AMSTERDAM — If you visit the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer, the most comprehensive retrospective of the 17th-century Dutch artist’s work to date, I might suggest going backward, starting with the last of the galleries. One of the first works you’ll encounter is “Woman Holding a Balance,” a characteristic Vermeer where the light streams in from the window to capture a beautiful moment of pause and reflection.

Next to it is the much larger and lesser known “Allegory of the Catholic Faith.” Produced just a year or so before his death in 1675, the painting is filled with symbols — the woman, named Faith, rests her foot on a globe, symbolizing the overcoming of worldliness, and she gazes upward at a glass ball, a symbol of holiness that is both empty and reflective of the entire universe.

Were you to start at the show’s entrance, however, you’d be greeted with equally religious paintings. In “Christ in the House of Mary and Martha,” his first known painting (c. 1654–55), Jesus engages in conversation with Martha, who is serving food to her guest, and Mary, who listens to him at his feet. Jesus’s hand, tilted upward in a gesture of explanation, rests at the center. It’s once again a characteristic Vermeer subject — a gentle moment of pause in glowing light — but the figures are not the Dutch middle class for which he is most known. 

Very little is known about Johannes Vermeer, but historians do know that he was raised a Reformed Protestant, only to convert to Catholicism upon his marriage to the Catholic Catharine Bolnes. As the exhibition texts describe, Vermeer’s ambitions show through in his earliest works, as at the time history painting was considered one of the highest genres of art. These early works are not his most engaging, nor his most iconic — they are, to be frank, not very interesting — and his “Allegory” feels like a cacophony of symbols that he’s trying to squeeze together like devotional checkboxes.

But the overt religiosity at either end of the show reveals a side of Vermeer that is less discussed yet essential to understanding his work. The connection between these and his secular works is evidenced in the scales of judgment carried by the woman in “Woman Holding a Balance.” Though she is ostensibly weighing her jewels to determine their earthly value, the painting of the Last Judgment behind her is a suggestion that she, too, will be judged upon her death.

From February 10 through June 4, the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands, is hosting the largest-ever retrospective of the painter, produced in collaboration with the Mauritshuis in The Hague. It represents 28 of some 37 known paintings — a tiny oeuvre given Vermeer’s outsize influence and regard in Western art. And as such, it’s worth taking time going through the exhibition.

The paintings have traveled from places like the Frick Collection, the National Gallery of Ireland,  and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. “The Girl With a Pearl Earring,” Vermeer’s most famous painting (bolstered by the eponymous film starring Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson), on loan from The Mauritshuis, is on view through March 30. 

With the majority of his work in one place, themes and overlaps between artworks are readily visible, from his color choices (the blue and gold from “Pearl Earring” appear frequently) to the placement of windows (most often on the left), and even the recurrence of certain models, like the unnamed maid in “Mistress and Maid” and “Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid,” who’s clearly modeled after the same person.

The exhibition is in turn organized thematically — starting with the section Venturing Into Town, which features his outdoor works. Other sections are themed around his interests in music and musical instruments, figures receiving letters, and reflections on faith. A timeline at the end of the exhibition, alongside his biography, helps place the paintings in the context of his life.

That such an exhibition could come together is in itself rare, as is the access and privilege required to travel to Amsterdam to see the works in person. The last Vermeer retrospective, featuring 25 works at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, was nearly 30 years ago. Fortunately, the Rijksmuseum offers a number of ways to experience the exhibition remotely. 

There is, of course, the beautiful catalogue, which details not just the works but the research conducted in preparation for the show. We learn, for instance, that Vermeer’s top patron was not Peter van Ruijven but his wife, Maria de Knuijt, who began purchasing his work around the time the artist started incorporating more secular subject matter. “The Milkmaid” originally had designs for a jug holder and fire basket that were later painted over to create the sparser background.

The catalogue is published alongside Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light and Reflection, in which author Gregor J.M. Weber contextualizes Vermeer’s production in the Catholic-Protestant conflict of 16th- and 17th-century Netherlands. The relatively young Jesuit order, whose focus was on education and the natural sciences, had a station in Delft, next to Vermeer’s home. Weber argues that this might have influenced the artist’s relationship to light, as the Jesuits there saw the divine in the workings of the camera obscura, a technology that likely inspired Vermeer: “The image of the camera obscura is also created miraculously by light (understood to be divine) and thus could serve in Jesuit devotional books as an illustration of faith,” Weber writes, referencing the sphere in “Allegory.” “Again, it is light whose reflections Vermeer uses to make this message visible. Light and its manifestations thus emerge as a fundamental interest of Vermeer’s and a constant in his work.”

The Rijksmuseum is also launching a digital platform called Closer to Johannes Vermeer, in both English and Dutch, with English narration by Stephen Fry. The experience guides viewers through thematic elements of the works, like the role of windows in his paintings and the specific type of portraiture — tronies — that he developed. And the Mauritshuis, recognizing the meme potential unleashed by “The Girl With a Pearl Earring,” has opened up the space left by the painting to fan contributions. 

Thanks to ultra-high-resolution photographs, we can zoom in on the paintings to the level of pigment particles. Each work contains points of interest with greater explanation that illuminates themes across Vermeer’s oeuvre — for example, clicking on the curtain in “The Art of Painting,” we learn about repoussoir, a technique that uses a dark element in the foreground to enhance the feeling of depth, presenting the other works that utilize this same technique. This mirrors the didactics of the physical exhibition, which help orient viewers to the works.

Spiritual elements aside, Vermeer’s work is a treasure of composition, color, and caricature that long predates the rise of photography and cinema. In a religious context, light may be a vessel of God, and in a secular context, it offers a wide range of health benefits, including vitamin D and serotonin. There is good reason we find the glow of Vermeer’s paintings so resonant.

The science of awe is emergent, but early research suggests we feel awe because it reminds us of our place in a larger, interconnected universe. At times, Vermeer was sheltering in place as the plague ravaged Delft, and he painted amid growing conflict and economic tension in Europe. Then, as now, quiet transcendence was a necessity. 

Seeing this show, I mentally returned to those haunting early COVID-19 mornings and evenings, when time slowed down and my thoughts turned inward. Those moments of quiet light were, in a word, awesome. Each text message I sent or received felt like the magic missives in “Woman Writing a Letter” or “A Lady Writing,” where the world outside beckoned through a thin veil. Music from my turntable came to me like “Young Woman with a Lute,” telling me of the world outside while holding me in the solitude. Pouring out milk (from a carton, not a jug, sadly) became an act of deep mindfulness.  

