It’s the kind of rubric that is simple, flexible, relatable, and iterable, like a meme template or a slang term. Case in point: a visitor immediately picked up on it, telling her friend, “My obtuse rage would be traffic.” It helps that Kim is hilarious. I laughed aloud at the “locally sourced rock” listed in the medium line of the “ATTENTION” label, and in the pie chart “Why My Hearing Parents Sign” (2019), one of the wedges reads “SO THEY CAN TELL ME FAMILY SECRETS (THEY DON’T).”

Kim revels in translation not just between languages or systems of notation, but between concepts and feelings or experiences in works such as “How to Measure Loudness” and “How to Measure Quietness” (both 2014). In the former, she ranks “ASIAN FLUSH” above “SUBWAY ANNOUNCEMENT” but below “YELL AT TSA OFFICER,” suggesting a volume to physical discomfort. The latter work compares volume to psychological discomfort: She uses the musical notation “p,” denoting softness, to notate the silent treatment as “pppppppp” — the silence, one could say, is loud. 

But Kim also deals in the limits and failures of such systems. In “Competing Languages I” (2020), two bent musical notes-as-staffs are stacked atop and facing away from each other, with the titular words nested on opposite sides, irreconcilable. She also draws attention to the exhaustion of communicating with hearing people in a world we constructed (“she is relentlessly… dedicated to sharing her Deaf lived experience with others,” the exhibition text says). In “Degrees of Deaf Rage Within Educational Settings” (2018), she points to the Kafkaesque condition of not being able to enroll in a class because it’s not popular enough among Deaf students for the school to employ an interpreter. In “Degrees of My Deaf Rage in the Art World” (2018), she calls out the art world — with “Guggenheim accessibility manager” being a particular source of rage.

But Kim’s most emotionally effective communicative instrument might be her hand, which she uses to produce lyrical, agitated, playful, and bittersweet tones, always with a signature smudginess that suggests variation and distortion. I think of those strokes and smears as her “voice” in this particular medium, and it’s often quivering with rage and hurt. Feedback, we know from “How to Measure Loudness,” is one of the most obtrusive sounds; in “Feedback Aftermath” (2012), the four-line staff vibrates violently. Misspellings indicate this rage as well: In “Degrees of Institutional Deaf Rage” (2018), she fills in an angle with choppy, almost angry overlapping strokes, captioning it with the words “ORGANGIZER [sic] NOT WILLING TO COMPENSATE INTERPRETERS FOR SOCIAL/ DINNER HOURS” in jagged letters. 

I was struck by a peculiar quote from Kim embedded in the wall text beside the giant flopping hands of “ATTENTION.” The work, she says, is “trying to get one’s attention or bring attention to something forever.” Encoded in that odd and forceful word, “forever,” I sense fatigue and resignation — Sisyphus eternally pushing his fateful rock up a hill. But there’s also a plenitude, a boundless pool of potential, in the word. Indeed, from the inevitably messy translations and mistranslations between ASL and American English, between movement through space and the flat surface of the page, between the intensity of feeling and the simplicity of the smudged charcoal line, Kim’s work iterates — and reiterates, and reiterates — how wondrous, devastating, exhausting, not enough, too much, funny, and beautiful language can be. 

Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night continues at the Whitney Museum of American Art (99 Gansevoort Street, West Village, Manhattan) through July 6. The exhibition was curated by Jennie Goldstein, Pavel Pyś, Tom Finkelpearl, Rose Pallone, and Brandon Eng.

In a fortuitous coincidence, I arrived at Paul Gardère: Vantage Points just as the artist’s daughter was walking another visitor through the show. Catherine Gardère, who manages her late father’s estate, generously invited me to join. Just two days earlier, I was unfamiliar with both Paul Gardère and the Stuyvesant-Fish House, the historic home, now owned by Cooper Union, hosting the show; the artist’s work caught my eye online. Seeing his vibrant multimedia pieces with his daughter among the trappings of a home felt like a most fitting introduction.

Gardère, a Cooper Union alumnus, was born in Haiti in 1944 and moved to New York with his mother and brother as a teenager. His works deftly combine iconography and symbolism from multiple cultures. The resulting tension is not just between influences from Haiti and United States, but also between Gardère’s Catholic, Francophone background in Haiti (threatened by autocrat François Duvalier’s bloody regime, prompting the Gardère family to leave the country) in contrast with Haitian traditions and art separate from French colonization. “Triplex Horizon” (1998), a commanding mixed-media work flanked by two semi-abstract blue paintings (the show’s two earliest pieces), holds these cultural elements in an uneasy balance: A reproduction of “Shipwreck” (1965) by Haitian artist Rigaud Benoit is torn into multiple pieces and paired with a small recreation of a Monet painting, along with photographs of the US coastline. The dominant colors — red and glittery blue — reflect the flags of Haiti, France, and the United States, yet each country’s imagery is isolated from the others, and Haiti’s is literally ripped apart.

What makes Vantage Points so distinctive, and poignant, is Gardère’s personal touch. His departure from both the classical, European-influenced Haitian painting that he took up after graduate school and the American Modernism of professors including Robert Morris and John McCracken led him toward a mixed-media and, at times, maximalist aesthetic. But nothing in the show is visually overwhelming. Instead, his techniques and materials merge with his subject matter to sketch out a portrait of his life; even when Gardère is commenting on topics as weighty as colonialism and racism, the sense of an individual in the studio, with a singular history and a daily routine, lingers. In “Rowing to Giverny” (1999) and “Le Pont” (1995), views of Monet’s famous garden in Giverny, France, are inspired by the artist’s 1993 residency at the Fondation Claude Monet, but the landscapes are not pure Monet — a bit of Haiti is mixed in. The shimmering mud surrounding the painting in “Le Pont” makes this work — which hung for decades in Gardère’s studio — about the realities and textures of place, nature as a life-sustaining entity, not an object to be tamed in the name of art.

In this way, Gardère’s life is contained in each of his works. And through them, he invites his audience into a meaningful and personable dialogue, just as his daughter did in sharing the stories of her father’s art.

Paul Gardère: Vantage Points continues at the Stuyvesant-Fish House (21 Stuyvesant Street, East Village, Manhattan) through June 6. The exhibition was presented courtesy of the Estate of Paul Gardère with coordination by Cooper Union School of Art Dean Adriana Farmiga and Assistant Dean Yuri Masny.

Kingdom of Cats at Gagosian’s small uptown outpost on Park Avenue transports visitors into a serene, timeless realm where nature, craft, and culture merge. Gnarled, winding trees teem with surprises: snakes slither around their trunks, fruits dangle, and cats appear as playful presences. These felines — perched among trees, standing tall as independent ceramic figures, or depicted in the paintings on the walls — infuse the space with a quiet vitality, bridging the mystical and the everyday. 

These beguiling works are by Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, known professionally as Setsuko. Born in 1942, the artist hails from a distinguished Samurai family with roots in Kyushu and Kyoto, Japan. At the age of 20, she met the painter Balthus, whom she married five years later; with him, she moved to Rome and then Switzerland. Her work seamlessly traverses Japanese and European cultural and artistic traditions. Her ceramic sculptures of trees, foliage, and animals, such as “Le serpent et la vigne” (2024), blend the intricate textures and organic forms of Edo-period Japanese art with a European approach to representation that prioritizes permanence and solidity. Tree-like sculptures, chandeliers, and candelabra harken back to the Japanese Shinto religion, in which trees are sacred objects of worship, while her sensitivity to the subject matter imbues her work with pathos. 

Cats lurk and lounge in every corner of the exhibition, Setsuko’s take on the supernatural felines in Japanese mythology. A ceramic one coated in a white enamel glaze and adorned with a double gold chain and a large heart medallion sits elegantly on the gallery’s front desk (“Le grand chat au médaillon,” 2024), evoking the maneki-neko, a cat that greets visitors with a raised paw. “Le chat et la vie” (2024), a large, impressive bronze sculpture of a circular fig tree, symbolizes the circle of life; a cat resting serenely atop a branch brings together the ephemeral and eternal. In Japanese mythology, cats take on many roles. From the shape-shifting bakeneko to the corpse-stealing kasha, they are often portrayed in a nefarious light. While Setsuko’s cats pay homage to this deep cultural history, they lounge peacefully or gaze outward as understated protectors, exuding a sense of calm and untroubled ease.

Setsuko’s approach to sculpture is deeply tied to materiality, balancing fragility and endurance through her distinctive techniques. She often works with dark terracotta, layering it with white enamel glazes to create a luminous, almost ethereal surface — heightening the interplay between surface and depth, rawness and refinement, and the contrast between permanence and transience, which extends to her bronze works incorporating imagery from nature. Her paintings of still lifes and fantasy scenes, which hold equal weight in the exhibition, reflect the hushed tonalities of Morandi, the bold clarity of Matisse, and the distilled elegance of Japanese woodblock prints, and echo the quiet resonance of her sculptures. Some are done directly onto paint palettes, including an imaginative portrait of a woman composed of flowers and butterflies. 

Across these media, Setusko embraces the tensions that structure our lives, shaping forms that, much like nature itself, are in constant dialogue with time.

Setsuko: Kingdom of Cats continues at Gagosian (821 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through March 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

Richard Flood, who served as chief curator of Manhattan’s New Museum for five years, died on Sunday, February 16, at the age of 81. The news of his passing was announced by the museum.

“Richard had a distinguished career as a gifted curator and critic and was beloved by many,” New Museum Director Lisa Phillips told Hyperallergic. “He was one of a kind: curious, funny, and extremely well-read. He had a keen eye and a sharp wit. We loved him as a colleague and friend, and he will be dearly missed.”

Flood joined the New Museum in 2005 as chief curator and became director of special projects and curator at large in 2010 before retiring in 2019. Previously, Flood had spent nine years as chief curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and worked as managing editor of Artforum, director of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, and curator at MoMA PS1. In 2017, he published a collection of essays from his 40-year career as a writer and critic, titled Richard Flood: Notes From The Playground. 

His first group exhibition at the Walker Art Center was “Brilliant!” New Art from London, a survey of 22 emerging British artists that was celebrated by the Independent as a highlight of the 1995 art season.

Flood was not always known for his forward-thinking views on contemporary art, however, notably making headlines for his criticism of online arts journalism during a 2010 panel at the Portland Art Museum.

In 2007, Flood curated the New Museum’s inaugural show at its 235 Bowery location, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, along with Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman, featuring 80 contemporary artworks exploring the parallel practices of sculpture and collage. He would go on to curate numerous other exhibitions during his tenure at the museum, including Double Album: Daniel Guzman and Stephen Shearer (2008), featuring works that tackled rock culture and self-portraiture; Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other (2010), which examined the artist’s contributions to Brazilian Conceptualism; and The Last Newspaper (2010–2011), with works incorporating newspapers from as early as the 1960s. 

Fellow curator and mentee Corinne Erni, who worked with Flood at the New Museum from 2010 to 2015, told Hyperallergic that Flood’s passing is “a big loss to the art community.” 

“Endlessly curious, Richard was a brilliant curator and writer, and an unconventional thinker with a great sense of humor,” said Erni, now chief curator of Art and Education at the Parrish Art Museum in Long Island.

Flood was a founding member of the New Museum’s IdeasCity, a free public initiative launched in 2011 that brought together artists, environmental activists, and poets over a series of festivals in New York City and New Orleans. 

“For me, the biggest deal is making sure that the younger generation gets involved in positive ways and that somebody is helping them,” Flood said in a 2021 interview with the Creative Process podcast. 

Flood also contributed to the establishment of the International Leadership Council, a global ambassador program that supports the New Museum’s programs and exhibitions.
“We shared a tremendous excitement about bringing together creatives from different disciplines in conferences, public art commissions, and street festivals to generate new networks, synergies, and propositions for urban living in New York, Istanbul, and São Paulo,” Erni said. “Richard will live on in all of those who participated.”

LOS ANGELES — Yesterday, I bypassed Frieze’s VIP opening and headed to two of the city’s alternative art fairs instead: the Post-Fair and the Other Art Fair. As the former’s name suggests, the new kid on the fair block addresses the exclusivity and privatization of typical art fairs by offering low-cost entry while hosting its 29 galleries and project spaces in Santa Monica’s repurposed Art Deco-style post office. Later in the day, the Other Art Fair opened for its 13th edition in Los Angeles, presenting work by 140 independent artists who took center stage and engaged with visitors who could purchase pieces directly. Refreshingly, the only white cubes to be found were floating in craft cocktails.

At Post-Fair, galleries occupied walls along the space’s cavernous wooden corridors. At the booth of PPOW, artist Harry Gould Harvey IV completed a hero’s journey with four new large-scale works on view. Harvey transforms simple materials — matte board and found wood from abandoned mansions — into ritual objects meant to translate esoteric spiritual literature into sources of personal reflection. I was particularly drawn to “Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear To Tread” (2025), which Harvey explained has a direct tie to Los Angeles. On the work’s righthand side, he included a Xerox transfer of late artist Wallace Berman’s “Untitled” (c. 1967), a grid of photos of a hand holding a transistor radio superimposed with symbolical mass-media images. Harvey’s tribute to the pivotal West Coast artist takes the form of a tombstone meant to imbue the work with his positive spirit.

Visitors circled Dylan Spaysky’s three-dimensional hanging works at Good Weather gallery’s presentation, admiring their multiple layers of framed mirrors backlit by night lights with exposed extension cords. Spaysky draws inspiration from cel animation, a technique popularized by Walt Disney animators in the 1930s and a callback to Los Angeles’s film history. Each mirror is embossed with overlapping characters or sets from these early films, reconsidering their contextual and literal construction. Look closely at “1961 mirror” (2025), and you might spot Pongo and Perdita from the animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians — released in the artwork’s titular year.

Meanwhile, hanging from the walls and adorning the floors at Harlesden High Street were Angela Anh Nguyen’s gun-tufted textiles. The LA-based artist uses tufting — which she coincidentally learned through YouTube tutorials — to contemplate the reflexive nature of American culture wars exacerbated by online media. “I’ve been reading a lot of theory lately” (2023), for one, amusingly depicts a figure having lost a battle to a fallen bookcase awash in titles such as Das Kapital by Karl Marx, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, and A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion. As I meandered through the rest of the presentations, the atmosphere was cheerful and curious, aided by the long stretches of empty space that allowed for breathing room between the art (and the visitors). 

After a rare traffic-free drive back from Santa Monica, I geared up for the opening night of the Other Art Fair in Atwater Village. I had lovely conversations with several artists at the humming fair, including Eden Miller, who debuted paintings of liminal, dreamlike scenes with seraphim taking the shape of blue-toned pelicans and winged fish. Down the hall, I encountered Jess Lin’s works exploring her Taiwanese-American identity as an expat who grew up abroad. Her newer paintings, among them “Marina Martinis” and “Taroko Bao” (both 2024), unexpectedly combine childhood foods with Singaporean and Taiwanese cityscapes to create surreal yet delicious compositions. 

In addition to the artist booths, the front room featured a two-person show: In the Land of Gods and Monsters, curated by Feia Studio’s Thomas Martinez Pilnik and Jake Cavallo, who recently raised money for artists impacted by the January wildfires. Anna Marie Tendler, author of Men Have Called Her Crazy (2024), also held pop-up portrait photography sessions, while local artist Judy Baca debuted a mural titled “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” (2025) and artist STVNDID’s “The Play Pen” encouraged visitors to paint in an interactive space. 

Both the Other Art Fair and Post-Fair are billed as “alternative” shows — another option, perhaps less stodgy, outside of the blue-chip circuit. However you choose to label them, though, these fairs shared an air of lively jubilation as community members came together to support the real stars of the show: artists.

Accused UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson shooter Luigi Mangione appeared for a brief hearing at a Manhattan court today, February 21, for the first time since his December arraignment. The Ivy League graduate’s mug, embraced by many as a symbol of resistance against all that is wrong with America’s healthcare system, was high-profile courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosenberg’s latest assignment.

Since the last time the public saw Mangione’s now familiar face, collective hysteria over the suspected killer’s likeness has largely calmed down. But images from his lengthy, cinematic perp walk, attended by New York City Mayor Eric Adams, which some social media users compared to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, still linger. 

In Rosenberg’s courtroom sketches of today’s 2:15pm hearing at the New York Supreme Court, Mangione appears less like a holy figure and more like a working professional. Wearing a green sweater and bulletproof vest over a white-collared shirt, he appears markedly older than his age. Rosenberg’s Mangione is tilted to his left, gazing away from the presiding judge and his lawyer Karen Friedman Agnifilo and at some unknown person or object. Behind him, Agnifilo is portrayed arguing in front of the judge, who looks plainly ahead.

In court, Mangione’s lawyers argued that Altoona police violated his constitutional violations when they recovered evidence when they detained him at a McDonald’s restaurant in December. No trial date has been set. Mangione is facing federal charges that could land him on death row if convicted. He is in custody in Brooklyn.

“I am overwhelmed by — and grateful for –- everyone who has written to me to share their stories and express their support,” Mangione said in a written statement posted to his legal defense on February 14. “Powerfully, this support has transcended political, racial, and even class divisions, as mail has flooded MDC from across the country, and around the globe. While it is impossible for me to reply to most letters, please know that I read every one that I receive.”

On Thursday night, February 20, an autonomous group projected an enlarged version of what appears to be an AI-generated image of Mangione portrayed as the “patron saint of health care justice” onto a building in lower Manhattan. The image first went viral on social media in December when it was posted by the user @commiepsychologist1 on Threads. In yellow letters, the activists added “Free Luigi” to their projected image.