Much of what Vermeer stands for is now under question. Most of the painter’s subjects were the Dutch upper middle class, whose leisure and wealth were enabled by colonies and slavery. “Pearl Earring” was a recent target of climate protests, alongside other famous works of Western art. The role of religion in society is ever in question. And even the artistic heroism of Vermeer is more complicated now, with new research that shows his process was much messier than previously imagined.

But despite all this, Vermeer’s works continue to inspire, perhaps because they capture moments of pause we can all look back on in our own lives. At the press preview, otherwise stoic art critics and journalists giddily took selfies with some of his famous works, a scene that will no doubt repeat itself countless times as the show goes on. 

Part of Vermeer’s appeal, I suspect, is that, like those he painted, we know very little about him, and so we are free to project whatever we’d like onto his life and work. He can be a hero for depicting women’s interiority or a creep for mostly painting physically attractive ones. He can be a devoted Catholic showing the light of God or a skilled student of optical science. He can be an introverted painter or a wheeling-dealing art dealer.

I think back to “The Geographer,” one of his few paintings in which a man takes center stage. The young man, with a compass in hand, bends over a set of maps, but he looks upward, perhaps out the window or simply lost in thought. We have no official self portrait of Vermeer, but I like to imagine the geographer is a stand-in for the artist, and for all of us, really, caught in a moment when the world is much larger than we imagined and yet somehow deep, meaningful, and magical.

Vermeer continues at the Rijksmuseum (Museumstraat 1, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) through June 4. The exhibition was curated by Gregor J.M. Weber, Pieter Roelofs, with assistance by a team of scientists.

SAN FRANCISCO — Full disclosure right at the top: I found writing this review of Joan Brown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art more than a little challenging. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so torn about an artist’s work, particularly after a retrospective — Brown’s first in more than two decades — that in this case includes some 80 pieces, including a handful of witty sculptures, but mostly paintings, many of them monumental, most of them colorful and hella fun. Which is to say that I enjoyed, and admired, a lot about Joan Brown. But even after revisiting the show to check my reactions and my notes, and after reading the smart and thorough essays in the excellent exhibition catalogue (no hesitation on that count), I remain very much of two minds. Was Brown a protean powerhouse bravely willing to buck the art world status quo at any expense to her own reputation? Or was she an artist who too easily embraced ideas and influences with the same restless energy with which she took up endurance swimming, spiritual practices, and spouses?

Unlike most West Coast artists of her time — especially women — Joan Brown found success early. Born in 1938 in San Francisco, she attended art school in the city and by her late teens was already exhibiting her work and palling around with other someday-notable local artists like Jay DeFeo, Manuel Neri (second of her four husbands), and Bernice Bing (whose own retrospective is currently at the Asian Art Museum). When she was just 22, Brown’s gestural “Thanksgiving Turkey” (1959) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, and the following year her painting “Flora” (1961) graced the cover of Artforum. Inside, the magazine described Brown as “Everybody’s Darling.” But amid so much early acclaim, which included museum shows on both coasts and representation with a New York gallery, everybody’s darling went rogue.

The SFMOMA show opens with Brown’s early lauded work, big canvases that are figurative and gestural, with troweled-on swaths of oil paint applied so thick it’s almost sculptural. Brown later said of this time, “I really dug paint.” Yeah, I dig it too, and these paintings are immediately likable, if familiar, in their painterly exuberance. 

Although by the end of the decade Brown would pivot away from anything that might be called painterly or gestural, her lifelong subjects are already present — animals, self-portraits, swimming. “Girls in the Surf with Moon Casting a Shadow” (1962) beautifully conveys her lifetime love of water — a nude pair hold hands in moody ocean spray that crashes over the figures in thick, three-dimensional waves of blue paint — while “Dog and Chair in Environment” (1961) is an indoor portrait of her beloved bull terrier, Bob. Brown’s pets had human names — her cat was called Donald — while in her art animals would increasingly stand in for humans. And for herself, especially the cat.

Brown’s early success led to dissatisfaction, as much with the art market as with what she was making. She resented the easy commodification of her work, and the incessant demand for her to create something just so others could own it. She also began to feel dishonest in producing painterly gestures that implied spontaneity, whether true or not. In short, her motives were pure. But the pivot to stiff figuration and flat color planes is for me nearly as off-putting now as it was for critics in the late ’60s. 

It feels churlish to have qualms about an artist who is beloved by many in the Bay Area. Though, to be fair, maybe not as many as SFMOMA’s entrance implies by proclaiming, Joan Brown: Local Legend. While a press release describes her as “one of San Francisco’s most important local heroes,” a totally unscientific poll of some dozen Bay Area friends, mostly writers wise to local culture, found only one who knew anything about Joan Brown. And that friend discovered Brown after doing research on Bernice Bing.

If only to reveal the life and work of Joan Brown to a wider audience, this retrospective is important. There is so much about Brown to admire: a working artist all of her adult life, a revered and influential teacher, a mother who brought her son into her art, an earnest spiritual seeker, and a passionate swimmer who, with five other women in 1974, successfully sued for membership in the men-only outdoor swimming clubs of the Bay. But I’m still uncertain when considering the totality of her art.

Brown’s mature style is a little wacky (in her catalogue essay, Helen Molesworth calls Brown “wonky”), but that weirdness is offset by preternatural calm, a still, airless quality akin to ancient art, especially that of Egypt. Like ancient Egyptian art, Brown’s figures and ground have a static, timeless air. They do not explain themselves. They are evocative and mysterious, faintly familiar, but also ciphers, which can be part of their power. But I miss the energy of her early work. 

Which is not to say her mature style didn’t produce wonderful paintings, particularly the self-portraits, some as ageless as any Egyptian Fayum mummy, even with a teacup to her lips; or Brown’s dual portrait with her swim coach, Charlie Salva, deities of their pool domain; and the large paintings commemorating her dangerous Alcatraz swim with wry energy and heroics.  

Though Brown helped liberate the local swimming scene, she had little interest in feminism, much less feminist art. That’s fine, but lapses of interrogation — of herself, of culture, of history — are less easily overlooked. When she depicts herself as an odalisque, for example, she’s overtly interested in Ingres, but indicates no questions around where her blue eyes fit in to this Orientalizing, othering, sexualized trope. As Marci Kwon writes in her catalogue essay, about a painting (not in the show) in which Brown reimagines Gérôme’s “The Bath” of 1880–85, depicting a Black woman bathing a white woman, “Brown’s triptych transforms the Black woman into a black cat. … But what of the cat? She has no say in this matter. She exists in these pictures to cleanse Brown of her sins.” If Brown’s earnestness can be off-putting, it’s also sometimes more troubling. That unwillingness to grapple feels like a significant flaw.