LOS ANGELES — As crowds descended on the Santa Monica Airport yesterday, February 20, for the opening of Frieze Los Angeles, casual bystanders might forget that just a month ago it wasn’t certain whether the international art fair would even be returning to LA this month. Wildfires had just swept through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, deeply impacting the city’s artistic communities. Despite some concerns over whether it was “too soon,” organizers decided to move forward as planned alongside four other LA fairs happening concurrently, with the notion that they were an opportunity for those affected to benefit financially — and for collectors and patrons to show their support. In an overt acknowledgement of these tensions, Frieze added the subtitle “A Celebration of Creative Resilience and Community Rebuilding,” in press material.

Still, the specter of the fires was impossible to ignore. It was immediately evident as I walked up to the tent, where I encountered Dominique Moody’s “NOMAD” (2015–2025), a hand-built trailer made from wood, steel, and scavenged parts, one of eight public artworks comprising the Frieze Projects x Art Production Fund initiative. Moody built the trailer at Zorthian Ranch, most of which burned down in the Eaton Fire, and had been visiting with the family of the late assemblage artist John Outterbridge the day before their homes were destroyed. After the Altadena blaze, she decided to dedicate the work to those “who lost everything” emphasizing the “impact on the larger arts community, in particular the Black Arts community that is so powerfully present there.”

Nearby, a group of artists had set up an installation unaffiliated with Frieze and composed of a picnic blanket on which sat burned and charred pieces of furniture. Kikesa Cosio, one of the artists, told me that “Here Lay a Home” would be the site of performances throughout the weekend to raise awareness of the destruction suffered by the Altadena community, which her family had called home since the 1920s.

Even inside the tent, works that had no connection to the recent tragedy took on new levels of meaning. Chris Burden’s “Nomadic Folly” (2001), originally created for the 2001 Istanbul Biennial and presented by Gagosian gallery, the structure made from rugs, pillows, and curtains resembles a communal desert oasis, highlighting the basic need for shelter. The decision to exhibit the piece in the current context could be read as thoughtful or exploitative, depending on your perspective.

And while Frieze took strides to acknowledge the disaster and support those affected — with 10% of ticket sales donated to the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund, a Black Trustee Alliance booth focused on Altadena’s Black community, and a “Galleries Together” fundraising initiative for international galleries who want to help — it was easy to overlook these overtures and get swept up in the fair’s sprawling maze of nearly 100 exhibitors.

“It feels like the status quo,” said one curator, who asked not to be identified by name. “Everything benefits victims of the wildfires, as it should, but it can be hard to tell.”

Though it may be strange to see the usual blue-chip art (Anish Kapoor curved mirrors, Alex Katz portraits) against the backdrop of all the loss and devastation, “business as usual” was kind of the point. The success of the fair, after all, is seen as a reflection of the resilience and adaptability of LA’s art world after the fires. Fearing low sales, some exhibitors would have preferred to postpone the event, with a handful dropping out altogether. Most, however, forged ahead, in hopes that collectors from across the US and abroad wouldn’t be scared off by news images that gave the impression to many non-Angelenos that all of LA was engulfed in flames.

On opening day, however, there was a palpable buzz and celebratory atmosphere amongst exhibitors and patrons alike. 

“People heard the call to come and support,” said Hammer Museum curator Erin Christovale. “This feels positive in the wake of the fires. What local artists need is money in their pockets.”

LA art dealer Sebastian Gladstone said he had sold seven of nine wood and bronze sculptures by Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, each priced between $10,000 and $40,000. In a shared booth with Stars gallery, one of the strongest presentations at the fair, Desir’s sculptures mixing Afro-futurism with a dark, gothic aesthetic were paired with visionary paintings by the late Mette Madsen.

Despite the early success, Gladstone remarked that he had not yet seen members of the upper echelons of collectors. Hollywood did make a showing — I spotted Balthazar Getty, James Franco, and Justine Bateman perusing and schmoozing, and Kid Cudi captivated by a glowing James Turrell piece at Pace Gallery’s booth.

Sam Parker of Parker Gallery noted that his early skepticism about turnout had dissipated. The previous evening, the gallery opened its new location in Hollywood with solo shows by Joe Minter and Daisy Sheff, welcoming hundreds of visitors. “It was crazy,” he exclaimed. “The energy is great.”

Tomokazu Matsuyama’s maximalist presentation at Almine Rech featured nine paintings, dazzling pomo pastiches that fused Western and Japanese styles and motifs, reflecting his own hybrid identity shaped by moving to the US from Japan as a child. “Resilience is something that is familiar in a Japanese context,” he told me, referring to the disasters, natural and man-made, that have affected the island nation. The historical and cultural multiplicity inherent in the works seemed to resonate, as nearly all the works, priced from $100,000 to $600,000, had sold, four to institutional collections, the gallery said in an email.

“It’s been an amazing morning — everyone’s talking about the energy, the sense of lightness. It’s an affirmation that we should be doing this, we should all be together,” said Trevyn McGowan of Southern Guild, making its debut at Frieze LA this year. The gallery expanded from their base in Cape Town, South Africa to Los Angeles last February. “I have not been able to move from the booth since we opened.”

The booth’s presentation featured 5 woman artists, four from South Africa and one from LA: photographic works by Zanele Muholi and Alex Hedison, textiles by Bonolo Kavula, towering ceramic and bronze sculptures by Zizipho Poswa, and paintings by Manyaku Mashilo, who also has a show at the LA space.

Although the space inside the tent can seem far removed from the fraught world outside, McGowan acknowledged the platform that the fair provided. “Since the election, I made it clear: Everything we do has to be done with purpose, toward equality and diversity. It can’t just be intrinsic, it has to be at the forefront of every decision we make.”

Countering the rapid rise of xenophobia, intolerance, and nationalism, expressions of solidarity and resistance could be seen elsewhere throughout the fair, notably in several Frieze Projects, including Jackie Amezquita’s “trazos de energía entre trayectorias fugaces (strokes of energy between impermanent traces)” (2025). The artist’s installation of lava rocks, soil, and corn masa that took up much of the soccer field, the focal point of which was a Mesoamerican pyramid. Nearby, Ozzie Juarez had recreated a South Central Swap Meet, inspired by those he grew up going to, and was giving away toys sourced from these actual gatherings and repackaged. 

“Are these from the homies?!” a woman in a sharp suit excitedly exclaimed, picking up a small figurine of one of the beloved Chicano/Latino characters.

Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez, whose I.C.E. SCREAM (2025) series of neon-hued resin paletas, or ice pops, relabels the immigration and customs enforcement agency as “U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement,” took home the fair’s 2025 Impact Prize.

As part of her AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides) project, Tanya Aguiñiga designed a fruit cart where she and her sister Karla Aguiñiga are showing a ceramic installation of erotic fruit sculptures, Frutas Coquetas (Sexy Fruit) (2025), created by artists in a program for refugees and asylum seekers. Despite their prominent location inside the tent for the first time, and the crowds surrounding the cart, Aguiñiga noted the disconnect between the fair’s typical audience and her community-based art practice. 

“I’m OK not being for everybody,” Aguiñiga said matter-of-factly, standing in front of her display of suggestive pears, phallic bananas, and other frisky fruit. “People are afraid to take stances on things that don’t relate to their own lives, when it all relates to all of us.”

Amid biting winds and blustering streaks of snow, a group of autonomous activists projected a large and saintly illustration of accused UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione on a Lower Manhattan building Thursday evening, February 20, calling for a fair trial ahead of Mangione’s court appearance on Friday afternoon.

Having pled not guilty to 11 state charges of murder and terrorism days after his extradition to New York late last December, Mangione is set to appear in state court today for what should be a routine status check on the case.

Emblazoned in the center of the enormous projection at the intersection of Canal and Lafayette Streets, the words “Free Luigi” have been chanted, inscribed, grafittied, meme’d, and commercialized worldwide. Prior to Mangione’s arrest in Altoona, Pennsylvania, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s shooting ignited fervent conversations about exorbitant medical care costs, the exasperation and desperation around denied claims, and the ethics of health insurance companies determining what constitutes necessary patient care.

At 26 years old, Mangione himself has become a celebrity suspect upon his arrest and time in custody. His Pennsylvania mugshot was juxtaposed with hundreds of photos from his college days, time living in Hawaiʻi, and international travels in memes, thirst posts, and think pieces, some likening him to a Christian saint or even Jesus himself, as in the very image used in yesterday’s projection.

Photos from Mangione’s December 19 perp walk in New York City exploded in popularity online as the compositions and color schemes further likened Mangione to a Christ-like being from Medieval or Renaissance art history. During his December 23 court appearance, Mangione’s attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo blasted the procedure, claiming her client “was on display for everyone to see in the biggest staged perp walk I’ve ever seen in my career.”

Friedman Agnifilo called attention to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s decision to attend the perp walk, citing his earlier statement to the press: “I want to look him in the eye and state that ‘you carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city that this, the people of New York, love.'”

“The mayor should know more than anyone of the presumption of innocence that he too is afforded when dealing with his own issues,” Friedman Agnifilo argued, claiming that the public attention and assumption of Mangione’s guilt could impact her client’s right to a fair trial.

Mangione has not entered a plea on any federal charges at this stage.

A Mexico City exhibition of paintings portraying sexualized and queer Christian priests and nuns has elicited fervent complaints from religious groups and right-wing figures who have held protests at the museum for over a week.

Artist Fabián Cháirez’s exhibition La venida del Señor (The coming of the Lord) opened on February 5 at the Academia de San Carlos Centro Historico, a building affiliated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. Consistent with the artist’s practice of entwining sexual diversity and subversions of traditional gender roles in retellings of Mexican history and Christianity, the series of nine paintings dating from 2018 to 2023 show consecrated women and men in suggestive poses.

“It’s an exercise in which I make a comparison between religious ecstasy and sexual ecstasy, two things that would appear to be opposites but actually have more in common,” Cháirez told Hyperallergic in Spanish over WhatsApp.  

Some paintings feature the nuns with their eyes shut in ecstasy, using glasses of wine or folds in robes as allusions to digital penetration, while priests are depicted performing individual or group fellatio on melting altar candles, kneeling on all fours to drink red wine from a cup, and licking Jesus Christ’s nailed feet on the crucifix.

Incensed by the exhibition’s contents, the Mexican chapter of the Association of Christian Lawyers (AAC) says it filed a legal complaint against Cháirez with the National Council to Prevent Discrimination (CONAPRED), a government agency established in 2003 to promote policies for equality and resolve complaints of alleged discriminatory acts. As reported by Infobae, the AAC’s complaint was digitally signed by 9,000 people and claims that La venida del Señor “violates the right to freely profess one’s faith without being the object of attacks,” citing Article 24 of the Mexican Constitution.

AAC declined to provide comment via email, citing the confidential nature of the complaint. 

“There is a double standard from the public that feels offended,” Cháirez explained to Hyperallergic, adding that many of the complainants are “characters who self-define as ‘the new Mexican right-wing.'” Conservative figures such as Mexican Senator Lilly Téllez, Luis Felipe Calderón Zavala (son of former Mexican President Felipe Calderón), and “ultra-conservative” actor and far-right leader Eduardo Verástegui voiced their disdain for the exhibition online.

“I think there are other issues we should be protesting against, such as the church’s abuse of power and sexual abuses within the church,” the artist continued.

Beyond the AAC’s complaints, the exhibition has faced multiple protests onsite from groups taking offense to Cháirez’s portrayals. On Valentine’s Day, February 14, Catholic protesters organized outside the Academia de San Carlos with signs that read “Blasphemy is not art” and accused the artist of bringing about “Christianophobia” in Mexico.

Another intervention occurred inside the gallery yesterday, February 19, when members of UNAM’s Catholic community entered the space and staged a symbolic closure of the show with caution tape, signs, and t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “No ofendas mi fe en nombre del arte” (“Don’t offend my faith in the name of art”). The action was peaceful and the participants left without incident.

“As an artist and member of the LGBTQ community, the fact that the far right is making gains is quite uncomfortable,” Cháirez continued. “But it’s important that we reconsider our strategies to confront any violence that we might face, especially by seeking community and trying to connect with people in real life who might think differently from us and exist in other contexts — by sharing information so that others can understand difference, freedom of expression, freedom of artistic expression, and all freedoms.”

This isn’t the first time Cháirez’s artwork has drawn criticism, particularly for its LGBTQ+ content or interpretations of the paintings as such. A 2019 exhibition devoted to Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City became the site of a protest that escalated into violence between representatives of the nation’s farmworker unions and LGBTQ+ activists over the inclusion of the artist’s 2014 portrait of a nude Zapata with a pink sombrero and seated pin-up style on a horse. The museum kept the painting on view but removed it from the exhibition’s publicity campaign and added a wall text expressing the Zapata family’s disagreement with Cháirez’s representation.

With regards to La venida del Señor, Cháirez said that UNAM has taken some security measures for visitors and staff since the beginning of protests to avoid additional tensions with the public, “but so far there are no indications that the show will be closed, and I think that’s a very positive stance on their part.”

Valentina Di Liscia contributed reporting and translation assistance.

At the end of its previous term, the Trump administration turned its attention toward the arts. A 2020 executive order entitled “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” mandated that all future projects conform to Neoclassical architectural styles; another series of executive orders concerned the so-called “National Garden of American Heroes,” an assemblage of triumphalist and traditionalist statues of patriotically correct figures, including, among others, Barry Goldwater, Douglas MacArthur, and Vince Lombardi. Both of those previous orders were scrapped by President Joe Biden, only to be resuscitated during Trump’s second term. Now, the new administration is disturbingly consolidating its authority over government agencies concerned with art. 

For example, the National Endowment for the Arts updated grant policies to eliminate funding for anything interpreted as related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), while prioritizing propagandistic “projects that celebrate the … semiquincentennial of the United States of America.” Most galling, in an unhinged Truth Social rant, Trump purged the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, installing himself as the chair, while extolling his “Vision for a GOLDEN AGE of American Arts and Culture” on the same social media site. He barked: “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA — ONLY THE BEST. RIC, WELCOME TO SHOW BUSINESS!”

In a later post, Trump wrote, “from now on, we will wage a Relentless War of purification against the last elements of our Cultural decay! Make American Art Beautiful Again!” Except he didn’t post that. That statement, save the Trumpian affectation of scattershot capitalization and invented second sentence, was delivered by Adolf Hitler in a July 18, 1937, speech at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich. 

That Trump and Hitler’s artistic sentiments (among others) can be so seamlessly edited together is beyond cause for concern. While there are still some who pretend that our president’s fascism is an open question — Elon Musk’s Sieg Hiel conveniently explained away — the MAGA movement’s newfound interest in the arts prefigures an even more ominous turn. If cultural institutions were allowed to continue their necessary work of arts funding, exhibitions, and scholarship relatively unscathed during the first Trump administration, that is no longer the case in his second. Trump’s desire to chair the Kennedy Center understandably seems a bizarre waste of time, an exercise in middling dilettantism. But fascism, by its very nature, is obsessed with cultural control. Far from being just another joke exercise in Trumpian narcissism and excess, his new perseveration is evidence of his continued fascist creep.   

Hitler was famously a failed painter, a mediocre landscape artist tellingly incapable of ever representing a human figure. As Reich chancellor, he understood his role as a generative force, spending hours with his official architect Albert Speer poring over imagined schematics of a triumphalist New Berlin, or planning museums such as Munich’s Haus der Kunst. From 1937 until 1944, toward the end of the war, Great German Art Exhibitions were staged in Munich, promoting artists whom the Nazis felt exemplified Aryan ideals. “Hitler’s obsession with aesthetics was not merely a personal quirk,” writes Frederic Spotts in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (2002), “but a central driving force behind his political vision, where he sought to ‘re-create’ Germany” — i.e., to make it great again. The dictator understood the charged energy of creative expression, of stunning imagery, grandiose architecture, theatrical spectacle. This was a field of battle as surely as a literal one, the site of “Cultural Struggle” or Kulturkampf. It’s what American alt-right journalist Andrew Breitbart once described when he said that “politics is downstream from culture.” What’s terrifying is that a culture war never remains cold, and it never remains just about culture. 

In her landmark 1975 essay in The New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag explains how fascism isn’t just an ideology, but an aestheticized politics that emphasizes the “contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental.” These values were all on display at the Great German Art Exhibition, where 600,000 people viewed the war paintings of Franz Eichhorst, military scenes by Fritz Erler, and neoclassical kitsch by Wilhelm Hempfing. The deserved contemporary obscurity of those artists can be contrasted to those who displayed at the notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition held in 1937 — held by the Nazi party to showcase “bad art” — including Expressionist, Cubist, Surrealist, and Dadaist notables such as Piet Mondrian, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, and Pablo Picasso. Ironically, the Degenerate Art Exhibition proved far more popular than the shows of approved art, with more than a million Germans flocking to it in the first six weeks. As for Hitler, his artistic preferences were vehemently conservative and anti-modernist, describing German avant-garde galleries as having mounted “shows [that] were terrible. They were a disgrace.” Actually, that was Trump talking to reporters last Sunday about the Kennedy Center.

Trump shares with Hitler more than just an affection for the prosaic, maudlin, and nationalistic. He also understands the strategic importance of controlling the arts, of not letting apolitical bureaucrats dispense grants or specialists organize exhibitions and schedules, but rather consolidating his own control (as he’s doing over every other aspect of government). His recent actions may seem like micromanaging, but they reveal a darker intent. In his first term, Trump received vociferous condemnation from most in the culture industry, particularly in Hollywood. He doesn’t intend to let speech flow unfettered this second time around. Fascism’s perseveration about cultural control can’t help but recall the repressed and the libidinal, such as Hitler’s obsession over his failure as a painter contributing to his desire to be seen as a great artist, working not with paints and canvas but with people and the nation. Even here, Trump’s own humiliation at being an outer borough has-been never fully accepted in Manhattan is the emotional impetus to his middle finger to the arts establishment. 

Though Trump never wanted to be a painter, he has clearly always wanted to be an actor. In a sense, he is — one with a massive international stage. Just as Hitler drew upon all of the creative energies of German culture to evil result, so too could only the United States produce a Trump — a carnival barker and medicine man, shock jock and pornographer, reality show star and pro-wrestler. The Nazis traded in German kitsch, and so MAGA will trade in Americana. Last week, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a conductor before the National Orchestra with the caption “Welcome to the New Kennedy Center!” As the maestro takes up his baton and the rough beast slouches toward Washington, we must, as artists and critics, ask ourselves: How can we preserve our souls? 

Toward the end of his life, Goya created the now-famous works that would come to be known as his Black Paintings (c. 1820–23) — 14 murals depicting supremely disquieting imagery painted on the walls of his villa outside Madrid. That dark house with its creepy masterpieces, where the great artist convalesced in isolation, is recreated in the short documentary La Quinta del Sordo (2022). The film, directed by Philippe Parreno, consists of close-ups of the Black Paintings so extreme as to be discomfiting, alienating them from their stately homes in the Museo Nacional del Prado and drawing the viewer into Goya’s disturbed headspace. The film is about to make its United States premiere as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s esteemed Doc Fortnight festival, where it will be preceded and followed by live cello performances.

The movie is one of several in this year’s program addressing art and artists. The festival’s opening night selection, Stanley Nelson’s We Want the Funk! (2025), is a historical survey of the namesake genre’s roots and wide, lasting influence. Ephraim Asili narrows the focus with his short “Isis & Osiris” (2024), commissioned by the Hammer Museum as part of its Alice Coltrane exhibition, which reimagines her instrumentations for the harp. In the same Music of Sound shorts program, Lila Avilés’s “MÚSICAS” (2025) follows Mujeres del Viento Florido, a group of Indigenous woman musicians, on a tour across Mexico. 

Another shorts program, Manifest, compiles films in which artists make direct statements about the relationship to the land. In “Night Fishing with Ancestors” (2023), the Indigenous Australian media collective Karrabing imagines a pre-European encounter between Aboriginal people and voyaging Indonesians, positing a different, less violent history than the one we have. In “Give it Back: Stage Theory” (2023), the performance ensemble New Red Order tells the story of Sugarloaf Mound, the only surviving Native American earth mound in St. Louis, through panoramic paintings from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Jarring music and intertitles explaining the history of settlers’ displacement and erasure of Indigenous people disrupt the beatific, Manifest Destiny-flavored iconography of these paintings. And Cauleen Smith presents three recent films in their intended form as a united trilogy for the first time. “The Volcano Manifesto” (2025) takes the form of a voiceover set atop a rapid-fire series of painterly images, delving into Smith’s fascination with monumental geological formations — caves, mines, and of course, volcanoes.

One of the festival’s more ambitious and conceptually complex projects attempts to filter national identity through the lens of a single iconic actor. Alexander Horwath’s essay/travelogue Henry Fonda for President (2024) journeys across the United States and through the country’s history, using only the titular actor’s many roles and films as cultural referents. The film interrogates the idea of the “All-American” movie star — a title Fonda embodied for many during his heyday, though his roles in films like The Grapes of Wrath (1940) often evinced ambivalence about supposedly universal American values.

Ideas around artmaking take center stage in a double feature of shorts. 2023’s 14 Paintings (a title that resonates with Goya’s series) visits the Chinese town of Dafen. Formerly the world capital of copycat paintings, it recently pivoted to mass-producing originals. Director Dongnan Chen interrogates the oxymoron at the core of that idea. Finally, in Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2025), the case of art forger Ely Sakhai is a springboard for Julian Castronovo’s exploration of ideas around authenticity and artistic legitimacy. It’s a fitting synecdoche for the wider exploratory spirit of Doc Fortnight.

Doc Fortnight 2025 continues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through March 7.

LOS ANGELES — We’ve made it to another LA Art Week! I went into this year feeling a bit apprehensive. Normally, Felix — the fair that exhibits artworks within poolside cabanas at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, on view now through Sunday, February 23 — is much more relaxed and lighthearted than Frieze, the week’s centerpiece show. But with artists, gallerists, and collectors still in the midst of recovery from the Palisades and Eaton fires, I couldn’t help but wonder: Would this silly fair be cloaked in a somber atmosphere?

On opening day, fire relief was immediately foregrounded by an exhibition and silent auction assembled by the newly formed collective LA Ayuda Network, a collective of artists and art workers who have been providing assistance to fire victims. Over 150 local artists donated new works, each priced at just $500 except for a small selection by high-profile local artists including Rafa Esparza, Beatriz Cortez, and noé olivas, which were being sold in a silent auction to benefit those impacted.

“The show was called Foundations, with the idea that nothing is built from one stone,” artist Debra Scacco, one of the collective’s organizers, told me on opening day. “So we invited artists to make a stone.”

Artists were allowed to interpret this assignment very loosely, so the array of objects, displayed on rows of low benches, spans everything from painted rocks and watercolor drawings to sound installations. Among them is Emily Müller’s “The Museum of Stones” (2025), a tiny gallery displaying small ore rocks on pedestals or mounted with wire. Camilla Taylor, who lost her home and studio in the fire, contributed “Ear Fragment” (2025), a ceramic fragment in the shape of an ear protruding from a wooden frame. 

Taylor’s work is also being exhibited at the fair by the Kyiv- and New York-based Voloshyn Gallery, which decided to feature almost exclusively Los Angeles artists even though it does not currently represent any of them.

“We decided to change our presentation to show local-based artists to support the community,” said gallery owner Julia Voloshyna.

Voloshyna reached out to the ceramicist Cathy Akers, who evacuated her home during the Eaton Fire and was fortunate enough to return safely. Together, they curated a group show centering Taylor’s drawings and glass sculptures of staircases; Aker’s exuberant vases, some of which feature nude women as handles; and Lara Joy Evans’s c-prints of mud pots embedded in custom-made resin frames, among other works.  

Apart from these more obvious references to the fires, Felix was just as cheerful as ever — though it did feel less crowded than past editions — and the works on display were a full-tilt into the realm of surrealism. This levity felt purposeful: Not only would the fair not be marred by tragedy, but it would also be pointedly absurd, reminding its attendees of art’s potential to express joy.

I particularly loved the details in the pastoral paintings of William Schaeuble, who was the sole artist exhibited by the Chicago-based gallery Povos. Across the works that make up his solo presentation, titled Where is everyone going?, an Elvis impersonator stands on top of a podium, tiny cars are burning in the countryside, and dogs are barking everywhere, including in trees. 

A room jointly shared by Long Story Short and Marinaro galleries featured a painting by Jeremy Olson, “Anesthetica” (2025), in which aliens huffed some kind of nuclear green laughing gas. It’s uncommon to see Olson’s skillful painting, especially striking in its lusciously rendered carpets, portraying sci-fi stoners instead of haughty rich people. This room also showcased many paintings by Hannah Murray, including “Soeurs Vertes” (2024), a vibrant piece dominated by shades of pink and blue in which two expectant mothers sit poolside in their last childless Hot Girl Summer. This scene isn’t necessarily surreal, but I can’t remember the last time I saw pregnant women so beautifully rendered in contemporary art, so it may as well be a fantasy.

Among all the mythological references, I kept noticing one figure haunting paintings and drawings: Satan. I’m not sure if the influence came from the fires or the recent takeover of the Trump administration, but the overall message seemed to be that the world is going to hell. I spied horned creatures in Luciano Maia’s “Sem título da série Onironauta” (2024), presented by the LA- and Milan-based gallery M+B, and Rick Bartow’s “Bull Man Laughs” (2011), shown by LA’s Timothy Hawkinson Gallery. In a display by Charles Moffett gallery in New York City, pointy-earned demons copulated in front of vibrant bonfires throughout Maggie Ellis’s oil paintings. And in El Apartamento, a gallery based in Havana and Madrid, a painting by Rocío García, “El brindis” (2025), showed a hairy wolf-like creature toasting and interlocking legs with his date, the scene bathed in blood-red hues. 

Not everyone was prepared to dance with the devil, however. In a presentation by the NYC gallery Europa, Milly Skellington protected the booth with “HOLYWATER” (2024), the phrase hand-carved into pink quartz in the style of the Hollywood sign. We need to sprinkle that sacred element all across the city, dousing any wildfire ember that remains.

‣ Writer Lindsey Adler brings us along her journey through a Yoko Ono symposium, which she fittingly dubs “Yokofest,” reappraising the artist’s legacy for Defector:

It is inescapably relevant that Ono was a Japanese woman who demanded to be let into the avant-garde scene in New York just a few years removed from the end of World War II. She often felt stripped of her agency and power, so she used what she had: her body and the way other people perceived it. This included her vocal chords. She often screamed, wailed, and at times turned sounds we associate with sex into screams of horror. 

She felt deep grief over both the attacks on Japan and the horrors of Japanese imperialism. She lost custody of her daughter, Kyoko, and didn’t see her again for 27 years. She watched her husband die and laid grieving in the bed they shared, trying to ignore the sound of heartsick fans blasting “Imagine” outside of The Dakota, trapping her in a loop of hearing her dead husband’s voice.

When I learned this final detail, and pictured Ono trying desperately to block out this music, I felt my chest tighten with sadness and anxiety. My eyes welled up and at that moment, I was the one who felt the need to let out a primal scream. (I did not. Even at Yokofest, that would have been inappropriate.)

‣ Hasan Ali writes for the Nation about the singular voice of late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who brought Sufi qawwali music to a wider audience:

Last fall, Real World released the recording as Chain of Light, which becomes Khan’s final studio album, 34 years after it was recorded and 27 years after the singer’s death. Today, Khan’s legacy is undeniable, to the point that the pieces that form the bulk of the modern qawwali repertoire were almost all made famous by him. Though qawwali is a devotional music, Khan was responsible for taking it from the shrine to the record shop, turning it into a genre that could be enjoyed in a secular context. His use of sargam (a technique in which the voice is used like an instrument to improvise within the structure of the composition) to complement the music’s devotional aspects gave it an exploratory quality with immediate appeal to fans of modern jazz or psychedelic rock. To Khan’s hundreds of millions of fans in India and Pakistan and his admirers dotted across the West, the new material on Chain of Light amounts to a musical resurrection.

‣ Iconic drag artist Jinkx Monsoon sat down with Them‘s Mathew Rodriguez to talk about changing her legal name — and the attacks on trans people that pushed her to do it:

A judge legally signed off on my new name and I have one piece of ID with all the correct information on it. And to me, even though that one piece of ID is only part of it, it’s one piece of ID that says who I am correctly. And that is one step closer.

I didn’t really talk to anyone else that day, but you know how when you’re in certain spaces and you see someone and you recognize family? You make eye contact for a second and that’s all it takes to know: “Hey, we’re here doing the same thing. Good on you.” It’s just little moments of eye contact and just little moments of recognition between me and other trans and nonbinary people and the very helpful civil servants who were working that day. I am a very lucky person that my city is so willing and happy to help its citizens claim their true identity. And I just know that that’s not what the situation is around our country. I don’t know how to best advise people in less tolerant areas or more conservative areas other than try to think of it as one step at a time and each step you take is a step in the right direction.

‣ And in an act of violence that has sent shockwaves across the world, the first openly gay imam was murdered in South Africa while on his way to officiate two weddings. Todah Opeyemi reports for BBC on Muhsin Hendricks’s outspoken advocacy for queer Muslim communities:

Hendricks often spoke about the importance of interfaith dialogue and the need to address the mental health issues and trauma faced by LGBTQ+ individuals within religious communities.

He told the Ilga World Conference in Cape Town last year: “It is important that we stop to look at religion as the enemy.”

Reverend Jide Macaulay, an openly gay Anglican minister, described Hendricks’ death as “truly heartbreaking”.

The British-Nigerian LGBTQ rights activist runs House of Rainbow, an organisation that provides support for gay people in Nigeria where same-sex relationships or public displays of affection are illegal, and paid tribute to Hendricks’ bravery.

“Your leadership, courage, and unwavering dedication to inclusive faith communities have left an indelible mark,” he said.

Sadiq Lawal, a gay Muslim man living in Nigeria, told the BBC that Hendricks, had made such an impact as he had made “the impossible possible” by saying the words: “I’m a queer imam.”

‣ In his monthly Prism column, William C. Anderson takes a look at the rise and fall of DEI initiatives, providing a sorely perspective on programs that he explains were “a counterinsurgent tactic to pacify uprisings” in 2020:

The ease with which corporations shredded their DEI policies is why it’s important to note the fundamental differences between fighting to be included and fighting for autonomy and self-determination. Diversifying oppressive structures and seeking equity within corporatocracy is as limited as trying to do the same within representative governance. Before you demand a seat at the table, you should first ask if it’s a table worth being at in the first place. Let’s not pull up chairs at dinner parties that need to be destroyed. Unfortunately, that’s the standard response for a public hypnotized into thinking they have a collective stake in capitalism. 

The oversimplification and sanitization of the civil rights movement also have much to do with this. State-sponsored historical narratives translated in schools, museums, and political arenas have reduced multipronged struggles to nothing more than a fight to “melt and integrate,” to quote the late poet Gil Scott-Heron. This problem over-represents the integrationist wings of the civil rights movement and downplays a dynamic revolutionary period. It shrinks it to a moment in time where Black people are portrayed as entirely satiated by an unguaranteed right to vote, more institutional racial representation, and, of course, the ability to spend money equally among white consumers in previously inaccessible spaces.

‣ Apparently, Microsoft says it invented a new state of matter. (Just what we need from tech companies right now!) Cade Metz has the story on the alleged addition to that age-old trio of solid, liquid, and gas for the New York Times:

Microsoft’s technology, which was detailed in a research paper published in the science journal Nature on Wednesday, adds new impetus to a race that could reshape the technological landscape. In addition to accelerating progress across many technological and scientific fields, a quantum computer could be powerful enough to break the encryption that protects national secrets.

Any advances are set to have geopolitical implications. Even as the United States explores quantum computing primarily through corporations like Microsoft and a wave of start-ups, the Chinese government has said it is investing $15.2 billion in the technology. The European Union has committed $7.2 billion.

Quantum computing, which builds on decades of research into a type of physics called quantum mechanics, is still an experimental technology. But after recent strides by Microsoft, Google and others, scientists are confident that the technology will eventually live up to its promise.

‣ What lessons can we glean from labor organizing about fighting to protect public health in the US? Researcher Abdullah Shihipar explains for the New Republic:

The larger point to McAlevey’s story is that to advance the labor movement in America, the movement has to organize workplaces and in order to do this, organizers have to be willing to have hard conversations. That doesn’t mean that we concede ourselves to the points of people who don’t agree, nor does it mean that we condescend and belittle opposing arguments; rather, much like the workers of Jefferson Einstein, we commit to talking and listening until we make inroads.

Public health workers did this during the early stages of the COVID vaccination program. Across the country, community health workers did faith-based outreach, outreach to farmworkers and other workers, communicated in different languages, went to community housing projects and staffed pop up vaccination sites. All of this relied on a network of trusted community leaders and institutions. The anti-vaccine sentiment that erupted in the years since reflects the inability to scale up these efforts – they were always limited in nature, and within months, vaccination became primarily the responsibility of the pharmacies. 

‣ In a long overdue move, the Haida Nation will finally be able to reclaim its land off the coast of British Columbia per an agreement with the Canadian government, CBC News reports:

The Big Tide Haida Title Lands Agreement affirms that the Haida have Aboriginal title over all of the islands’ lands, beds of freshwater bodies, and foreshores to the low-tide mark.

It will transition the Crown-title land to the Haida people, granting them an inherent legal right to the land.

The transfer of the underlying title would affect how courts interpret issues involving disputes.

Gaagwiis Jason Alsop, president of the Council of the Haida Nation, held up the agreement signed Monday to show the crowd.

He said the ceremony represents a move from an era of denial, occupation and resistance to one of peaceful coexistence and recognition that “this is Haida land.”

Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree told the crowd gathered for the ceremony that it was a moment where history was being made.

Anandasangaree said in an earlier interview that the agreement will kick off a five-year transition period and will require legislation to iron out all the details about how this will apply in practice.

He said it is the first time the federal government has recognized Aboriginal title through negotiations.

‣ In the East Village, one restaurant has served over 15,000 free meals over the course of six months. Jaya Saxena talks with the director of Cafewal for Eater about its role as a job training program and community center for immigrants:

Cafewal — which means “cafeteria” in Pular and Fulani, both common West African languages — operates out of the basement of the Elim House of Worship, which is outfitted with a commercial kitchen. “We have an eight-week training program, so they’ll spend eight weeks in the kitchen with us. And then we’re also sharing the space with a job training and application room. So it’s this nice little pipeline,” says Hefferon.

So far, about 40 of the men they work with have received work authorization, and they’ve been able to help 15 of them find jobs in restaurant kitchens, catering companies, and other food-distributing non-profits. Diners are mostly other West African migrants there to take English lessons, work on their resumes, or just sit in some warmth.

‣ Few among us have not been swindled by surveillance pricing, but the Cut‘s Charlotte Cowles has a handy guide to outsmarting it:

Zephyr Teachout, an attorney and professor at Fordham University who specializes in antitrust law, points out that you’re more likely to be targeted with higher prices if you seem to be in a rush. “If you order a car service to go to a hospital, you might pay more than if you were going to a restaurant, because you’re presumably in a hurry,” she says. “Or, if your order history shows that you frequently pay for express delivery, your vibe is haste, and your prices might be higher.”

Of course, all of this is enraging. “There’s a gross feeling of unfairness when you’re paying a different price for the same product, because you’re being profiled and targeted,” says Teachout. “You don’t need to be an economist to see how it’s the seller exploiting its position of power, and the vast amount of intimate data points they have about people, to rip them off.”