I’m more than willing to concede that there may be something I just don’t get. Brown anticipated such ignorance. In her essay Kwon quotes from Brown’s 1983 text, “The Artist versus the Art Historian and the Art Critic,” wherein Brown asks, “Why can’t art historians and critics learn the difference between knowing and knowing about?” Brown claimed, as an artist, to know. As a spiritual seeker she sought to know more, and it led to her early death in Puttaparthi, India, where at age 52 she was killed by a falling turret, along with two assistants, while installing an obelisk she created for the Eternal Heritage Museum of her guru, Sai Baba. Spiritual artist killed by spiritual architecture. Is it tragedy or transcendence? Maybe it’s both.

Joan Brown continues at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (151 Third Street, San Francisco, California) through March 12. The exhibition was curated by Janet Bishop and Nancy Lim, SFMOMA curator and associate curator.

LONDON — It’s often revealing to see how contemporary painters relate to their predecessors. Anthony Daley has developed a body of work that directly responds to his predecessors, on view at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest public museum in London, founded in 1811. Since his arrival in England as an emigrant from Jamaica decades ago, Daley has been visiting this museum. He has long been fascinated with Peter Paul Rubens’s “Venus, Mars and Cupid” (1635). His show of 12 new paintings, Son of Rubens, is in dialogue with that work. I had never thought of Rubens’s paintings as inspiration to a contemporary abstract artist. And so I was fascinated to learn that Daley says: “I’ve been tortured and driven, educated, fathered by Rubens.”

Daley’s large paintings are closely hung in a spacious side gallery, covering the four walls, and set directly opposite “Venus, Mars and Cupid.” Daley’s and Rubens’s paintings provide a strong visual contrast. Rubens paints solid bodies, while Daley loves colors unattached to surfaces. Rubens’s blue and red fabric, the shiny armor of Mars, and the pale pink skin of Venus are colors that define the surfaces of these objects and her flesh, while Daley paints dark veils of iridescent blue, orange, yellow, and red, occasionally with black lines running across. If you let your eyes relax, you can see hints of large ghostly human figures hovering in the background. Rubens’s Marie de’ Medici Cycle in the Louvre, a series of 24 paintings, tells her life story. But Daley’s paintings have no obvious narrative, and his titles, such as “Bombshell,” “Saintly,” and “Dividing Line,” don’t facilitate interpretation. So while I admire Daley’s paintings, which are reminiscent of the 1960s color field works of Paul Jenkins, I could not initially see how he was inspired by Rubens. Nor could I understand how his abstractions relate to Rubens’s theme of love (Venus) overcoming war (Mars).

But when I went home and read, I better understood this show. In an amazing account of synesthesia, Charles Baudelaire brought to my mind a means of connection between these seemingly diverse paintings. Saying that “perfumes, sounds, and colors answer each to each,” in relationships that “chant the ecstasies of the mind and senses,” he offers a presciently abstract characterization of various old masters, including Rubens: 

Rubens, a river of oblivion, a garden of idleness, a pillow of cool human flesh on which we cannot love, but where life endlessly rides and heaves like the air into the sky and the sea within the sea.

Rubens’s theme — love conquers war — is it not presented visually in Daley’s veils of color? As Baudelaire says, the net effect of synesthesia is to blur boundaries, between the air and sea, as also within these elements, which are in constant motion. Here, I believe, we find an authentic characterization of what Daley found in Rubens, correspondences of color that can carry expressive meanings abstractly.

Anthony Daley: Son of Rubens continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery (Gallery Road, London, England) through April 2. The exhibition was curated by Lisa Anderson, managing director of the Black Cultural Archives.

PHOENIX — For more than a decade, Missouri-based filmmaker Christian Rozier has been spending time on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in eastern Arizona, where he’s collaborated with Indigenous community members using film as a storytelling platform. “We used a very participatory model,” he told Hyperallergic. “Everyone worked in front of the camera but also behind it; everyone interviewed each other and filmed each other … I was so personally inspired by my time there, and their unbelievable reservoirs of creativity,” Rozier said during the run-up to this year’s Indie Film Fest in Phoenix, where the feature film Apache Leap (2023) that he directed will anchor the festival’s inaugural Original Storytellers Night on February 22.

Filmed on the reservation and in the nearby city of Globe, the coming-of-age drama considers family expectations, financial challenges, and other pressures facing a young man who dreams of being an artist. Making Apache Leap was part of a larger initiative focused on cultivating and sustaining a growing community of filmmakers in San Carlos, through an organization called the Native Arts Film Academy, which is just beginning to ramp back up after taking a pandemic pause. 

“The idea to make Apache Leap was sparked from a few students saying we should make a film,” according to Carrie Sage Curley, one of the film’s cast members. “It’s time for more Indigenous people to be on this platform, and to use the platform to support each other.” Rozier explained, “Most film production over the last 100 years on Indigenous land in North America has had a very extractive, non-inclusive orientation. Our approach is radically inclusive and deeply communal.”

Short documentaries being shown during Original Storytellers Night will include From the Mountains to the Sea (2021, dir. Anna Marbrook), which follows tribal leaders from Arizona traveling to New Zealand to meet with Māori peoples who share experiences of protecting an ancestral river. There’s also Art of the People (2017, dir. Kiril Kirkov), which features artists in Northern Arizona who “share the heart story of Navajo religion, philosophy and way of life through live painting demonstrations.” In addition, the evening will include a screening for a short comedy documentary called “Sheep” (2020). It’s directed by Luke Hunt, a member of the Navajo Nation and Kainai (Blood) Reserve who made the film with family members at his grandmother’s residence. “We like to see true representation on the screen,” said Hunt, who started Creative Natives Productions to help make it happen. Hunt suggests that people looking for Indigenous films search platforms like Vimeo and YouTube. “There are more Native filmmakers out there than people realize.” 