‣ Mina Le’s YouTube essays are the only episode drops I look forward to nowadays — and in her latest video, she discusses the warped nostalgia of early-2000s internet culture and considers the strange social media landscape we find ourselves in:

‣ Life imitates art — er, Abbott Elementary!

‣ And finally, please enjoy this glorious series of puppy side-eye paintings:

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.

Welcome to the 273rd installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, artists befriend the stillness of early morning and find calm in white walls painted the shade of watercolor paper.

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

Adam Crowley, Kansas City, Missouri

How long have you been working in this space?

Ten years.

Describe an average day in your studio.

I get up at 5am to paint. I’ve been doing this ever since our daughter was born seven years ago. I have a full-time job and my wife is a gardener, so she has the daylight. So every morning, I am in the basement working. I’m conscious of using my limited time for painting, so I make sure to leave my phone upstairs and focus as much on the work as possible. I have come to really enjoy the early-morning dark and quiet before the rest of the world wakes up. I’ve become cognizant of the noise in the world, so I try to keep it quiet and don’t listen to any music or podcasts.

How does the space affect your work?

The space and the time I’m allotted affect my work because there is no natural light that early, so I have taken to using photographs or setting up still lifes in the studio. On some weekends I will do some plein air, but most of my painting time is spent in the basement. It is nice to have my studio in my house because I don’t have to worry about another commute or try and carve out extra time. I can go downstairs whenever I am home, and the only thing I need to do is make sure my alarm is set.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

Kansas City has a wonderful art community. It’s a small city, so there aren’t really pockets of artists around. I do live a little south of downtown, where a lot of studios and galleries are, so my biggest concern is getting myself out to see shows from time to time. But there are few galleries popping up around my area, which is nice to see.

What do you love about your studio?

Its proximity to our home, and its comfortable familiarity.

What do you wish were different?

I wish it were a little bit bigger, and had more light.

What is your favorite local museum?

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for the Old Masters, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art for newer dialogues.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

Oil always, but within the last year or so I’ve been working with tempera which, after some initial frustration, I’ve become very fond of.

Lilian Cooper, Delft, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

How long have you been working in this space?

Four years.

Describe an average day in your studio.

A studio day usually begins around 8:30 in the morning. I normally have several series I am working on. At present, I have several projects I am preparing for exhibition so these are the first priority — but I do love to add time for research and just thinking through experiences or things I want to capture. My day begins with a fresh sheet of paper, unless I am already working on something. I usually have an idea in my mind that I need to realize straight away, and from there, I see how the creative process unfolds. I have recently started listening to podcasts when I find it hard to dive into the creative process, but mostly I love the silence. I can hear urban birds, on one side moorhens and to the rear the green parakeets, blackbirds, pigeons, and turtle doves. I hear students, too — I live in a university town and just enjoy the distant sounds of life around me. The experience is so calming and centering that I will find myself in the studio late at night, just to grab as much precious time as I can. If I come in from being elsewhere — openings or my temporary job — I will treat myself to snatched studio moments.

How does the space affect your work?

I find the space very calming. I now live (and work) with a garden. I’m finding that the plants have started taking over my life and creativity. I retreat into my creative space, which I have painted the broken white shade of watercolor paper. I wanted to be without distraction. I have light pouring in and filtering linen curtains. If I feel like being in the world, I will open them; otherwise, I relish the diffused light and the focus it gives me.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

First and foremost I connect with my neighbors. I am a guerrilla gardener, helping and encouraging my neighbors to create street gardens. The street is now populated with insects. I also connect with the arts community all around me. There is an art and ecology center a 15-minute walk away and fascinating research programs everywhere. This place has allowed me to connect with the scientific community. I keep in touch with my long-term (art) friends and colleagues via social media and we meet up regularly, particularly at openings. I now live an hour away, but it also means I am an hour closer to the communities I work with elsewhere.

What do you love about your studio?

There is so much I love about my studio. The calmness, the white walls so that no color distracts me. Being close to other people, the community I live in. Having so much space compared to before. My drawing table, which was a present to myself — I had dreamt of a surface where I could roll out long drawings without impediment.

What do you wish were different?

Very few changes required, except I do dream of serious storage space. It is also really a sitting room and dining room that I converted into a workspace. I would like a space that is less precious, if that makes sense. I would like not to worry about the floors getting dirty and to be able to pin things to the wall.

What is your favorite local museum?

That is a very difficult question. I live within 30 minutes to an hour of several amazing museums. I would put the Kunstmuseum in the Hague high on my list along with the Mauritshuis, equally Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The Stedelijk and the Rijksmuseum are a little bit over an hour away in Amsterdam. One of my favorite museum collections is the living plant collection at the Hortus Botanicus Leiden. As artists living in “the Randstad” — including the cities of Rotterdam, the Hague, Amsterdam, Utrecht, and smaller towns in between — we are all spoilt for choice.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

Again, a challenging question. I love a sheet of cold-pressed cotton rag watercolor paper. I would be lost without my watercolors, gouache, and drawing pencils.

Art is at the heart of New York City. No other place in the country has the abundance of museums, commercial galleries, nonprofit spaces, and public art that this city boasts, and spring is the time to emerge from hibernation and take it all in. From van Gogh-inspired flowers at the New York Botanical Garden to feminist chinoiserie at The Met, a vibrant world of visual and intellectual stimulation awaits in and around the city.

We at Hyperallergic pride ourselves on being attuned to our city and readers, and we’ve assembled this guide to reflect the diversity of our readership — and to encourage you to step outside of your comfort zone and experience something new, whether that means traveling to the far reaches of a borough or across state lines, or considering different artists and perspectives.

You can certainly spend a whole day in a single area — there’s more than enough to see in Chelsea or Tribeca alone — but we hope you’ll read through our guide and follow the paths that call out to you most, or that you’ve never taken. We know that you’ll find art that will nourish your soul. —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor

Opening in Late February | March | April | May | Spring Art Fairs | Outdoors in the City

FUTURA 2000: BREAKING OUT

Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse, Concourse Village, The Bronx
Through March 30

Titled after his 1980 subway car painting “Break,” this comprehensive retrospective traces the evolution of New York City-based artist Futura 2000’s five-decade career through sculptures, drawings, prints, collaborative works, archival ephemera, and site-specific installations that span early graffiti art to contemporary abstraction.

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Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage

Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
Spring 2025

Emerging only after Robert Frank’s death in 2019, previously unseen footage from between 1970 and 2006 documenting the artist’s observations of loved ones, collaborators, process, and international travel has been spliced together in a moving-image scrapbook in this exhibition.

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Light: Rafaël Rozendaal

Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
Spring 2025

Rafaël Rozendaal’s small digital file commands a large audience at the Museum of Modern Art’s ground-floor lobby. An early fixture of web art, Rozendaal developed an autonomous website that algorithmically generates animations based on storyboard sketches he made on paper.

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Beijing Stories: Liu Shiming and Lois Conner

Liu Shiming Art Foundation, 15 East 40th Street, 5th Floor, Murray Hill, Manhattan
Through March 21

After graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Chinese sculptor Liu Shiming decamped to the countryside. Rural folk traditions and the changing landscape of the capital city — where he eventually returned and remained until his death in 2010 — infuse his rough-hewn sculptures. This exhibition pairs these works with the black-and-white photographs of Lois Conner, who captured the city from a different, often aerial, vantage during the same period.

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Black Dress II: Homage

Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 144 West 14th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through March 22

In 2014, Pratt Manhattan Gallery showed the work of 10 emerging Black fashion designers, including such visionaries as Carrie Mae Weems and Tracy Reese. Since then, the exhibition has expanded into a website, a YouTube channel, and a lecture series. Black Dress II both continues and pays homage to that effort, bringing together work across mediums to highlight not just designers but also tailors, models, hair and makeup artists, and others — and the community and sociopolitical factors that shape their work.

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ASMA: Ideal Space for Music

SculptureCenter, 44–19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens
Through March 24

ASMA’s immersive exhibition at SculptureCenter, composed of aluminum sculptures, canvas compositions, and eerie characters constructed from silicon, resin, bronze, steel, and glass, explores concepts of disintegration, contamination, and desire. It marks the Mexico City-based artist duo’s inaugural United States institutional exhibition.

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Embracing the Parallax: Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland

Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Avenue Huntington, New York
Through March 30

Nearly two dozen gelatin silver prints by photographer Berenice Abbott are presented in dialogue with the writings of her lifelong partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland, offering new insight into the pair’s three-decade intellectual and romantic relationship. As part of the Heckscher’s 2025 Pride initiative, Embracing the Parallax examines the power dynamics of visibility and invisibility, and how documentary photography can generate conversation and foster civil responsibility.

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American Artist: Shaper of God

Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn
Through April 13

Inspired by the life and work of the late science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, this exhibition pairs archival materials with video performances, installations, and sculptural works that build on biographical parallels between the author and American Artist. An accompanying monograph and related programming series further delve into Butler’s creative output, as well as contemporary science fiction, and Afrofuturism.

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Pets and the City

New York Historical, 170 Central Park West, Upper West Side, Manhattan
Through April 20

Victorian-era portraits of children and kittens, paw-shaped political campaign signage, and early 20th-century photographs of New Yorkers and their four-legged friends come together in a charmingly quirky exhibition tracing 250 years of the city’s visual history through its human and animal residents.

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Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities

The Museum at FIT, 227 West 27th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through April 20

The cabinet of curiosity, a 17th-century precursor to the modern museum, often included not only specimens, artworks, and artifacts but also clothing. This exhibition provides the first in-depth exploration of the intersection between these encyclopedic cabinets, fashion, and colonialism, featuring earrings evoking scientific specimens, an umbrella with a music box as a handle, and other garments of wonder.

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Fern Apfel: Letters Home

Wassaic Project, 37 Furnace Bank Road, Wassaic, New York
Through April 27

Hudson Valley artist Fern Apfel’s unique spin on the “life” in “still life” involves referencing old handwritten letters sourced from all over the world. Her bright, minimalist acrylic compositions call attention to the art of snail mail — its devotion, aesthetics, and timeless conversations.

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Winter Workspace

Wave Hill, 4900 Independence Avenue, The Bronx
Through April 27

Across the late winter and early spring, Wave Hill offers eight-week sessions for local artists to develop art inspired by the ecology of this sylvan oasis. On Sundays and during Open Studios, this year’s cohort will be sharing their works-in-progress, from the thick impasto figuration of Ye Zhu to the rustic assemblages of sTo Len. It’s a welcome reprieve from some of the too-slick white cubes you might find downtown. 

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Tatlin: Kyiv

The Ukrainian Museum, 222 East 6th Street, Manhattan
Through April 27

The Ukrainian Museum’s first exhibition focused on the pioneering Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin includes a recreation of his Kyiv studio and a presentation of his late-1920s illustration and design work, alongside sculpture, film, and photography by his students at the Kyiv Institute of Art.

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Ellen Kozak and Scott D. Miller: River-Rising

Hunterdon Art Museum, 7 Lower Center Street, Clinton, New Jersey
Through May 4

In the artists’ immersive four-channel video installation, the surfaces of the Garonne River in France, the Bilbao Estuary, the Hudson River, and the Venice Lagoon ripple asynchronously to a musical score intended to evoke a sense of deep unease regarding humanity’s continued assault on our waterways.

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To Conjure: New Archives in Recent Photography

International Center for Photography, 84 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through May 5

In this group exhibition, artists Widline Cadet, Koyoltzintli, Tarrah Krajnak, Shala Miller, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Keisha Scarville, and Sasha Wortzel deploy histories of the American South, Caribbean, and Central and South America to redefine archives as not just keepers of the past, but tools to lay the framework for our future. 

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Yehwan Song: Are We Still (Surfing)? 

Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn
Through May 11 

Anyone disenchanted with daily doomscrolling on the same five websites might find reprieve in Yehwan Song’s web-based practice. Rejecting hostile, anti-user website interfaces that employ algorithmic performances for corporate interests and surveillance technology, Song’s exhibition reinforces digital agency through projections, kinetic sculptures, and references to water and its influence on the foundational internet lexicon.

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John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography at The Drawing Center

Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan
Through May 11

The Drawing Center takes an intimate peek into the interior life of avant-garde musician John Zorn in this exhibition of his visual art. Zorn’s works on paper, including musical scores and bold abstract ink creations, are accompanied by a monthly series of concerts held inside the exhibition.

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Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through May 11

For the famed Romanticist’s first comprehensive survey in the United States, some 75 of his works, ranging from completed paintings and drawings to working sketches, are assembled at The Met. The show is a profound investigation of Friedrich’s desire to evoke a sense of deep introspection and an emotional response to the natural world. 

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Democratizing Prints: The JoAnn Edinburg Pinkowitz Gift

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through May 13

This quarterly rotation of viewable prints from The Met’s collection shows selections from a recent gift of hundreds of 20th-century works of Mexican printmaking. Many of the featured artists worked in collaboration with the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Workshop of Popular Graphic Art), a Mexico City art collective founded in 1937 that distributed thousands of prints for leftist causes.

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Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos 

Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through May 17

Artists Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza imagine ancient artifacts flying through time and space in this exhibition. esparza, for instance, shows a monument that recalls an Olmec head at the edge of a wormhole, while Cortez explores the ways that people and objects move across land through steel sculptures that suggest looted objects.

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Martha Diamond: Deep Time

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Through May 18

The late Martha Diamond called critic Peter Schjeldahl a friend; rubbed shoulders with artists of the New York School, including Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard; and lived and worked at the center of the city’s art scene in a loft on the Bowery. Yet somehow, she’s still underregarded. This exhibition places her back in the center of the art world, tracing her career from 1973 to 2009 through paintings, works on paper, and monotypes that capture the ever-changing vistas and tempers of the city. 

Read the review by John Yau here.

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The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World

The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, Murray Hill, Manhattan
Through May 25

The Morgan brings to life a trove of medieval beliefs about the world by reuniting two of the few remaining copies of The Book of Marvels. Written by an unknown author in France in the 15th century, it chronicles regions around the world and their inhabitants through received, sometimes inaccurate, knowledge. The exhibition also includes additional objects that illustrate these conceptions, including a manuscript by Marco Polo.

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Robert Graham Carter: The Art of Reflection

Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Avenue, Huntington, New York
Through May 25

The Heckscher Museum of Art delves into the 60-year career of mixed media artist Robert Graham Carter. Shown in Long Island, where Carter has lived since the ’60s, teaching art for more than 50 years, the exhibition presents works related to the legacy of segregation, Black spirituality, and the joy of family.

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Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity

Neue Galerie New York, 1048 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Feb. 20–May 26

This exhibition presents two philosophies of the post-World War I New Objectivity movement side-by-side via paintings, sculpture, film, photography, decorative art, and more by artists including Marcel Breuer, Otto Dix, and George Grosz. While both camps turned away from Expressionism toward more objective depictions of the real world, the Classicists prioritized beauty while the Verists emphasized sharp political commentary on Weimar Republic society.

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Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore, the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection

New York Historical, 170 Central Park West, Upper West Side, Manhattan
Through June 22

Drawn from Smith College’s Historic Clothing Collection, this exhibition surveys the rarely seen textile history of ordinary people. Tattered dresses, fast food chain uniforms, mini skirts, and modern suits attest to both the women who wore them and the changes in societal roles over the last two centuries.

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Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black

Princeton University Art Museum, Art@Bainbridge, 158 Nassau Street, Princeton, New Jersey
Through July 6

Ancient Greek pottery gets a second life in the work of Puerto Rican artist Roberto Lugo. He swaps heroes in battle with Jackie Robinson up to bat, chronicles the Central Park Five case, and illustrates a Selena Quintanilla concert, narrating scenes of both persecution and community. The same ancient vessels that inspired him will be on view alongside his pottery, bringing this inventive show full circle.

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Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night

Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Meatpacking District, Manhattan
Through July 6

Artist Christine Sun Kim shaves language down to its bones, upending the visual lexicon of infographics to transcribe Deaf experiences in a world of exclusionary norms. This show surveys over a decade’s worth of her incisive drawings, videos, and sculptures, from her Degrees of Deaf Rage (2018) drawings to her 2024 mural playing on musical notation, “Ghost(ed) Notes.”

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Young Joon Kwak: RESISTERHOOD

Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, 26 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan
Through July 27

Young Joon Kwak casts, molds, and metamorphosizes the bodies of her loved ones into glittering sculptures. In this show at the only American museum dedicated to LGBTQIA+ artists, Kwak asserts forms of queer and trans resistance that relish in transformation and contradiction with new sculptures, videos, and bold neon pieces.

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Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection

Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through Aug. 10

The 1970s saw the golden age of graffiti in New York, much of it both physically and culturally underground. Above Ground tracks the transition from the underbelly of the city to the center of the art world, drawn from the museum’s deep collection, donated by the late artist Martin Wong. These include big names such as Rammellzee, Lee Quiñones, and Futura 2000, who also has a solo show open through March at the Bronx Museum.

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Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial 

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through Aug. 10

For this blockbuster show exploring how design shapes the psychic landscape of spaces we call home, 25 site-specific installations moved into the design museum that was once the home of Andrew Carnegie. Making Home is fittingly organized by theme across floors, with highlights including a bold, eclectic dinner table by Nicole Crowder and Hadiya Williams and the biomorphic furniture of Liam Lee and Tommy Mishima.

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Imperial Treasures: Chinese Ceramics of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties from the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection

Asia Society and Museum, 725 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through Aug. 10

A seemingly familiar tradition is cast in a new light in this exhibition, which explores how Central and Southeast Asian influences left their mark on the ceramic of China’s Ming dynasty, which lasted between approximately the 14th and 17th centuries. Take a deep dive into the stories of these 25 exquisite plates and vessels.