Today, Hunt is in postproduction on a short film about a veterinarian who’s spent decades working in the Navajo Nation. He’s also the director of a film he co-created with designer Eunique Yazzie (Diné), which will serve as the land acknowledgment for the festival. “Land acknowledgments are a hot topic in our community and outside it,” said Yazzie, who cofounded the Cahokia SocialTech + Artspace in the Roosevelt Row arts district with social entrepreneur Melody Lewis (Mojave/Tewa/Hopi). “You have to approach the community and ask them how they want to be acknowledged, and offer space for them to do the land acknowledgment so they are speaking for themselves instead of you speaking for them,” Yazzie said.

Matty Steinkamp, who founded the Indie Film Fest in 2018, plans to make the Original Storytellers Night part of every year’s Indie Film Fest moving forward, so the festival can play an ongoing role in elevating Indigenous voices in the Southwest.

“I love the way Matty is going about this,” Yazzie said. “He lends his studio, his access, and his resources and plugs us in to help us get our ideas off the ground.” Still, Yazzie says she wishes there were more film companies that really understood how to do that. One resource is the Sundance Institute Indigenous Program, which supports Indigenous-created stories through labs, fellowships, screenings, and other gatherings designed to “decolonize the screen,” according to Institute materials posted online. “Only Indigenous voices can tell their stories with dimensionality, and the tools to make that happen are incredibly accessible,” says Rozier. “If you and your group want to do this, you absolutely should do this, and we’re here to share our experiences and lessons learned.” Rozier said he hopes that Apache Leap will inspire more Indigenous people to make their own films, and to support the work of other Indigenous filmmakers. “Even a cell phone can work for filming, which means the barriers for film production have never been lower.”  

“Our highest hope,” explains Rozier, “is that folks who come from different Indigenous communities across the country, continent, and globe will see that this is indeed possible.”

Original Storytellers Night takes place February 22, from 4pm to 9pm, at Cahokia PHX (707 North 3rd Street, Suite 130, Phoenix); tickets are $10.

DENVER — Reggaeton is booming, thanks to artists like Bad Bunny and Calle 13’s Resīdɛntə who continue to enhance the genre’s appeal with their focus on political and social change. Netflix’s new comedy series Neon is set to star Puerto Rican actor Tyler Dean Flores as a would-be reggaetonero taking on the Miami scene. The series is set to begin production in Puerto Rico from February to April. 

Neon is the brainchild of Shea Serrano, the first Mexican American to become a three-time New York Times best-selling author, whose titles include The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed (Abrams Image, 2015) with Max Searle serving as showrunner. To hear that a Netflix show about the genre is in the works wasn’t shocking, but what is strange to hear is that behind the camera — producing roles, consultants, and the writers’ room — were void of the much-needed Boricua voice. Puerto Rican filmmakers, writers, and comedians are understandably upset and are not only questioning the new comedy’s authenticity but also how its impact can continue to perpetuate the archaic idea that Latiné experiences, stories, and people are interchangeable. 

In the late 1980s, Panamanians fused Jamaican beats with Spanish lyrics to create a unique sound, reggae en español, but by the early ’90s its influence began to spread to the Puerto Rican music scene. The new genre, Reggaeton or reggae de Puerto Rico, synthesized Spanish reggae from Panama and hip-hop with Latin American and Caribbean rhythms. In the early ’90s the Puerto Rican police launched a campaign against it, confiscating cassette tapes from music stores under penal obscenity codes, levying fines, and demonizing rappers in the media as “irresponsible corrupters of the public order.” Underground cassettes were eventually sold openly in music stores and clubs, gaining acceptance as an integral part of Puerto Rican popular culture. The new genre eventually found its way to the mainland thanks to the continued diaspora due to conflicts between the US government and the island. 

For Puerto Ricans, writing a Reggaeton series without them is not only a slap in the face, it’s pretty impossible if you’re looking for an authentic storyline that has their popularized signature sazón. Puerto Ricans close to the production who have asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their jobs all have one sentiment in common: To save face, show creators have been saying it’s a show about the music and not Puerto Rican culture, but the two cannot be separated. One anonymous Puerto Rican filmmaker shared their concerns about showrunner Max Searle also not being Puerto Rican or Latiné (Searle is a top-level executive producer who has creative and management authority and is typically the head writer, script, and story editor), saying, “This to me is even more problematic. He can’t share perspectives on the culture or our experiences. This would’ve been a great opportunity for inclusion in this space and they missed the mark.”

Entertainment journalist Cristina Escobar, who first broke the story with Latino Rebels, told Hyperallergic: “I became an entertainment journalist to advance Latinx representation. Our creatives aren’t getting their due in terms of press coverage and thoughtful reviews, so I set out to better cover our community. Our communities also have specific needs that aren’t well understood in Hollywood so they aren’t getting addressed. Neon not having any Puerto Rican writers hits both of those spots — it’s an important chance to tell a Latinx story to a wide audience, with Latinxs at the helm. As one of my sources said in my article, ‘Latinos are not interchangeable.’ To have a Puerto Rican protagonist in a story about reggaeton and have no Boricua voices crafting that story is an injustice.”

One source close to the production said, “I was approached about the show but they refused to meet with me. They had their writers in mind from the beginning and those writers have even admitted that they know nothing about our culture. It’s not authentic if our people aren’t part of the creative process.”

Escobar, who created LatinaMedia.Co nearly five years ago to uplift Latina and femme Latinx perspectives in media, explores solutions to the gatekeeping. “I think we need to push as audience members, creatives, and journalists for more representation that thoughtfully and meaningfully expands how we and outsiders understand Latinx communities,” she said. “We need more and more diverse representation at all levels in Hollywood. I’m talking in front of the camera, behind it (as writers, directors, executives, etc.) and as cultural gatekeepers (aka critics, entertainment journalists, and influencers). To make that happen, we have to be loud and organized, pushing for more power at all levels.”

Blacklisting is a major roadblock for many as they discuss their concerns about the project. “Hollywood’s blacklisting game is strong,” Escobar said. “It’s an industry where they don’t post jobs, you have to be nominated by someone already involved in the project. That makes hiring as much about someone’s reputation as their credentials.”

“So when someone steps out of what is deemed acceptable behavior — and here ‘acceptable’ is defined by the White power structure — they get punished for it,” Escobar continued. “Add to that the fact that Hollywood is quick to throw out people of color, Latinxs, and women, and you have a very narrow path to success for marginalized communities. Blacklisting makes it harder for us to have meaningful conversations about what’s working and what’s not in the entertainment industry. It ties our hands and slows progress. And it’s very, very real.” 

Netflix declined to provide an official statement in response to the allegations in this article. Serrano could not be reached for comment.

Fans and scholars might be surprised to learn that the earring in Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (1664–67) may have been an imitation gem. The work is one of the Dutch artist’s most iconic paintings and inspired a 1995 historical novel that was adapted into a 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth. This discovery is one of many explored by the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer retrospective, which opened on February 10.

Vermeer brings together new research and 28 paintings, many of which institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, have loaned. The Mauritshuis museum in the Hague lent the “Girl with a Pearl Earring” to the show. Visitors can also explore the show through an online exhibition launched on January 16, allowing Vermeer lovers to view the works in ultra-high resolution photographs capturing even the tiniest of cracks and fissures in the aged canvases.

The stunning conclusion about the famed earring comes in the show’s co-curator Pieter Roelofs’s essay about Vermeer’s turn towards a Dutch Golden Age type of study called the “tronie” in the mid-1660s. Unlike a portrait displaying a living person, this genre depicts a fictitious scene, fabricating elements like the backdrop, clothes, or accessories, even if a painter uses a model. Roelofs writes that the iconic Dutch painter was interested in using the genre to explore how light and shadows interact with a face.

Roelof notes that all four of Vermeer’s tronies, “Girl with a Flute,” “Girl with a Red Hat,” “Girl with a Veil,” and “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” feature these so-called “pearls.” About half of the Dutch painter’s works include pearl earrings or necklaces that were in fashion in the latter portion of the 17th century. However, this jewelry had to be shipped to the Netherlands from South Asia and was exorbitantly priced as a result. The tronie that highlights the earring has the largest gem of the four studies. Roelofs explains that based on the size and weight of most pearls imported at the time, Vermeer wouldn’t have been able to afford the earrings he painted and likely referenced imitation glass pearls instead. 

Discoveries such as the fake earring and the artist’s interest in the camera obscura, which he acquired through encounters with Jesuit priests, excite art historians as much about Vermeer’s life as a painter has remained a mystery. Vermeer only created about 37 known works. Some wonder if an apprentice created works like “Girl with a Flute” and have even speculated his daughter Maria was the pupil. She is also thought to have been the model for “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” 

Looking for something to fill the void once season nine of the reality TV show Love Island UK finishes? Well, now you can watch seven contemporary artists from across the United States compete for a $100,000 cash prize and a chance to exhibit their work at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardens in Washington, DC, through a novel reality TV show called The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist. Set to premiere on March 3, The Exhibit is looking beyond the museum’s walls to attract vast audiences by riding the current wave of affinity for reality competition shows.

Across six episodes, artists Jamaal Barber, Baseera Khan, Frank Buffalo Hyde, Clare Kambhu, Jillian Mayer, Misha Kahn, and Jennifer Warren will create their own interpretative commission works inspired by the existing works in the Hirschhorn’s permanent collections. Lead judge and museum director Melissa Chiu will headline the panel with a series of rotating guest judges such as artists Adam Pendleton and Abigail DeVille, digital strategist JiaJia Fei, critic Kenny Schachter, and several others.

“As the national museum of modern and contemporary art, the Hirshhorn is committed to finding new ways to connect people with the art and artists of our time,” Chiu said in a statement to Hyperallergic. “Integrating our community of artists, art experts and museum-goers with the combined 100 million American households that have access to MTV and the Smithsonian Channel radically expands our reach.”

At face value, the trailer indicates that The Exhibit follows the typical formula of a reality competition: MTV News’s Dometi Pongo serves as the show’s seasoned host, the episodes will manipulate our adrenaline and emotions through dramatic sound effects and song choices, and each of the seven artists will come into the competition with a special background and message to share through their practice, determined to be America’s Next Top Artist, so to speak.

The Exhibit was developed in partnership with MTV Studios, Paramount, Smithsonian Channel, and PB&J TV + Docs and will show exclusively on MTV and the Smithsonian Channel. Considering the museum’s mission to make contemporary art “radically accessible to a vast audience,” it seems like a missed opportunity to not provide any modes of streaming the show online considering how many people, especially students, don’t really use cable TV anymore.

One thing that stands out for me is that unlike what we see in Tyra Banks’s cutthroat competition scape, the judging panel for The Exhibit won’t be picking off the artists from the pool one-by-one with psychologically damaging criticisms (looking at you, Janice Dickinson). The group of seven artists will remain on the show for all six creation rounds and high-profile guest critiques. We can only hope that the non-elimination approach is better thought out this time around compared to how it panned out in Jeffrey Deitch’s 2006 reality TV attempt Artstar, which prioritized the artist over the art.

The Exhibit will premiere on MTV at 9pm EST on Friday, March 3, and will re-air on the Smithsonian Channel at the same time on March 7.

A group of leading museum governance organizations in the United States issued a joint statement yesterday, February 9, opposing a small Indiana university’s plan to sell over $20 million dollars’ worth of art to fund improvements on freshman dormitories. The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG), and the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) collectively called on Valparaiso University’s Brauer Museum of Art to reverse course and search for other solutions to its financial woes.

As the Chicago Tribune reported, the Brauer Museum of Art plans to sell works including Frederic E. Church’s “Mountain Landscape” (c. 1849), Childe Hassam’s “The Silver Vale and the Golden Gate” (1914), and Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Rust Red Hills” (1930).

For years, Valparaiso has faced financial challenges related to declining enrollment and the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2020, the university has cut 17% of its faculty and staff. Against this backdrop, the school’s board approved selling the artworks in October of last year to help remedy the institution’s budget shortfalls. The sales have yet to be finalized, but auction house appraisers reportedly paid the museum a visit.

Backlash to the potential sales came swift and harsh with the museum’s first director and namesake Dick Brauer threatening to remove his name from the institution if the plan goes through. It was Brauer who suggested that the university purchases O’Keeffe’s “Rust Red Hills” in 1962, long before the museum was established in 1995.

Valparaiso University and the Brauer Museum of Art have not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.

“We will consider assets and resources that are not core or critical to our educational mission and strategic plan, and reallocate them to support the plan,” Valparaiso President José Padilla said in campus-wide email on February 8. The sale proceeds will help pay for a five-year strategic plan that includes improving freshman living conditions, a move that the university hopes would encourage enrollment.

In the museum world, however, Valparaiso’s planned sales would break a taboo. Although deaccessioning artworks is exceedingly common, museum governance organizations have long prohibited institutions from selling art to fund anything other than art acquisitions and care for existing collections. However, those restrictions were briefly loosened during the pandemic lockdowns as museums faced falling revenue.