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Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always

Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Through Dec. 21

Curated by the renowned artist and activist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), whom we lost this past January, Indigenous Identities is an expansive survey of contemporary Native art. With 97 living artists representing more than 74 Native nations and communities throughout North America presenting work across multiple media, this show is not to be missed.

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Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation

Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Astoria, Queens
Through Jan. 11, 2026

Four decades after its opening, the Noguchi Museum invites audiences to step back in time. This exhibition brings works from the museum’s original second-floor presentation back to the space, reimagining Isamu Noguchi’s vision for their installation based on archival images from 1985 to 1988.

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Jeffrey Veregge: Of Gods and Heroes

National Museum of the American Indian, 1 Bowling Green, Financial District, Manhattan
Ongoing

Jeffrey Veregge’s unique “Salish Geek” style, a hybridization of traditional Coast Salish artistry and comic book illustrations, gets an enormous display through two narrative murals at the National Museum of the American Indian’s New York location.

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Opening in Late February

Avram Finkelstein, Something Terrible Has Happened (Corpus Fluxus)

Smack Mellon, 92 Plymouth Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn
Feb. 22–April 27

For artist, writer, and AIDS activist Avram Finkelstein’s first major exhibition of intimate artworks, Smack Mellon focuses on Finkelstein’s consideration of the body through the lenses of accessibility and disability. Also featured is a series of drawings referencing the artist’s experience of a psychiatric evaluation after attempting to come out as a teenager in 1967. 

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Mie Yim: Spiked Garden

Smack Mellon, 92 Plymouth Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn
Feb. 22–April 27

Created during the COVID-19 quarantine, Mie Yim’s compact abstract pastel works continue the artist’s divergence from representational imagery and toward colorful, tonal, and gestural oddities that avoid the perils of overthinking. 

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A Rose Is

Flag Art Foundation, 545 West 25th Street #9, Chelsea, Manhattan
Feb. 27–June 1

A marker of death, an offering of affection, a materialistic pursuit — the rose is dissected into a seemingly infinite number of meanings in this exhibition. Excerpts of poems, sculpture, and photography by artists including Farah Al Qasimi, Louise Bourgeois, and Robert Mapplethorpe show are included in this visual history of the beloved flower.

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Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Feb. 28–Sept. 28

When Chinese archaeologists rediscovered ancient bronze vessels centuries ago, they spawned a renaissance that inexorably changed Chinese art. The bronze casting technique, originally used to create everyday items, was repurposed and applied to everything from incense burners to flower vases. These later objects were long perceived as inferior, but here, The Met seeks to redress the record.

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Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200

Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Feb. 28–Feb. 22, 2026

A bicentennial celebration, Breaking the Mold comprises three sections focusing on different aspects of the museum’s collection: art and objects made in the borough and the land it sits on over three centuries; developmental acquisitions that put the institution on the map; and a selection of donated and gifted works of contemporary art.

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Opening in March

(Re)Generations: Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim, and Howardena Pindell amid the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection

Asia Society and Museum, 725 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
March 4–Aug. 10

The Asia Society’s collection of “pre-modern Asian art” encompasses a wide range of cultures and traditions, so it’s only fitting that three contemporary artists — Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim, and Howardena Pindell — tackle it from different angles. Their artworks will be in conversation with ancient items from the collection in a kaleidoscopic exhibition, reinvigorating Asian art history and its many facets as a living, breathing organism.

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Wish You Were Here: Guidebooks, Viewbooks, Photobooks, and Maps of New York City, 1807-1940

The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan
March 6–May 10

This exhibition features more than 130 objects, including guidebooks, viewbooks, photobooks, maps, and pamphlets that document the growth and appeal of New York City during the 19th and early 20th centuries. A walk down memory lane for some and introduction for others, it presents the constant evolution of the Big Apple for residents and tourists alike.

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Suellen Rocca

Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
March 7–April 19

This six-decade survey highlights the late Suellen Rocca’s unique visual language of playful graphics and patterning, and offbeat references to consumer culture and domesticity. These singular qualities made her stand out among the Hairy Who artists in Chicago’s storied 1960s art scene.

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The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt

Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
March 7–Aug. 10

Traditionally read during Purim, the Book of Esther declares the holiday one of “sending portions one to another, and gifts to the poor” to commemorate the salvation of the Jewish people. That spirit of generosity is on full view in this exhibition celebrating the influence of the Book on both Jewish and Christian communities in 17th-century Holland through works by Rembrandt and his contemporaries, including the Book in scroll form and paintings of its scenes.

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Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved

Dia Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York
Opens March 7

Multimedia artist Renée Green taps into the wellspring of 1960s–70s conceptual art strategies to trouble the boundaries between truth and fiction. Through new, reconnected, and archival works, Green deploys color, text, audio, materiality, and spatial configuration to analyze the notions of perception and landscape within the context of art history.

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Kotobuki: Auspicious Celebrations of Japanese Art from New York Private Collections

Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, Midtown East, Manhattan
March 13–May 11

This joyful multimedia exhibition, which includes painting, calligraphy, ceramics, and other art forms, approaches the auspicious notion of kotobuki, or celebration, across seven centuries of Japanese art history through a variety of significant cultural objects from important private collections in the New York City area.

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Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit

Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
March 14–Aug. 3

Consuelo Kanaga, an influential 20th-century American photojournalist, wanted to “catch the spirit” of her subjects. Her 60-year oeuvre sprawls across this retrospective, with around 200 films and images of the marginalized people whom she thoughtfully rendered in her work.

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Abang-guard: Makibaka

Queens Museum, Grand Central Parkway and Van Wyck Expressway, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Queens
March 16–Oct. 5

What does visibility mean for people in diaspora? Filipino artist duo Abang-guard (Maureen Catbagan and Jevijoe Vitug) explores the question through the topics of immigration and labor. For Makibaka, the artists reconfigure the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair pavilions for the Philippines and New York as an entry point to the history of Filipino-American labor.

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Umber Majeed: J😊Y TECH

Queens Museum, Grand Central Parkway and Van Wyck Expressway, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Queens
March 16–Oct. 5

Can the early days of the internet yield lessons for the future? Umber Majeed answers with a resounding “yes,” and then some. Her speculative universe reimagines the Pakistan Pavilion at the 1964–65 World’s Fair in New York and its intersections with South Asian diasporic life by leaning into bootleg, “digital kitsch,” augmented reality, and more.

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Jack Whitten: The Messenger

Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
March 23–Aug. 2

The late Jack Whitten refused categorization in favor of forging his own way through the 1960s New York art scene. The painter used distinctive techniques, making marks with materials such as Afro combs, saws, and squeegees. These and more examples of his enduring legacy will be on view in his first full retrospective, plus several pieces on public display for the first time.

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Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
March 25–Aug. 17

Chinoiserie is to China as concepts of a plan is to an actual plan. This exhibition reimagines the European decorative style, inspired by Chinese porcelain and freighted with fantasies about an “exotic East,” through a feminist lens. It brings together almost 200 objects ranging from an 18th-century cup and saucer depicting ships and mermaids to South Korean contemporary artist Lee Bul’s anthropomorphic “Monster: Black” (1998–2011), an object that dares to stare back.

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Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come From the Tropics

Hispanic Society Museum & Library, 3741 Broadway, Washington Heights, Manhattan
March 27–June 22

For this show, Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão debuts large-scale painted ceramic plates inspired by the Amazon Rainforest as part of her ongoing Plate series. The exhibition continues outside: Varejão will wrap a painted fiberglass anaconda around Anna Hyatt Huntington’s 1927 statue of Spanish military figure El Cid in a challenge to its themes of imperialism and human superiority over nature.

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Take it home, for (__) shall not repeat the error.

Apexart, 291 Church Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
March 28–May 24

Named after an ambiguous translation of part of an epitaph in Japan’s Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, this group show contends with the United States’s development of the nuclear bomb. Beginning with uranium mining in the Congo and continuing on to the weapon of mass destruction’s nuclear waste footprint, the exhibition calls upon painting, drawing, animation, and more, to construct a linear narrative of the Manhattan Project.

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Opening in April

Martin Beck: … for hours, days, or weeks at a time 

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Connecticut
March 30–Oct. 5

Before rainy-day ambiance YouTube videos, there was Syntonic Research Inc. In the 1970s, the American label sold vinyl recordings of the natural world, intended to increase listeners’ efficiency at work and at home. Artist Martin Beck uses a range of mediums to explore this sonic series, considering how end goals of productivity — and even domination — are often couched in the language of self-care and comfort.

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Amy Sherald: American Sublime

Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Meatpacking District, Manhattan
April 9–Aug. 10

The largest survey of Amy Sherald’s career travels from San Francisco to the Whitney this spring, including over 40 works from 2007 through today in Sherald’s signature grisaille portraiture style. In addition to the 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama that catapulted the artist into the spotlight, the survey includes her painting of Breonna Taylor as well as new and rarely seen works.

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WORKING KNOWLEDGE: Shared Imaginings, New Futures 

The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse, The Bronx
April 11–July 6

An indoor garden ecosystem and an interactive chatbot are just two of the works populating this uniquely engaging show, which gathers artist-designed tools for change — and invites visitors to take them up. Eleven artists and collectives each present a participatory project reflecting a commitment to grassroots organizing, with the South Bronx community at its center.

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Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
April 18–Jan. 18, 2026

Through an ever-expanding oeuvre of short films, collages, and multimedia painting, Rashid Johnson has considered Blackness, culture, and the making of art history for nearly three decades. This mid-career survey displays his body of work in the Guggenheim’s rotunda, from a sculptural stage for performances on the ground floor to a site-specific work on the top.

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Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction

Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
April 20–Sept. 13

From basketry to painting, this exhibition weaves together approximately 150 objects and artworks that challenge the boundaries of textile as a form. It’s a star-studded show — the works of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers, and Hannah Höch offer invigorating encounters with canvas, paper, and linen — but there are quieter stunners, too, such as Ed Rossbach’s membranous synthetic raffia web.

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Sargent and Paris

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
April 27–Aug. 3

John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X,” infamous at the time of its completion in 1884 for the sitter’s risqué dress, is in the spotlight once again in this exhibition exploring the artist’s decade studying in Paris. The show will delve into the process behind the pivotal portrait and, crucially, bring Sargent into conversation with the network of patrons, artists, writers, and other contemporaries he encountered abroad.

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Spring Art Fairs

Future Art Fair

May 7–10 | futurefairs.com
Chelsea Industrial, 538 West 28th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan

Future Art Fair returns to Chelsea Industrial to celebrate its fifth anniversary, marking its establishment in the city’s fair scene after launching on shaky ground during the COVID-19 pandemic. Starting this year, the fair will allocate 15% of its profits to a fund that allocates grants to emerging art dealers.

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Frieze New York

May 7–11 | frieze.com
The Shed, 545 West 30th Street, Hudson Yards, Manhattan

Since its launch in 2012, Frieze New York has presented ambitious gallery lineups and themed presentations from solo artists and groups. This year’s iteration will see its return to The Shed with over 65 exhibitors, where visitors should be sure to stop by the Focus Section, which spotlights emerging artists and galleries and has a track record for showcasing some of the strongest presentations at the fair.

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NADA New York

May 7–11 | newartdealers.org
548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan

The New Art Dealers Alliance’s fair is known for bringing younger galleries to the fore. Though already in its 11th year, the New York edition maintains a signature supportive community studded with small and midsized galleries.

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Clio Art Fair

May 1–4, 8–11 | clioartfair.com
456 West Broadway, Soho, Manhattan

Held biannually, this self-described “anti-fair” is known for platforming artists without exclusive New York City gallery representation. Clio’s spring edition will take place over the course of two weekends and feature approximately 30 independent artists, who will present works running the gamut of both mediums and prices.

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Independent Art Fair

May 8–11 | independenthq.com
Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street, Tribeca, Manhattan

Independent Art Fair celebrates its sweet 16 this year with 82 invite-only exhibitors and a new curatorial initiative focusing on artists who haven’t had more than one solo show in New York. Aptly dubbed Independent Debuts, 22 galleries will be participating in this section.

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1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair

May 8–11 | 1-54.org
Halo, 28 Liberty Street, Financial District, Manhattan

The only art fair focused on work by African and diasporic makers, 1-54 has shifted to a Fidi venue for its select curation of over 40 galleries. Emerging, mid-career, and established artists will exhibit in this year’s edition, including Renée Stout, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Aïcha Snoussi, and Slimen Elkamel.

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The Other Art Fair

May 8–11 | theotherartfair.com
ZeroSpace Brooklyn, 337–345 Butler Street, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn

Based in Brooklyn, the Other Art Fair stands out for its affordable entrance fees and inclusive ethos, built on a premise of accessibility. This year’s edition will feature over 100 independent artists with artworks priced as low as $100 or less, alongside a photobooth section where visitors can get their portrait taken by Anna Marie Tendler, artist and author of Men Have Called Her Crazy (2024).

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TEFAF New York

May 9–13 | tefaf.com
Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan

The 11th edition of TEFAF will once again take place at the Park Avenue Armory, where a roster of 91 global exhibitors will present works including visual art, jewelry, antiquities, and design pieces. Alongside exhibitor booths, attendees can check out the fair’s historic period room displays.

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Opening in May

Collection in Focus: Faith Ringgold

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
May 9–Sept. 14

In Faith Ringgold’s “Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach” (1988), a family gathers on a Harlem roof, the George Washington Bridge spanning the horizon line and Ringgold herself aloft in the starlit sky. The Guggenheim will pair Ringgold’s iconic quilt with related works, including pieces by those who inspired her, like Picasso, and those she in turn inspired, like Sanford Biggers.

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Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk

Parrish Art Museum, 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, New York
May 11–Sept. 21

Recall an experience so impactful it colored the rest of your life. At the Parrish Art Museum in Long Island, you can see evidence of such a moment in the work of Sean Scully. In 1982, the artist stayed in Montauk for a single month for a residency; this survey showcases how that interplay of landscape and light inflected his abstract paintings for almost half a century after, right where it all began.

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Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers

Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan
May 11–Sept. 27

Never-before-seen botanical drawings by the beloved Hilma af Klint will showcase her signature gentleness in each leaf, stamen, and petal. The Swedish mystic artist believed that human truths could be found in the mute wonder of nature. Gazing into the carmine red of a barely blooming tulip supported by a fresh green stalk and bulbous root, you’d be hard-pressed not to believe her.

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Outdoors in the City

Iván Argote: Dinosaur

High Line at 30th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Through Spring 2026

Colombian artist Iván Argote reimagines New York City’s most polarizing bird on a massive scale for Chelsea’s elevated public park. Perched above 10th Avenue on a concrete plinth, this 2,000-pound, nearly 16-foot-tall hand-painted sculpture is both a humorous commemoration of the pigeon and a thought-provoking installation that raises questions about the transformation of urban landscapes and the historical narratives embedded in monuments.

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Huma Bhabha: Before the End

Brooklyn Bridge Park (Public Art Fund), Pier 3 Greenway Terrace, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn
Through March 9

In Brooklyn Bridge Park, four massive bronze sculptures with organic material for heads (bones, horseshoe crabs) and plinth-like torsos rise from the earth atop cement blocks. These sculptures are sphinx-like in their awe-inspiring inscrutability, and recall Assyrian reliefs scored out of rough earth. 

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The Socrates Annual

Socrates Sculpture Park, 32-01 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, Queens
Through April 6

Since 2001, the Socrates Sculpture Park’s fellowship program has provided financial and technical support to up-and-coming artists to produce public projects for its yearly park-wide exhibition. This year’s cohort takes on the theme of invasive species through a range of associations, from spotted lanternflies to nationalist media propaganda.

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Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye

JCDecaux bus shelters across New York City (Public Art Fund)
Through April 6

Known for her meticulous photographic practice, which merges collage with installation, Carmen Winant presents 11 compositions documenting cross-country road trips, consisting of more than 1,200 film stills she and her mother took when they were teenagers. Fragmented timelines assembled from Super 8 and 35mm frames comprise the artist’s most personal work yet, to be displayed across 300 bus shelters spanning New York City, Boston, and Chicago.

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Van Gogh: Painting with Flowers

New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Boulevard, Bronx Park, The Bronx
May 24–Oct. 26

Forget those “immersive” van Gogh shows that only immerse viewers in projections. At the New York Botanical Garden, you can experience the revered painter’s artworks amid a botanical wonderland. Celebrate spring with recreations of van Gogh’s masterpieces composed of flowers — and pretend you’re actually there, in the blooming fields with the artist himself.

Be part of an engaging panel discussion that delves into the evolution of graffiti as an art form and the lasting influence of visionary artist and collector Martin Wong. Tracing its origins in New York City’s subway tunnels and streets to its eventual recognition in galleries and museums, graffiti has had a profound impact on urban culture and artistic expression.

Join Hrag Vartanian, Editor-in-Chief of Hyperallergic, as he moderates an insightful panel featuring artist Lee Quiñones, PPOW Gallery Co-Founder Wendy Olsoff, and Sean Corcoran, Senior Curator of Prints and Photographs at MCNY. Together, they will explore the social and political forces that propelled graffiti’s ascent and its evolving impact. The conversation will also shine a light on Martin Wong’s pivotal role in preserving graffiti’s legacy, particularly through his vast collection that played a key part in bringing the art form out of the underground.

Arrive early to explore the exhibition: Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection, which provides a window into a vibrant subculture of young creators and highlights previously unseen treasures from the Museum’s major collection of graffiti-based art.

Get Tickets – $25 | $10 for Hyperallergic Members

This event is produced in a partnership between the Museum of the City of New York and Hyperallergic.