“This remains a fundamental ethical principle of the museum field, one which all institutions are obligated to respect,” the joint statement reads. “In no event shall funds from deaccessioned works be used for anything other than support for a museum’s collections, either through acquisitions or the direct care of works of art.”

Even when artwork sales are technically allowed, deaccessioning announcements repeatedly stir controversy. Under AAM’s loosened pandemic policy, the Baltimore Museum of Art announced it would sell $65 million worth of art to fund an equity initiative, but facing severe criticism, the museum reversed course only hours before the works hit the auction block.

The organizations said that they “remain hopeful” that Valparaiso University will change its mind, adding that they are willing to assist the museum in finding other solutions to its financial woes.

“We stand ready to assist, in any way we are able, to find other solutions to the institution’s needs without resorting to the selling of works that can never be recovered, to the great detriment of current and future students and community members,” the organizations announced. They have not given any specific details on what help they can offer the struggling university museum.

In the small town of Conway, New Hampshire, a local bakery’s mural depicting pastries — painted by a high school art class — has spawned a conversation about government censorship of art and First Amendment rights. Owner Sean Young of Leavitt’s Country Bakery and the Institute for Justice, a libertarian nonprofit public interest law firm, are suing the town of Conway for a symbolic $1 after the zoning board ordered the mural be removed because it depicts goods sold within the shop, and therefore qualifies as an illegally large sign.

In 2021, Young bought Leavitt’s Country Bakery, a nearly 50-year-old local institution. Early last year, a friend connected Young with local Kennett High School art teacher Olivia Benish. Benish was searching for a community art project for her students, and Young agreed to let the class paint a mural on the front facade of his new business. A few months later, the students painted a mountainscape comprised of pastries — doughnuts, muffins, cookies, etc. — against the backdrop of a sunny sky, a nod to Conway’s location near New Hampshire’s White Mountains. The project took five weeks to paint and was finished in June 2021.

Only nine days after it was completed, however, Conway’s code enforcer told Young that the mural needed to be removed.

“At first I was really upset about them telling me to paint over it because it was a great thing for the kids,” Young told Hyperallergic. “It was a great art project.”

Young posted about the incident on social media and attracted droves of local supporters. He attended Conway’s August zoning board meeting, but despite citizens’ vocal outcry, the town office upheld its decision. In September, Young and a large group of community members (including Benish) advocated for the mural at another zoning board meeting, but the town office again kept the order in place. (It’s not the first time that Conway has enforced its strict sign ordinance: It recently ordered the nearby Settler’s Green outlet mall to remove its murals on similar grounds.)

Young hired a local lawyer in October, but soon, the Institute for Justice reached out and took on his case, which Young said was the only way he would have been able to financially continue his legal fight. The nonprofit organization defines itself as a “national law firm for liberty and a prominent defender of economic liberty and First Amendment rights for individuals, entrepreneurs, and businesses — especially small businesses,” and has a record of fighting small towns on similar bureaucratic oversteps.

“I think it sets a good example for all the people in town who have had their rights trampled on,” said Young. “Hopefully it will create some good change in the town and more positivity between the town board and everybody who lives here, because right now the relationships are pretty strained.”

At the end of 2022, the mural still remained on Leavitt’s Country Bakery, and the town office told Young that he could face criminal charges and fines if he did not paint over the work by February 2. On January 31, Young and the Institute for Justice officially filed a lawsuit against the town of Conway. They also filed a restraining order against the removal of the mural to which the town has agreed. As of today, the mural is still in place.

Beyond fixing what many see as Conway’s needlessly strict sign ordinance and enforcement, the Institute for Justice sees Young’s case as a fight for a bigger issue.

“This case is about the right of small business owners, and all Americans, to display art as protected by the First Amendment,” Institute for Justice litigation fellow Betsy Sanz told Hyperallergic over email. “If this mural didn’t depict donuts, the town would be fine with it. Or if this same mural was on the farm stand next door, rather than on the bakery, that would also be fine with the town. That is absurd. The government shouldn’t get to play art critic and decide what is and isn’t acceptable art, or who is and who isn’t an acceptable displayer of art.”

Conway’s zoning ordinance states that it “has no intention of restricting individual free speech, but the Town does recognize its right to place reasonable restrictions upon commercial speech.” The town has not responded to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment.

“In the end, town officials came after Leavitt’s mural not because it’s a threat to anyone, but because they don’t like what it depicts,” Young wrote in a February 7 letter to the editor of the Conway Daily Sun.

“That’s censorship, and that’s why I teamed up with the Institute for Justice to give Conway a civics lesson in the First Amendment.”

In the wake of last year’s trend of climate emergency demonstrations targeting art museums internationally, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation has announced its third cycle of the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative (FCI), $10 million worth of grants to stimulate clean energy projects across cultural institutions in the United States. Visual arts museums and art schools are encouraged to pursue funding opportunities from FCI to do their part in building and maintaining a sustainable future for arts and culture.

Eligible institutions are invited to evaluate their financial needs for clean energy projects within three tracks: scoping grants, technical assistance grants, and implementation grants. Scoping grants, ranging between $10k and $25k, are for understanding which energy and sustainability deficits are impacting the premises and recognizing the available paths for mitigating them. Technical assistance grants between $25k and $50k are for helping institutions outline the specificity and budgetary requirements of an established efficiency project for further financing. Implementation grants between $50k and $100k cover the starter costs of a fully realized efficiency project plan.

In partnership with clean energy nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), which promotes “natural capitalism,” and Environment and Culture Partners, which helps the cultural sector address environmental issues, FCI has awarded a combined $8.1 million in grants and emergency funding to 128 institutions through the last two iterations.

“The wide scope of the FCI grants accounts for and supports each of the multiple stages essential to achieving sustainability,” RMI’s CEO Jon Creyts noted. “From assessments to analysis to implementation, these art organizations are not only making their own facilities greener and more energy efficient, they are also establishing a blueprint for climate action that similar institutions can follow.”

Speed Art Museum, Phipps Conservatory, Tacoma Art Museum, the New Museum, the Visual and Performing Arts Center at Bennington College, and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York were among 48 grantees across 19 states in the 2022 award cycle. A spokesperson for the Morgan Library and Museum told Hyperallergic that the institution received an implementation grant in 2021 and 2022 to replace its cooling towers.

“The previous cooling towers were near or at the end of their useful life and operated with decreased overall system efficiency,” the spokesperson said. “These towers have been replaced with new towers, which enable the Morgan to maintain proper environmental conditions for the display and storage of the Morgan’s irreplaceable art, and to operate more efficiently, effectively reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 32 tons CO2e annually.”

FCI asks grantees to report their emissions and energy use data in a 12-month baseline report prior to the award, a 12-month report post-project, and a 24-month report post-project. FCI is accepting proposals from February 20 through March 31. Interested institutions should attend the informational webinar on March 1, from 2pm to 3pm EST.

“I don’t set out to do books for children,” said artist and writer Maurice Sendak in a 2003 interview with art historian Jonathan Weinberg. “I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think anybody knows how to do that.”

Such an attitude might be surprising, given Sendak’s success as a children’s book author, most notably for the enduringly popular Where the Wild Things Are, which he wrote and illustrated in 1963. But behind his words is a conviction that children know more than adults generally give them credit for.

“People keep things from children now,” he continued, “in the sense that we don’t want to frighten them or upset them, yet we all know they sat and watched the [World Trade Center] towers go down a hundred thousand times. They’re just waiting for you to tell them.”

Indeed, Where the Wild Things Are tells the story of a rambunctious young boy named Max who befriends and rules over monsters before he returns to the real world. The tale laid the groundwork for the idea that modern children’s books can address themes of monstrosity, disobedience, and directly confronting personal fears.

Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak is a new book from the Columbus Museum of Art and DelMonico Books, edited by Weinberg, who is also curator of the Maurice Sendak Foundation. It accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the museum, up through March 5 — the first major retrospective of the artist’s work since his death in 2012. 

Critical essays and interviews accompany sketches, self portraits, and illustrations from his lesser-known works like Little Bear (1957), Hector Protector (1965) and We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993). The book rewards readers with a deep dive into Sendak’s work and process.

We learn, for instance, about Sendak’s working routine — a “rigorous schedule,” according to his longtime assistant, and now Sendak Foundation president, Lyn Caponera, that included a daily reading of the New York Times and freshly squeezed orange juice (an excerpt of her essay is available on Literary Hub). 

His love of music was also critical to his creative process. “I can share my life with music,” he said in an interview, “much better than I can share it with anybody or anything else. And it’s also a necessity.”

Much has been written of Sendak’s own childhood trauma and upbringing in the shadow of the Holocaust. The book addresses this without centralizing its influence on his work. In his 83 years of life, after all, he encountered many other monsters to address, like the housing crisis (“I’m angry at the government taking so long to do anything about homeless kids,” he said in 1994) and, as in the above quote, the 9/11 attacks.

Sendak’s illustrations carry weight all on their own for children and adults alike, and this book beautifully captures his prolific career. As a childhood Sendak fan now grown up, I find his reflections on the wild things among us the most poignant.

“We’re all living towards the end of the twentieth century and so we’re all banged up by that fact,” he reflected in 1994. “And so we know what’s happening all over the world and we know what’s happening with scourges like AIDS. And we’ve all lost best friends and colleagues. I have lost students. To not be afflicted by this, and for the work not to show it, means you’re dead.”

Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak (2022) is edited by Jonathan Weinberg and published by DeMonico Books. It is available online and in bookstores.

Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak continues at the Columbus Museum of Art (480 East Broad Street, Columbus, Ohio) through March 5. The exhibition was curated by Jonathan Weinberg.

• With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, look no further for a fascinating history lesson (and maybe some inspiration) than Katherine Roth on the many iterations of the holiday’s card for AP News:

In the mid-19th century, some people shared “Vinegar Valentines,” a sort of anti-Valentine that featured playfully insulting verses, not unlike a modern-day roast.

Sometimes, cards involved writing in a circle or upside down, like a puzzle. Some had a decorative folded border or verses on the folds; cutwork resembling lace; or watercolor decorations of pierced hearts, lovebirds and flowers. Lover’s knots and labyrinths were also common elements.

• “What even is a documentary anymore?,” asks Reeves Wiedeman in an exploration of the commercialization boom and general state of the documentary industry for Vulture:

In 2009, researchers at American University published Honest Truths, a report on the industry, in which a nature documentarian admitted to breaking a rabbit’s leg to ensure he got a shot of a predator capturing its prey; another filmmaker couldn’t find home movies of a family featured in a historical film and simply went to a flea market, bought some Super 8 footage of a random family from the same era, and used that instead. The Jinx features the greatest documentary ending of all time — Robert Durst apparently confessing by asking himself “What the hell did I do?” on a hot mic before responding, “Killed them all, of course” — but the two lines were later revealed to have been transposed in an effort to add drama to the climax, an editing technique common enough to have its own name: Frankenbiting.

• Artist Wendy Red Star writes about the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais, whose work speaks to her own art practice and experiences growing up on the Crow (Apsáalooke) Nation in Montana:

Kimowan’s Polaroids of hand gestures are poetic, simple and powerful. My father’s first language is Crow. He told me that when he was young, everyone would sign with hand gestures while they talked. Some signs were specific to the Apsáalooke, and some could be used to communicate with neighboring tribes. My father said that he could pick up conversations from across a room by seeing the hand signs. I don’t see people sign much these days. Seeing this work made me think about my connection to Native sign language.

Art gave me a way to understand or make sense of the world. But my teachers never presented the work of Native artists alongside artists like Cindy Sherman. While I appreciate her work, I don’t connect to it in the same way.

• For Aeon, philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò writes about ideas of a ‘precolonial’ Africa that often slip into dangerous and flattening racialized narratives:

All who talk glibly about ‘precolonial’ Africa, insofar as the designation bespeaks a temporal horizon, award an undeserved victory to the racist philosopher. Of course, the ‘pre’ in ‘precolonial’ supposedly designates ‘a time before’ colonialism appeared on the continent. But how do we deign to describe a period from the beginning of time to the moment when the European, modernity-inflected colonial phenomenon showed up? It accords more of a mythological than a historical status to the arrival of modern European colonialism in Africa and its long and deep history. The ‘precolonial’ designation, in practice, even excludes two earlier European-inspired colonialisms in Africa. After all, for those of us who know our history, Roman and Byzantine/Ottoman colonial presences on the African continent were not without legacies on the continent, too.