About the Speakers

Sean Corcoran

Sean Corcoran is the Senior Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York. He previously served as Assistant Curator of Photography at George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. His exhibitions have included Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs, Brooklyn: The City Within: Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, the current Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection. He has written extensively on photography and graffiti, contributing to more than two dozen publications, including essays for City as Canvas, Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection (Skira Rizzoli), Elliott Erwitt: At Home and Around the World (Aperture), and I See a City: Todd Webb’s New York (Thames & Hudson), Loisaida: Street Work 1984-1990 by Tria Giovan (Damiani) and has edited an upcoming publication on the photography of Robert Rauschenberg due in the summer of 2025.

Lee Quiñones

Lee Quiñones is considered the single most influential artist to emerge from the New York City subway art movement. He is a celebrated figure in both the contemporary art world and in popular culture circles, faithfully producing work that is ripe with provocative socio-political content and intricate composition.

Quiñones was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1960 and raised in New York City’s Lower East Side. One of the originators of street art, Lee started painting on New York City’s streets and subway cars in the 1970s. Over the next decade, he would paint over 100 whole subway cars throughout the MTA system, then shift to a studio-based practice. Lee was instrumental in moving street art above the ground when he created the first handball court mural in 1978. 

In 1980, Lee had his first New York show at White Columns, ushering in an important era as spray paint made the transition from moving objects to stationary canvas works. His work was included in the critical Times Square Show (1980); Graffiti Art Success for America at Fashion Moda (1980); the New York/New Wave show (1981) at PS1; and, in Documenta #7 in Kassel, Germany (1983). In the past decade, his drawings and paintings have been shown in East Village USA at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (2005), The ‘S’ Files at El Museo del Barrio (2010), and Looking at Music 3.0 at the Museum of Modern Art (2011). He has had solo shows at MoMA PS1, Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati, the Fun Gallery, Barbara Gladstone, Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Lisson Gallery, Barbara Farber, and Nicole Klagsbrun, among others. 

Quiñones’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Groninger Museum (Groningen, Netherlands), and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, Netherlands). 

Wendy Olsoff

Wendy Olsoff co-founded P·P·O·W alongside Penny Pilkington in the first wave of the East Village art scene in New York City in 1983. Since its inception, the gallery has remained true to its early vision, exhibiting work in all media with a focus on politically and socially engaged work, figurative painting and ceramics.

After meeting Martin Wong in the early 1980’s, P·P·O·W began representing him in 1990, and has managed his estate since his passing in 1999. The gallery has continuously championed Wong’s legacy, exposing his work to younger communities through intergenerational exhibitions and collaborations extending outside the art world.

An alumna of William Smith College (1978), Olsoff has lectured extensively throughout the United States at universities and museums. In 2012, Olsoff was a recipient of the Visual AIDS Vanguard Award for the gallery’s dedication and support of artists in the LGBTQ+ community and her ongoing leadership in the fight against censorship. She is a founding Charter member of the Council for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and served on the Board of Directors of the Art Dealers Association of America as well as Visual AIDS.

Hrag Vartanian

Hrag Vartanian is editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic, which he co-founded with his partner, Veken Gueyikian. In 2024, he was a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale University and was awarded a Susan C. Larsen Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Arts Writing by the Rabkin Foundation.

Julien Creuzet has reimagined his French Pavilion exhibition from the 60th Venice Biennale for The Bell / Brown Arts Institute. Merging immersive video and archipelagic sculptural installation, Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon (2024) extends the artist’s focus on water as a site of both historical and contemporary traumas and emancipatory futures. A liquid ecosystem of voice, texture, sound, and moving image as divine presence, this multisensorial project is deeply sonic, drawing from hip-hop, jazz, and other musical forms and bodily gestures across the African diaspora. Creuzet’s practice has long referenced legacies of colonialism, and his challenge to the architecture and history of the French Pavilion extends to Brown University’s campus and the centrality of Providence, Rhode Island, within the Black Atlantic.

At Brown, Creuzet expands his sculptural practice while introducing new forms of environmental affect. Six massive steel floor sculptures commissioned for The Bell are installed across the List Lobby and into the gallery, with mercurial amalgams of tropical foliage and animals silhouetted and superimposed onto islands of layered meaning and metaphor. Shimmering under the light of four large projection screens, these metal objects create an aquatic visual presence. 

The translinguistic soundscape of Attila cataract (…) is a dirge to those who have experienced death in the Black Atlantic, both forced upon by others and through forms of self-emancipation. Six songs feature lyrics written by Creuzet — predominantly in creolized French with real-time translation in Portuguese, English, and Spanish available on a large flatscreen — with the aim of reflecting the migratory and cultural entanglement of the Caribbean in defiance of colonial borders and nation-states. Overflowing at and beyond the gallery space, the songs were composed to accompany a four-channel video installation, forming the project’s core conceptual elements as it travels beyond Venice.

In development since 2020, Attila cataract (…) began as an exhibition co-commissioned by The Bell and Le Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble and its director, Céline Kopp. The announcement that Creuzet would represent France in the 60th Venice Biennale evolved the project, with Kopp and curator Cindy Sissokho organizing a prelude survey of Crezuet’s work in the fall of 2023 at Le Magasin, titled Oh téléphone, oracle noir (…), followed by Kopp and Sissokho’s curation of the Venice Pavilion in 2024.

Attila cataract (…) is on view at The Bell through June 1. 

To learn more, visit bell.brown.edu.

When wildfires swept through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena last month, the fate of the fairs participating in LA’s February Art Week was an open question. Many in the art world wonder whether it was too soon after a major tragedy to move forward with such a grand event, especially one so commercially driven. But as the dust settled and the smoke cleared, five of the six fairs — Frieze, Felix, the LA Art Show, The Other Art Fair, and Post-Fair — announced that they would be returning this year as planned, citing their commitment to supporting LA’s artistic community and their faith in its resilience at a fraught moment. Below is a handy guide to these shows along with a handful of offsite and alternative events and exhibitions that characterize the breadth and endurance of the city’s creative communities.

Fairs

Frieze

February 20–23 | frieze.com
Santa Monica Airport, 3027 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica

Frieze LA will bring nearly 100 international galleries to the Santa Monica Airport, with highlights including LA-based artist Lila de Magalhaes’s chalk and thread creations at Matthew Brown’s booth, a presentation of Noah Purifoy’s assemblages at Tilton, the United States debut of Chris Burden’s 2001 installation “Nomadic Folly” at Gagosian, and South African gallery Southern Guild’s first Frieze showing. Also keep an eye out for the Frieze Focus section featuring 12 emerging galleries, organized by curator Essence Harden, and Frieze Projects, including Ozzie Juarez’s homage to South Central swap meets and Madeline Hollander’s choreographed airplane rides.

Felix

February 19–23 | felixfair.com
Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles

The beloved hotel fair returns to the Hollywood Roosevelt for its seventh edition. Visitors can leisurely meander in and out of ground-floor cabana booths surrounding the swimming pool famously painted by David Hockney before heading upstairs heading upstairs to the tower presentations, accessed via the warren of crowded, winding halls. Nearly 70 galleries from around the world including over 30 first-time exhibitors will be participating, among them murmurs and Charlie James from LA, Voloshyn Gallery from Kyiv and Miami, Brigitte Mulholland from Paris, and Magenta Plains and Mrs. from New York.

LA Art Show

February 19–23 | laartshow.com
Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles

This veteran art fair is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, returning to the LA Convention Center with over 70 galleries from around the world. Don’t miss the retrospective of the fair’s non-commercial exhibition DIVERSEartLA, launched in 2017; Robert Vargas’s large-scale mural painted live onsite; and a presentation of works by Inna Kharchuk, Anna Veriki, Iryna Maksymova, and Liza Zhdanova, four woman Ukrainian artists reflecting their experiences of war, displacement, and resilience.

The Other Art Fair

February 20–23 | theotherartfair.com
2800 Casitas Ave, Atwater Village, Los Angeles

The Other Art Fair returns for its 13th edition in Los Angeles, relocating to a new spot in Atwater Village. Primarily showcasing the work of artists who do not have gallery representation, the fair features 140 exhibitors with a focus on accessibility, including a selection of original and limited edition art under $500. Highlights include the presentation of a new section of Judy Baca’s ongoing historical mural The Great Wall of LA (2025), Anna Marie Tendler’s “House of Self” photobooth, and a presentation of work by the MFAs of LA, a series focused on emerging artists from fine arts graduate programs in the Greater Los Angeles area.

Post-Fair

February 20–22 | post-fair.com
Santa Monica Post Office, 1248 5th Street, Santa Monica

Launched this year by LA gallerist Chris Sharp, Post-Fair is a stripped-down, no frills show that bills itself as an alternative to the pomp and excess of the global art fair circuit, bringing the focus back to the art with affordability ($10 tickets!) and fellowship in mind. Located in a Santa Monica’s former Art Deco post office, the fair’s debut edition will feature single-artist presentations by 29 galleries, ranging from the storefront space House of Seiko and the London experimental gallery Harlesdeh High Street to the international powerhouse Sprüth Magers.

Events

One Hundred Percent

Through February 22 | instagram.com/griefxhope
619 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los Angeles

In response to the wildfires devastated large swaths of Los Angeles last month, Hammer Museum curator Aram Moshayedi began reaching out to artists who had been directly affected, asking them to contribute one work each for a group show. The result is One Hundred Percent, a pop-up benefit exhibition featuring roughly 100 artists representing a diverse cross-section of LA’s creative community — a striking illustration of the number of artists impacted by the tragedy. As the show’s title declares, 100% of the profits will go directly to the participants.

Anti-Frieze: LA

February 21 and 22, 6–10pm | antifrieze.xyz
The Reef, 1933 South Broadway, Downtown, Los Angeles

The organizers of the Anti-Frieze performance festival insist they don’t harbor any ill will towards the major art fair (“We think Frieze is cool!”, they exclaim). But the event, organized in conjunction with the CalArts REEF Residency, undoubtedly offers a non-commercial alternative to the market frenzy taking place simultaneously across town. Anti-Frieze features five “time-based experiences” spread over two evenings, including Genevieve Fowler’s reimagined Passover Seder “Long Stretches of Short Time,” Nicholas Ginsberg’s “Container Port no. 1,” which explores global networks of trade through light and sound, and Amy Chiao’s “ur already in eutrophia,” a theatrical mediation on hygiene and geometry. Make sure to scope out the offerings before you go, as attendees must RSVP in advance.

Kronenhalle Lïds

Through March 22 | johndoegallery.com
107 East 11th Street, Downtown, Los Angeles

The brainchild of Raffi Kalenderian and Alberto Cuadros, Raffi and Al’s is part-ongoing performance project, part-group show, and part-pop-up saloon, offering a convivial space for the art world weary to wet their whistles. Its latest iteration is Kronenhalle Lïds at John Doe Gallery, a mash-up of the famed Swiss art bar and the ubiquitous cap store found at malls throughout the US. True to its irreverent spirit, the list of participating artists includes local favorites Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Mia Scarpa, and Frances Stark alongside big names that may or may not actually be featured, such as Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall. For night owls, the bar will be open for happy hour from midnight to 4am on Wednesday, February 19.

Mohilef Open Studios and Canyon Castator: Cannon Fodder

Saturday, February 22, 12-4pm | instagram.com/mohilef_studios
720 East 18th Street, Downtown, Los Angeles

Located just south of the 10 freeway in Downtown LA, Mohilef Studios is a converted industrial building that houses workspaces for 33 artists. On Saturday afternoon, they’ll be opening their doors for a building-wide open studios event, with food from Toro Antiguo, drinks by Recess and Dosi Dosi, and music by The Agency Art House. Concurrently at Mohilef, Diane Rosenstein Gallery will be opening an off-site exhibition of large-scale, maximalist pop-culture and comix-inflected paintings by Canyon Castator, who helped convert the Mohilef and another building into artist studios with his father and serves as an artist liaison.

Eastside Gallery Day

Friday, February 21 | instagram.com/theotherartfair
Various locations, Eastside Los Angeles

Much of the fair-related action this week is taking place on the Westside; however, several Eastside galleries have banded together to draw crowds to the other side of the 405 (and even the 5!) Highlights include Keith Boadwee’s cheeky transgressions at The Pit, new shows at historic house-galleries Sea View and the Wolford House, and a day of musical performances to accompany Tim Biskup’s print release at Face Guts. The evening caps off with an afterparty at the Silverlake Lounge hosted by Devin Troy Strother.

Redacted Lincoln Heights DTLA

February 19–23 | redacted.lacityart.org
Gallery Thirtysix, 1260 South Figueroa Street, Downtown, Los Angeles

This scrappy DIY pop-up exhibition originally borrowed its name from a well-known global art fair juggernaut until organizers received a cease-and-desist letter — which they promptly screened onto t-shirts — and settled instead on the absurd moniker Redacted Lincoln Heights DTLA. Organized by Wyatt Mills, Ben Quinn, and Raffi Kalenderian, the second edition of Redacted will take place on the 36th story of a downtown skyscraper in the aptly named Gallery ThirtySix and feature the work of 20 artists including Zoe Alameda, Solomon Rousseau, Meg Jorgenson, and others.

The Netherlands has agreed to return 119 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria per the country’s request, marking the single largest return to date of Benin antiquities looted by the British military as part of its 1897 punitive expedition, as announced Wednesday, February 19. Stolen from the Kingdom of Benin (now part of modern-day Nigeria) by British soldiers and eventually acquired by the Dutch State Collection, 113 of the objects to be returned are held at the Wereldmuseum Leiden and the remaining six at the municipality of Rotterdam.

Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) put forth the repatriation request in September 2022, about a year after receiving a 2021 provenance research report from the Wereldmuseum on collections related to the Kingdom of Benin, and two years after the Colonial Collections Committee of the Netherlands published its 2020 advisory report recommending that the Netherlands “consider requests for the return of cultural objects in the possession of the Dutch State from source countries colonised by other [European] powers.”

The Committee assessed Nigeria’s request as well as the Wereldmuseum’s provenance research and determined last October that the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture, and Science Eppo Bruins should move forward with the unconditional restitution of the objects.

Bruins co-signed the repatriation agreement with NCMM Director General Olugible Holloway in Leiden on February 19.

Consisting of plaques, personal ornaments, and figures, the collection of objects will be returned to the Nigerian government, which will then decide how and where they will be displayed. The six objects from the municipality of Rotterdam, also associated with the British expedition of 1897, include a bell, three relief plaques, a coconut casing, and a staff.

“This restitution contributes to redressing a historical injustice that is still being felt today,” Bruins said in a press statement about the agreement signing in Leiden. “Cultural heritage is essential for telling and living the history of a country and a community. The Benin Bronzes are indispensable to Nigeria. It is good that they are going back.”

“We thank the Netherlands for their cooperation and hope this will set a good example for other nations of the world in terms of repatriation of lost or looted antiquities,” said Holloway.

Photography, in one conception, is the art of constructing fictions. Working with, alongside, and against conventions of portraiture photography, Paul Mpagi Sepuya manipulates the gaps between image and object. He creates, negotiates, and frustrates desire and intimacy — viewers glimpse fantasy, but never quite reach a state of full enjoyment of it. In TRANCE, his second solo show at Bortolami, the artist elevates this longstanding interest in toying with the medium of photography into a maze of repetition, seriality, and cross-referencing.

Two freestanding billboard structures, together entitled “Studio Mirror Diptych (_DSF3596, _DSF3598)” (all works 2024) dominate the entrance to the exhibition. But they face away from the viewer, denying easy access. A billboard is a public monument that traffics in commerce and consumption, therefore eliciting identification, yet here they are reoriented inward, suggesting introspection or intimacy. As we come around to the front, we see that these works capture the process of production: Older works are hung on walls beside studio equipment, acting as props. The artist himself is depicted but disembodied, split in half by the gap between the billboards with only the outer edges of his limbs visible. A mirror in the image confuses any deciphering of depth. It’s unclear what’s being documented by the artist’s camera, seen at the right edge of the leftward billboard — possibly us. The act of sitting for photography, traditionally a passive position, is here turned against itself: the positions of spectator and performer switch off, dissolving the fourth wall and complicating a linear sense of time in which a work is completed and then viewed.

Communicative efficacy is also thrown into chaos elsewhere in the exhibition. In “Night Studio Mirror (_ DSF1073),” we see the artist holding a piece of cloth in front of his torso, documenting himself, his viewer, or an unknown third subject via a camera on a tripod. But a tilted mirror in the background beside him coyly reveals the artist’s naked buttock, opening up a new pictorial plane as well as a space of desire. The artist, trying to cover up his nakedness, is betrayed by the mirror — or perhaps it was all intentional. If eroticism is the desire for the unseen, then the camera at his hip, with its phallic rod and knob, stokes that desire. This game is reprised in works like “Gallery Gazing Ball (DSCF1919)” in which a beautiful young man (a collaborator? a lover?) looks disaffectedly downward, as if evading representation, in front of what appears to be a reflective sphere. Here, the phallic rod holding up that ball threatens to obfuscate his mostly revealed penis, again playing with the eroticism of the seen and unseen. 

Psychoanalysis figures the phallus as the thing that we desire but cannot have. In these photographic fictions, we sometimes feel that we’ve captured that object of desire — but only for an instant, before we realize we’ve fallen victim to Sepuya’s dazzling techniques of mirroring and misdirecting. The real thing, he reminds us, might not even be in the picture.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: TRANCE continues at Bortolami (39 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through March 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

Two decades have passed since the last exhibition devoted solely to the paintings of Rudy Burckhardt. Never one to toot his own horn, Burckhardt was a polymath whom the poet John Ashbery characterized as “unsung for so long that he is practically a subterranean monument.” The paintings are just one part of his diverse oeuvre, which also includes photographs, films, and the autobiography Mobile Homes (1979). Within each of these mediums, he explored multiple avenues. It is this multiplicity that makes him both memorable and elusive and why Rudy Burckhardt: A Painting Exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery is a must-see event. Through his directness, modesty, and scrupulous attention to detail, the artist’s representation of the oddness of the ordinary is unrivaled. 

The exhibition is comprised of 16 paintings — mostly Maine landscapes (1972–97) and New York cityscapes (1970–87), as well as a 1947 self-portrait and a 1968 still-life — accompanied by a group of paintings done on large dried, perennial mushrooms, arranged on a table. It’s works like these that have thrown people off when encountering Burckhardt’s art. He was a serious artist who never took himself too seriously. He painted manhole covers and lichen clinging to trees, things everybody saw but never stopped to look at closely, much less paint. 

In the undated “Pond #1,” Burckhardt depicts a fir tree on a horizontal canvas, defying the convention that it should be on a vertical support. A large pond stretches across the upper half of the picture plane, trees and hills beyond it, cloud-studded sky above. The tree is in the foreground on a gently sloping field demarcated by low stone walls. Nothing about it appears heroic. It stands slightly off center and alone, overlooking the pond. This is how I think Burckhardt saw the world, with an innocent, egoless eye, as interested in the details as in the entire view. He liked to see from a distance, as a flaneur walking in crowds, looking down at feet and from rooftops, surveying the entire scene, including each brick in the wall. His meticulous attention to detail never calls attention to itself — he was too modest for that. 

“29th Street Panorama” (1979) showcases Burckhardt’s mastery at joining two views replete with details, here, a broad city view and a close-up of a brick wall. The eye is constantly refocusing, moving in and out, and yet the painting never dissipates into its plethora of particularities; multiple things within the visual field can serve as focal points. In a brick building to the right of a gray one, we can see into the large windows; the overhead rows of fluorescent tubes remind us that the city is full of people we never see. 

Burckhardt portrays an unpeopled view of the city, yet through his attention to each brick and fluorescent light, he honors different forms of human concentration. This is one of the conceptual through lines connecting his paintings, photographs, and films. He is celebrating human activity, whether walking in an empty forest or among pedestrians, standing on a rooftop, or looking at the lichen on a tree. Nothing was without importance. Even though he photographically chronicled the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Willem de Kooning, at a time when artists were touted as heroic, he showed a softer, more vulnerable side of what art could be. In this and other ways, he was an outlier in the art world. 

His outlier status becomes all the more evident when looking at the mushroom paintings, which are captivatingly weird, even though the subjects are straightforward — self-portraits, portraits (including part of his wife, artist Yvonne Jacquette’s, face), rooftops, and landscapes. The paint handling can be blunt and awkward, and, like a watercolor on paper, nothing can be scraped away or altered after it is put down. In “Edwin” (c. 1975), the face of his longtime friend, the poet Edwin Denby, and the mushroom’s shape are identical. While the cycle of birth, death, decay, transformation, and rebirth was likely not on Burckhardt’s mind, I could not help but make the connection, while also sensing his droll humor. In Burckhardt’s work, one thing leads to another, and the interconnectedness of all things slowly reveals itself. 

In his essay “How I Think I Made Some of My Photos and Paintings,” he explains:

The finished picture is visualized beforehand, and the subject is more important than how it is painted, brought to a degree of completion, clear without ambiguity, without loose ends, as if it were the only painting ever made, outside of trends or history.

The complexity of his work is easy to overlook, because he calls attention to neither his mastery nor his labor. He was a modest polymath who loved being alive and in the world. With no trace of nostalgia, he looked at his surroundings carefully and tenderly.

Rudy Burckhardt: A Painting Exhibition continues at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (11 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through March 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

A sweeping exhibition of works by the acclaimed American painter Amy Sherald, best known for her portraits of former First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, is coming to New York City this spring. Nearly 50 portraits of Black Americans will go on display as part of Amy Sherald: American Sublime at the Whitney Museum of American Art from April 9 through August 10. The mid-career survey is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a New York museum. 

Spanning works from 2007 to the present, the show will explore Sherald’s signature figures rendered with skin tones in shades of gray and colorful clothing against vibrant backgrounds, merging black-and-white photography aesthetics and American Realist painting traditions to redress art history’s long exclusion of Black subjects in portraiture.

The exhibition will feature a slew of works, placing rarely-seen paintings alongside those that have garnered widespread acclaim, such as Sherald’s official portrait of Michelle Obama, the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition grand-prize winner “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” (2013), and the artist’s moving tribute to Breonna Taylor, a Louisville medical worker who was killed by police in 2020. Taylor’s name became a slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement, drawing attention to police violence against Black women and the #SayHerName campaign.

Amy Sherald: American Sublime will be paired with a billboard installation across the street from the museum’s Gansevoort Street entrance and the High Line that will bring together four portraits by the artist. Titled “Four Ways of Being,” the commission will go on view on March 25 and remain on display through September.

The survey’s New York presentation, curated by Sarah Roberts, will follow its debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. After its run at the Whitney, it will travel to Washington, DC’s National Portrait Gallery, where it will go on view from September through February 2026.

Last year’s representatives for Australia at the Venice Biennale, and the winners of the Golden Lion top prize, have called for reinstating the artist and curator originally selected for the 2026 pavilion. Creative Australia, the federal body organizing the pavilion, announced that it was withdrawing the appointment of Lebanese-born artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino on February 13. In a statement reproduced in full at the end of this article, the Bigambul-Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose said they were “appalled” by the decision.

In 2024, Moore and Buttrose became the first team from Australia to secure the prestigious event’s top prize for Best National Participation for their pavilion presentation kith and kin. The project consisted of redacted coroners’ reports for Aboriginal people who died while in detainment and a chalk-written diagram documenting 65,000 years of Moore’s family lineage.

Today, the duo criticized Creative Australia’s board for abandoning its biennial appointment of Sabsabi and Dagostino “quickly and without transparent process,” describing the move as “a corruption of [the federal body’s] core principles.” The decision to nix the 2026 artistic team artist came less than a week after their selection, and followed media and political scrutiny over some of Sabsabi’s previous work, setting off a series of staff and board resignations and eliciting immediate outrage from Australian arts community members.

“It is distressing to see that the arms-length objectivity of the Australia Pavilion’s selection process is so easily undone and that the independence of Creative Australia is so quickly compromised,” Moore and Buttrose said in their statement.

“To regain its credibility, Creative Australia must return to its founding mandate: supporting artistic practice, advocating for freedom of expression, and promoting the understanding of the arts,” the pair continued.

In an email to Hyperallergic regarding Creative Australia’s rescission, Sabsabi and Dagostino wrote: “We are deeply disappointed by Creative Australia’s decision to withdraw our appointment to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale,” describing the experience as “profoundly traumatic … personally and professionally.”

The pair asked for privacy at this time, but added: “We are grateful for the support from the arts community and the public, and we remain committed to the fundamental principles of artistic expression and cultural dialogue.”

Read Moore and Buttrose’s full statement below.

As the 2024 Artistic Team for the Australia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, we were beneficiaries of Creative Australia’s unwavering support. Creative Australia always shielded us from external pressures. Our Venice Biennale experience was positive and rewarding professionally and artistically. We are exceptionally grateful to have had this opportunity made possible by the support of the Australian Government and the generosity of private philanthropy combined. 

Our project, kith and kin, was selected by an esteemed independent international jury and Creative Australia, with Creative Australia reserving the final decision. The merit of this arms-length selection process was proven with kith and kin being awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Pavilion, the first time Australia has received this recognition since first attending the Venice Biennale in 1954. We understand that the same rigorous process was used in the selection of the 2026 team of artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino. 

We were appalled to learn that on 13 February the Board of Creative Australia quickly and without transparent process rescinded its contract with Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino. While their statement did not clarify the board’s reasons for their dismissal, the timing coincides with politically motivated accusations questioning the artist’s integrity in the media and in Senate Question Time. It is distressing to see that the arms-length objectivity of the Australia Pavilion’s selection process is so easily undone and that the independence of Creative Australia is so quickly compromised. To regain its credibility, Creative Australia must return to its founding mandate: supporting artistic practice, advocating for freedom of expression, and promoting the understanding of the arts. The decision by the Creative Australia Board to remove the 2026 Artistic Team is a corruption of its core principles, and the longer-term and wider implications for Australian artists, art professionals and audiences are unacceptable. 

We call for transparency on the Board of Creative Australia’s decision-making process and for the reinstatement of Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino as the 2026 Artistic Team for the Australia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Fashioning Wonder: Cabinets of Curiosity, the newest exhibition at The Museum at FIT, provides the first in-depth exploration of the fascinating connections between fashion and cabinets of curiosity. Wunderkammern, or “cabinets of curiosities,” emerged in the 16th century as precursors to modern museums, gathering rare and intriguing artifacts from around the world. These collections often included textiles and fashion, demonstrating the global influence of style and craftsmanship. Fashioning Wonder examines this legacy, presenting fashion through the lens of curiosity, collecting, and creativity.

The pieces on view, many of which are being displayed for the first time, reflect the rarity, beauty, and originality of objects found in these early collections. Featuring more than 200 garments and accessories mostly from the museum’s extensive collection, Fashioning Wonder showcases designers such as Dior, Schiaparelli, Pucci, and Vivienne Westwood, among many others. 

Curated by MFIT Curator Dr. Colleen Hill, the exhibition is organized into 10 thematic sections:

Specimens illustrates fashion inspired by natural history, including a 2013 Tom Ford gown intricately beaded in a zebra pattern with a horsehair “mane.”

A striking central birdcage displays feathered objects in Aviary, such as a table vividly adorned with feathers by Bill Cunningham, on view for the first time. 

Designs influenced by the human form appear in Anatomical Theatre, including a 2013 Arzu Kaprol dress made from metallic leather with a cut-out skeletal design. 

A celebration of fine craftsmanship, Artisanship features miniature fashion objects and historical dressmaking tools that can be admired for their intricate handicraft. 

Kunstkammer (“Chamber of Art”) fuses fine art and fashion, including a 2018 Comme des Garçons dress printed with the 1591 painting “Vertumnus” by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. 

Inspired by 17th-century paintings, Vanitas explores themes of mortality and luxury, including a pair of Sophia Webster’s elegant butterfly shoes, representing the fragility of life.

Reflections and Refractions comprises objects embellished with shimmering materials, such as a 1996 dress by CD Greene, designed for Tina Turner, with rhinestones and mirrors.

Illusions features a 1955 dress by Pucci, made from the label’s impressively convincing “visone” (mink) printed silk, complete with “tails” edging the skirt hem.

The last sections are intended for audience interaction, an important aspect of experiencing the early cabinets of curiosities. In What Is It? visitors are encouraged to engage with historical fashion objects, test their knowledge, and experience the sounds and construction of select pieces.

Finally, The Senses includes a touchable replica of a c. 1948 Molyneux dress (made by Katherine Shark, a graduate student in FIT’s MA Fashion and Textile Studies program), shown alongside the original object.

The exhibition is on view at The Museum at FIT in New York City through April 20.

To learn more, visit fitnyc.edu/museum.

Hundreds of artists rebuked the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in an open letter this week after the agency imposed new requirements for grant applicants not to operate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs or use federal funds to “promote gender ideology.”

The updated compliance standards for applicants come after the NEA canceled its Challenge America grant for “underserved communities” and announced that funding priority would be given to projects that “celebrate and honor” the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

On Tuesday, February 18, 463 artists and cultural workers sent a letter to NEA leadership, as reported by the New York Times, asking the agency to reverse course on its compliance with President Trump’s recent executive orders prohibiting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives in federally funded agencies and recognizing only two genders in the federal government. 

According to the updated NEA compliance guidelines, organizations submitting a grant application certify that they will provide records of their compliance with executive orders in addition to preexisting NEA requirements, including adherence to acts prohibiting age and disability discrimination. 

An NEA spokesperson has not yet responded to several inquiries. 

In response to Hyperallergic’s request for a signatory list, theater director and 2019 MacArthur Fellowship recipient Annie Dorsen said the list was private. In a document obtained by Hyperallergic, artists said they elected to be anonymous because they felt the letter would be “stronger without specific authors attached.”

Among the artists who have publicly stated their participation in the missive is performance artist Holly Hughes, a member of the group known as the NEA Four. In 1990, the NEA revoked Hughes’s and three other artists’ grants after Congress passed a “decency” clause that allowed it to reject applications based on subject matter. The artists, the majority of whom belonged to the LGBTQ+ community, then sued the NEA in a case ending at the Supreme Court, where justices upheld the clause. 

“The attacks on artists occurred then, as now, in a very censorious moment with a national freak out about the popularity of hip hop, and restrictions on the dissemination of information about reproductive services and safer sex information,” Hughes told Hyperallergic.

In Tuesday’s letter, artists accused the agency of abandoning its mission to “foster and sustain an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States” and asked it to reverse its current requirements and refuse similar future restrictions. The undersigned also accused the institution of “conforming to Trump’s reactionary and discriminatory executive orders.”

“Artists are not in the business of promoting ideology (whatever that means),” the letter reads. “We are compelled to tell our truths, to create community around the stories that give life to those truths, and to make common cause with others while we share this time on earth.”

Hours after the artists sent the letter to NEA officials, the agency held a prescheduled webinar on the contested new guidelines during which Michelle Hoffman, director of Arts Education for the NEA, said that compliance requirements for federal funding have existed for decades.

“All applicants for federal funds must sign an Assurance of Compliance,” Hoffman said. 

Hoffman said the Challenge America was rolled into its Grants for Arts Projects Programs as a matter of efficiency, but later added, “In accordance with executive orders, we will not fund projects that include DEI activities.”

Addressing the focus of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence projects to the new guidelines, Hoffman said the NEA had already partnered with Congress on special projects in 2016 under the Obama administration. A sentence stating that these projects would be given funding priority has since been removed from the NEA’s website. 

Hoffman did not explain why eligibility for organizations applying for Grants for Arts Projects increased from three years of arts programming to five years. 

While Hoffman said that requiring compliance with federal policy is a well-established practice for grantmaking agencies, the open letter signatories said the NEA had made a “short-sighted decision” to conform with orders that have the potential to be negated on constitutional grounds. 

“The two targets of these restrictions: queer and trans artists, and the much broader overlapping communities signified by anti-DEI language, are being targeted in all aspects of public funding,” Hughes told Hyperallergic.

A “black box” — variously a flight data recorder, theater, and camera — is essentially a repository for different modes of memory. Many are in close conversation in American photographer Dona Ann McAdams’s moving new autobiography, aptly titled Black Box. Just as her images are emphatically her own, so too is the form of this book that charts her four decades as a photographer, activist, and witness to history. Two expressive strands, one a retrospective of her strongest visual work and the other a series of flash memoirs, join to produce an object that is greater than the sum of its parts — a singular fusion of literary and photographic art.

Born in 1954 in Ronkonkoma, Long Island, McAdams posits that as a baby, her most present parent was the television set whose “way of seeing” primed her for a life behind the lens. Indeed, one of the most arresting images in the book shows baby Dona propped, hauntingly alone, in front of an overexposed screen that glows like an unearthly robot overlord. Most children of the mid-century can relate, though we may not have proven the astute student of its visual lessons that McAdams did.

The next childhood memory she offers is that of seeing her first horse, a Shetland pony. Its primacy in these pages indicates the transformative role of horses in her life and work. Her photographs of people and events, taken with a beloved Leica M2 over the course of a decades-long career, situate her squarely in the tradition of 20th-century documentary and street photography, including the work of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Helen Levitt. But her horses (and also goats) belong visually to another world, their beauty rendered almost abstract, their obdurate mystery intact.  

Black Box is not an illustrated life but a pictured one — by which I mean deliberately composed as an artwork in a class of its own. Growing up with working parents, her relationship to Catholicism, her realization of her attraction to women in every sense, and other details of McAdams’s personal history are entwined with accounts illuminating the development of her practice, from her first camera — a talismanic Polaroid Swinger whose instant film proved too expensive for much use — to the image she displayed for critique at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974 although she was not formally enrolled. Winogrand, then a guest instructor, singled out the picture with encouraging praise: “This is a really good photograph.” It is, as well as unmistakably influenced by the eminent photographer. So are several others, particularly those that envision the type of American landscape in which signage eclipses the humans it is meant for.

A sense of the uncanny pervades both photographs and texts throughout Black Box. 1980s and ’90s New York City, where McAdams was charged with capturing the seminal performance artists of the time as house photographer at Performance Space 122, was a busy intersection with a broken stoplight: Major social-cultural movements collided continuously. Yet McAdams had an eerie ability to encounter the influential movers and events of the day no matter where she was, from San Francisco to Australia to Central America. It is her generous openness to the moment that magnetized pivotal personalities and incidents. A memorial to these moments made of poetry and light, Dona Ann McAdams’s book of remembering is not easily forgotten.

Black Box: A Photographic Memoir (2024) by Dona Ann McAdams is published by Saint Lucy Books and is available online and through independent booksellers. The companion exhibition Dona Ann McAdams: Black Box will be on view at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery (144 West 14th Street, West Village, Manhattan) from April 18 through June 7.

Pioneering Conceptual artist Mel Bochner, whose work centering linguistics and mathematics upturned the traditional understanding of visual arts, died at age 84 on Wednesday, February 12. The news of his death was confirmed by Peter Freeman Inc. gallery in New York, which has represented the artist since 2006.

One of three children, Bochner was born to a traditional Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1940. His father Meyer was a sign painter and his mother Minnie (née Horowitz) was a homemaker. The artist cites his father’s occupation and the time he spent as his apprentice as major influences on his creative pursuits, recalling in a 1994 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art that “paints and brushes and drawing and everything were around me all the time.”

Growing up in the Steel City, Bochner had access to a high-quality public school education and was selected among his peers to attend Saturday art classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art from age eight through high school. He pursued an art degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), observing in a 2006 interview that the program was caught between Beaux Arts and Bauhaus models at the time. After graduating in 1962, Bochner spent some time in Cape Cod, California, Mexico, Chicago, and back in Pittsburgh before ultimately moving to New York City in 1964 and finding work as a security guard at the Jewish Museum.

Bochner’s stint at the Manhattan institution lasted about a year, as he was fired for famously falling asleep behind a Louise Nevelson sculpture, but his move to the Big Apple was pivotal. He began writing reviews for Arts magazine, started teaching art history at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), and formed a circle with artists including Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, and Dan Graham. 

During his first year at SVA, Bochner was asked to curate the school’s Christmas drawing exhibition, the result of which was the landmark show Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art (1966), a series of four binders sitting on white pedestals, full of xeroxed drawings from his friends and colleagues, studio notes, and scholarly content from intellectuals across STEM fields. The exhibition has been referred to as a critical foundation for conceptual art.

Throughout the ’60s, Bochner integrated text, numbers, and mathematical or scientific diagrams into his own practice, probing visual art’s relationship with language as a medium rather than a supplemental tool, as well as the limitations, boundaries, flexibility, and permeability of language and its impact on perception. At this time, he also embarked on his Measurements (1968–71) series, calling on the understanding of dimensions, spatial dynamics, and truth of seeing versus knowing. In the ’70s and ’80s, Bochner started rejecting paper and canvas’s traditional four corners, instead his text works and explorations of abstract geometry through sculpture and installation, murals, and custom-built angular canvases that often exceeded four sides.

Bochner is best known for his vibrantly colored, sans serif “thesaurus paintings” that fixate on a word and its stream of synonyms — each with their own individual meaning and variation from the origin — connoting language’s simultaneous freedom and instability. In the late aughts, he turned away from representing the complexity of language through expansive word webs and began his iconic “Blah! Blah! Blah!” paintings, telling FAD Magazine in 2020 that the supposedly senseless chatter is “a way of shorthanding a conversation.”

“You know what I’m saying, so ‘blah blah blah,’” Bochner told FAD. “It’s a form of agreement. But it also carries a contradictory and critical meaning – what you are hearing or saying is in fact meaningless, it’s simply ‘blah blah blah.’ It’s about the emptiness, the endlessness and the darkness of the discourse.”

Bochner’s work has been featured in domestic and international solo exhibitions over the last five decades, including major presentations at Carnegie Mellon University in 1985, Yale University Art Gallery in 1995, the National Gallery of Art in 2011, the Jewish Museum in 2014, and most recently the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022.

Stony the Road, photographer Dawoud Bey’s current exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, led me to some against-the-grain thinking that provoked a few vexing conclusions. It might do the same for you. 

If you were to peer at the reclusively lit gelatin silver photographs mounted on Dibond, as I did, you would encounter forest scenes in which dappled sunlight pierces through a leaf canopy; the undulant surfaces of tranquil bodies of water reflect the sun and the nearby trees; earthen paths gouged out by humans curve and meander through verdant, natural growth; and tree limbs intervene on these paths at odd angles, arced and bent like gnarled scaffolding. One word that aptly describes these scenes is “beautiful.” 

However, Bey is depicting the Richmond Slave Trail, a two-and-a-half-mile path that once led the first Black people enslaved in the United States from the Manchester Docks to the auction houses of Shockoe Bottom, in Richmond, Virginia. The gallery’s press release insists on me seeing what is not perceptible in these images: 

Bey’s series captures the historical and emotional texture of the Richmond Slave Trail—a well-trodden path of leaves, branches, and waterways that reveal the lingering imprints of the history of enslavement in America.

This sounds like mysticism. The imprints of this history are precisely what’s not revealed; they are actually obscured by the sylvan charm of the images.

I have written in the past about Bey’s simultaneously speculative and documentary work. I still struggle to see more in these photographs than the pastoral beauty they present. I can’t perceive the African captives marched into enslavement along this track in the 1600s — to do so requires an act of imagination. Ironically, the path also exists today as a historic walking trail described on a Virginia tourism web page as part of a province that is “for lovers.” You, too, might experience cognitive dissonance given historical descriptions and analyses of the brutality of the United States’s slavery regime and the plethora of art made about this. I can’t bring these contrasting perspectives into a singular, coherent view no matter how much I rub my eyes and squint. Perhaps that’s the aim of the work: to show that documentary photography can shroud rather than illuminate.

The press release goes on to state: “Bey’s Stony the Road series is an ongoing exploration of the deep connections between African American history, the American landscape, and the traumas embedded in those landscapes.” 

Can landscapes hold traumas? And if they can, why would they hold human ones? The earth is more than 4.5 billion years old. If it has a memory, it is a geologic one. The planet might recall the Cambrian explosion, about 530 million years ago, when an abundance of animals emerged onto the evolutionary scene. It might recall the Permian extinction about 250 million years ago when something killed approximately 90% of the planet’s species. Humans only developed agriculture and transitioned to a settlement lifestyle in the past 12,000 years. While acknowledging the depths of depravity of the transatlantic slave trade, why would the land remember this when it has likely experienced exponentially greater loss of life? Perhaps I’m wrong and the ground remembers everything. But as far as I can tell, this is not in evidence.

The point is: We remember, and it’s crucial that we do, and not foist off our responsibility onto mute things that do not answer when we call. We humans have a tendency to project onto other bodies or beliefs — the universe, various gods, fate — that which our own bodies struggle to bear and our intellects struggle to hold. Perhaps we use the land as a convenient place to let these generational traumas rest because they are brutally heavy. 

The artist most effectively utilizes his imaginative powers and inventiveness in the 10-minute film “350,000” (2023), which refers to the estimated 350,000 men, women, and children sold from Richmond’s auction blocks between 1830 and 1860. The film, projected on two enormous back-to-back screens, is a collaborative project, with cinematography by Bron Moyi and the soundtrack developed with Virginia Commonwealth University Professor E. Gaynell Sherrod. The camera slowly tracks the trail, as if following the gaze of someone trying to understand where they are and what this path leads to, while at times beguiled by the light falling through awnings of leaves. The soundtrack starts out with scraping and scratching like heavy equipment being moved. It then morphs into the grunts and groans of strenuous human labor. Later still, it changes into guttural enunciations that almost approximate speech. 

What those enslaved people actually experienced can only be imagined, for the most part, because we don’t have records of their sights and sounds. But we can reach out to them by invention. This interjection of our speculation into a story of demolition and deprivation is our way of making a way out of no way. It is our way of acknowledging our profound loss. The landscape that sits in stony silence will continue to do so. Bey’s photographs don’t need the rhetorical staging of animistic belief. They are elegiac and haunting, and speak poignantly to the African-American experience of making beauty out of the most wretched circumstances. And in telling the stories they tell, they demonstrate that at times it’s not factual truth we’re after, but emotional truth, and all these truths in tandem might set us free.

Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road continues at Sean Kelly gallery (475 10th Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan) through February 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

LONDON — In early November 2024, an artwork depicting Alan Turing created by an AI robot sold for $1 million at auction. It was a watershed moment in the history not just of computing and artificial intelligence, but also its connection with art. For Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet at Tate Modern, curators Val Ravaglia, Odessa Warren, and Kira Wainstein return to this relationship in its infancy. The show spans the 1950s through the ’90s — “before the internet” is its crucial end point, i.e., before computing expanded from the physical into the digital realm of telecommunications, or the ether. The artists and exhibits on view explore the use of then newly developing technologies in the most fundamental creation of mark-making, or provoking sensory effects in the body when combined with light and sound, through to early forms of communication. It is thoroughly grounded in the real, tangible, and charmingly analogue. 

As technology evolved exponentially during this period on a global scale, and in myriad means and forms, the curators wisely stick to a roughly chronological arrangement, exploring “artists’ shared interests and collaborations.” The selection is intended as a sample, for a comprehensive and definitive overview of the work being created at this time is surely impossible; even a wall map outlining the exhibition’s themed rooms — such as Materialising the Invisible or Dialogue with the Machines — and shared connections between these and artists and movements, is so dizzyingly tangled that it is barely legible. 

Helpfully, introductory wall captions include a handful of glossary terms relevant to each room, which double as introductory themes and concepts. Under the heading “Cybernetics,” for example, are the terms “Binary Code,” “Matrix,” and “Plotter,” the last defined as, “Drawing machine that interprets computer commands to draw lines on paper using automated pens or pencils.” Nearby is a reproduction of a 1968 photograph on a plotter that has been programmed by mathematician and co-founder of cybernetics H. Philip Peterson to scan the original and map out in pixels using numbers according to tonal gradient. Next to it is an example of a “drawing” from 1965 made by one of Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s “Métamatics” — machines that generated artworks — a cluster of stabbed, colored marks. Such joining of disparate artists and methods under shared themes characterizes much of the show.  

A perhaps surprising counterpart to the focus on machines in making art is the art’s sensory effects on the brain. Writer William S. Burroughs is probably the last name you would expect to see in an exhibition on digital technology, yet here he is in collaboration with poet and performance artist Brion Gysin, who created a spinning zoetrope-like light sculpture meant to be experienced through closed eyelids, apparently intended to trigger alpha waves in the brain. Visitors are encouraged to sit and experience this 1959 “Dreammachine” (Burroughs-inspired drug reveries optional). Elsewhere are other kinetic optics pieces playing with visual perception, including Grazia Varisco’s “Variable Light Scheme R. VOD. LAB” (1964) and Marina Appolonio’s “Circular Dynamics 6S+S” (c. 1968–70), spinning, mind-melting circles of light and geometric pattern, respectively. 

Providing effective punctuation to the extensive and extensively entangled survey are several rooms containing a single work by one artist. Most popular will likely be Carlos Cruz-Diez’s immersive installation “Chromointerferent Environment,” originally created in 1974, which projects moving parallel bands of light across the walls and ceiling, while visitors can photograph themselves for the socials throwing giant balloons around. (My sympathies to the room stewards, as at least three balloons popped loudly during the 10 minutes this reviewer spent in the vicinity.) More thoughtful, though perhaps less Instagrammable, is Tatsuo Miyajima’s Buddhism-inspired series 133651, arrangements of LED numbers of differing sequences and speeds, reflecting through digital imagery his thoughts on life cycles, change, and the passage of time. 

It is safe to say that the average viewer’s level of internet savvy may render such early forays into technologically assisted art archaic, even crude. Such examples as Greek artist Takis’s 1960s sculptures, which use electromagnetics to create simplistic music may feel underwhelming to a generation for which the seemingly infinite possibilities of digital sound is a given. Yet it is important to recognize that these global efforts to embrace tech advancement occurred as a natural progression; one need only look at the many iterations of the iPhone to understand obsolescence in the quest for improvement. Instead, what is overwhelmingly affecting is the sheer extent to which human imagination and inventiveness harnessed and exploited technological progressions throughout this period, in so many innovative forms. Does a robot AI-produced portrait of Alan Turing therefore symbolize its inevitable demise? Perhaps it remains that human insight and invention are the crucial ingredients in making art. 

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet continues at Tate Modern, (Bankside, London, England) through June 1, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Val Ravaglia, Odessa Warren, and Kira Wainstein.

CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee — The Amazon workers’ strike of 2024, the United Auto Workers general strike and SAG-AFTRA strike of 2023, the New Museum unionization of 2019 — the list goes on and on. One of the defining characteristics of the 2010s and ’20s thus far is the dramatic increase in unionization efforts and strikes — a boon for proletariat workers, which Tabitha Arnold’s exhibition Gospel of the Working Class embraces in earnest.

This show consists of rugs eulogizing contemporary labor strikes, such as “These Hands” (all works 2024), which depicts the 2023 United Auto Workers general strike. Created with punch needle embroidery, a meticulous, hand-worked process, these rugs are tightly woven, highly saturated textiles that borrow the visual language and style of social realism, calling to mind artists like Faith Ringgold and Elizabeth Catlett. In “Mill Town,” the use of horizontal stratifications both orders the composition and mimics the assembly line work of modern textile manufacturing. The simplified human figures within this piece carry banners, slogans to rally around. As my eye bounced energetically over the fiery-faced figures, a similarly optimistic flame kindled within my heart.

The integration of contemporary labor strikes within the visual language of social realism creates a narrative arc that asserts that these efforts are not anomalies but rather regularities. This effort is furthered by Arnold’s presentation of archival materials alongside the textiles. Chattanooga’s specific labor history is seen via photographs, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, posters, and other ephemera mined from the university’s archives, such as a ribbon reading “IN UNION THERE IS STRENGTH” from a 1908 Labor Day demonstration. Not only are these struggles continually relevant in the history of the United States, Arnold shows us, but they are immediate to the local community. 

Many of the movements of the early 20th century, such as Suprematism, Surrealism, and Cubism, explored the immaterial, the subconscious, and the “purely” aesthetic. Social realism, which rose in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, following the First World War, was an anchor, pulling people out of the clouds and back down to earth, where hundreds of thousands of people had just died in a continental conflict. Arnold’s mix of subject and style does well to historicize these contemporary labor movements, serving as records of these moments. But art in the contemporary moment hardly needs help grounding itself in reality — in the age of social media, witnessing is forced upon us. This is not to say that art should abandon its grounding and lean into escapism — but it’s beginning to feel like witnessing is no longer enough.

Tabitha Arnold: Gospel of the Working Class continues at the Institute of Contemporary Art Chattanooga at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (752 Vine Street, Chattanooga, Tennessee) through March 8. The exhibition was organized by the institution.

Upon his return to the White House, Donald Trump has targeted transgender and nonbinary people with a string of executive orders, rolling back Biden-era protections for these groups and asserting scientifically discredited essentialist definitions of gender onto everything from travel documents to women’s sports. 

Last Thursday, February 13, these attempts to publicly erase transgender and nonbinary individuals reached New York City’s Stonewall National Monument, where the National Park Service (NPS) scrubbed any and all references to transgender and queer people from its website describing the historic 1969 uprising — including the “T” and “Q” in the LGBTQ+ initialism. 

The website changes drew immediate outrage from queer rights activists and groups including Advocates for Trans Equality, ACT UP, and Human Rights Campaign, who subsequently rallied at the monument to protest the act. They covered the site with Transgender Pride flags and signs calling attention to trans and gender-nonconforming civil rights activists such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who were at the forefront of the 1969 uprising.

“Through the 1960s almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was a violation of law, rule, or policy,” a description for the Stonewall monument now read on the NPS website, notably omitting any reference to trans individuals. Additionally, a link to a 15-part educational video series about the rebellion no longer works.

While the NPS is a federal bureau within the Department of Interior, it is unclear whether the agency made the website changes in response to a specific Trump order. NPS has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s press inquiry.

Located on Christopher Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Stonewall became the first national monument to commemorate the LGBTQ+ rights movement in June 2016 after receiving a formal designation from then-President Barack Obama. It encompasses the Stonewall Inn itself, the surrounding streets where the famous uprising took place, and the adjacent Christopher Park, which is home to artist George Segal’s “Gay Liberation” (1992) sculpture. Last year, a corresponding visitor center opened at 51 Christopher Street, becoming the first LGBTQ+ visitor center in the National Park System; its inauguration was marked by a banner protest for Gaza at the nearby AIDS Memorial.

In a joint statement posted to Instagram, the Stonewall Inn and the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative said they were “outraged and appalled” by the NPS changes and demanded an “immediate restoration” of the word “transgender” to the monument’s website description.

“This blatant act of erasure not only distorts the truth of our history, but it also dishonors the immense contributions of transgender individuals — especially transgender women of color — who were at the forefront of the Stonewall Riots and the broader fight for LGBTQ+ rights,” the statement read, citing the efforts of “countless … trans and gender-nonconforming individuals” that helped form the basis of the modern LGTBQ+ rights movement.

“This decision to erase the word ‘transgender’ is a deliberate attempt to erase our history and marginalize the very people who paved the way for many victories we have achieved as a community,” the statement continued.

The Conru Art Foundation has launched the Seattle Prize Masters Fellowship, a new two-year immersive educational program to cultivate early-career artists dedicated to classical, representational painting. The Seattle Prize includes a $50,000 annual stipend, free studio space in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square, expert mentorship, and a program to support their professional success.

The prize is the centerpiece of the foundation’s broader initiative around arts education in Seattle, Washington, which includes the Masters Academy of Art’s relocation to Seattle and the appointment of its founder, artist and educator Ryan Brown, as its first director. 

Under Brown’s leadership, the academy will administer the Seattle Prize and build new capacity for education, advocacy, and support for representational art.

“With its vibrant arts culture, global outlook, and heritage of embracing diverse perspectives and people, Seattle is the perfect home for the Masters Academy of Art,” said Brown, who founded the academy in 2008 in Utah. “We’re excited to join the arts community in Seattle.”

Seattle Prize Highlights

• Generous Stipend: A $50,000 annual stipend, to allow focus on artistic development.
• Historic Studio Space: Personal studios located in a 19th-century building in Seattle’s Pioneer Square.
• Expert Mentorship: Weekly in-studio critiques from faculty and remote guidance from world-class artists.
• Comprehensive Support: The Masters Academy is developing an ecosystem to include an onsite gallery, marketing and communications, and a growing community of patrons.

How to Apply

Applications for the 2025-2026 Seattle Prize Masters Fellowship are available to the general public and must be submitted by March 15, 2025. Early-career representational painters who demonstrate technical proficiency and a commitment to the classical tradition are encouraged to apply. Selected fellows will begin their residency in October 2025, with an initial class of six to 10 artists. 

For more information, please visit seattleprize.org.

Valentine’s Day may be over, but love in art endures — including an iconic Klimt embrace. Solve this and other clues in the mini puzzle for the month of love, including a Michelangelo biopic, Broad City‘s co-lead, and more.