• The New Yorker’s David Remnick takes a deep dive into Salman Rushdie’s journey as a writer before and after the fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, almost exactly 34 years ago, and where he stands following a stabbing attack last August:

With every public gesture, it appeared, Rushdie was determined to show that he would not merely survive but flourish, at his desk and on the town. “There was no such thing as absolute security,” he wrote in his third-person memoir, “Joseph Anton,” published in 2012. “There were only varying degrees of insecurity. He would have to learn to live with that.” He well understood that his demise would not require the coördinated efforts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or Hezbollah; a cracked loner could easily do the job. “But I had come to feel that it was a very long time ago, and that the world moves on,” he told me.

• And in The Drift’s latest edition, Zain Khalid offers an opposing critical perspective on Rushdie’s position in mainstream consciousness post-fatwa and a review of his latest novel Victory City, published this week:

There are passages, primarily in Victory City’s second half, where the old Rushdie shines through. When Pampa asks her transcriber and acolyte what she might wish for herself in the future, the acolyte responds, “I want to be a foreigner.” Her description of what she envies about foreigners sounds a lot like a diagnosis of Rushdie’s success: “They just come and go, no ties, no duties, no limits,” she says. “They even tell us stories about ourselves and we believe them even if they get everything upside down. It’s like, they have the right to tell the whole world the story of the whole world, and then just… move on.” The exigency of this sentiment recalls the best passages in Shame, places where Rushdie’s visceral portrait of unbelonging collapses the distance between the reader and the text. Unfortunately, at almost every other juncture in Victory City, sensation supersedes internality. There are beheadings, rapes, years of drought, sometimes occuring all on the same page. Stories begin and are swiftly orphaned. More of them should have been. 

• Manhattan’s World Trade Center Oculus station opened a mere seven years ago to the tune of $4 billion dollars but has already begun showing signs of wear. Christopher Bonanos investigates why for Curbed:

But that’s not all that’s going on here. Matthew Crawford, superintendent at a company called Gem Construction and Waterproofing, oversaw a lot of the floor’s installation and maintenance, and when I called him, he knew what I was asking about right away. He mostly brushed aside my suggestion that the choice of stone was the fundamental problem, though he agreed that it’s “not the most resilient. There are millions of little hammers, every single day, pounding on that floor. I’d see a woman with stiletto heels running there, and I’d cringe.” The deeper problem, he explained, is that there’s a radiant-heating system underneath of the type you see in a lot of premium construction these days. Thin pipes snake around, back and forth, atop a layer of insulation, and they’re filled with a glycol solution that is warmed up and pumped around. Radiant heat has many advantages — evenness, silence, no vents to collect dirt or blow dust around — and a warmish stone floor is pleasant during the cold months. As it warms up, the stone (like all materials, though less than some) expands. The edges press on one another, harder and harder, and eventually they shatter.

• BBC produced a documentary — using funding from BP — that sanitizes the Azerbaijani regime and its ongoing persecution of Armenians, James Dowsett reports for openDemocracy:

Chris Garrard, from the arts campaign group Culture Unstained, told openDemocracy that media sponsorship arrangements such as BP’s “legitimise” fossil fuel companies as they continue to invest in new oil and gas infrastructure, rather than trying to meet net-zero goals.

Given the Azerbaijani regime’s track record of human rights abuses, the BBC film’s “positive cultural perspective on Azerbaijan” worked to “BP’s advantage”, Garrard said.

• Following her attendance at the new AP African American Studies framework’s unveiling celebration, the New York Times’s Mara Gay pens an unequivocal opinion skewering the College Board’s exclusion of crucial topics and thinkers from the curriculum:

The College Board, though a nonprofit, is a fixture in the country’s education infrastructure. Taking its courses and succeeding on its exams has long been a way for savvy high school students to make themselves more attractive to the most selective colleges and, upon acceptance, win college credit.

The inclusion of Black history into this enterprise is a meaningful act.

The Black scholars who pioneered the teaching of Black history long before it was popular to do so understand this. “We have to tell the truth,” one of those scholars, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University, said Thursday evening. “The truth is we helped to build this country.”

• ProPublica’s Ash Ngu shares a list of must-dos for reporters covering the repatriation of Native people’s remains, including notes for non-Native writers on respectfully connecting with Native Nations:

Reach out to tribal reps early, since they can be very busy. Know that tribes have different views on how best to repatriate. Tribes are not always ready to repatriate and don’t always want remains to be physically returned. Sometimes multiple tribes make competing claims that take time to sort out. Tribes may be open to respectfully conducted research.

Also, keep in mind that tribal leaders may not want to discuss repatriation and might not see news coverage as beneficial, especially if they’re in the middle of consulting with institutions and need to maintain those relationships. Repatriation can be a private issue in some cultures, and some do not have a cultural protocol for handing the dead.

• Artist and composer Christian Marclay speaks with France 24 about fusing mediums to create work that “gives shape, form, and color to sound”:

• In an essay for Atmos, writer and conservationist Ashia Ajani muses on roly-polys, green space, and their connection to Black futurity:

When I first began researching pill bugs, I was interested in learning about their parallels to how anti-Blackness poisons the Black experience: our bodies, like those of the pill bug, are in a perpetual state of grief cycling, attempting to filter out the bad in order to pave a path forward to reach the good. But the more I learned about these fascinating little crustaceans, I discovered that they are able to survive despite carrying this heavy metal accumulation in their guts until they die (and, eventually, returning the toxins to the earth as they decompose). It’s as though their life is a barometer of ills—and their death a silencing.

• The New York Public Library will soon be home to archival issues of the East Village Eye, which produced about 72 editions in its eight years of operation, Hannah Gold writes for the New Yorker:

Graffiti, too, was taken seriously: the same 1982 issue profiles, in addition to Fab 5 Freddy—who’d been part of the Fabulous 5 group in the late seventies, known for spray-painting entire subway cars—Futura 2000, another graffiti artist who’d begun on subways, and by 1981 was touring with the Clash, creating work live onstage as the band performed. The critic Steven Hager, who was fired from the Daily News for praising graffiti, has said that the Eye was the only place that would let him write seriously about the medium. There’s a friendly rivalry between the Eye and the Village Voice about who was the first to ever define hip-hop in print, but the Eye seems to have won. (In that 1982 interview with Afrika Bambaataa, Michael Holman offered this parenthetical: “Hip hop: the all inclusive tag for the rapping, breaking, graffiti-writing, crew fashion wearing street sub-culture.”)

• Farah Bakaari pens an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books on the shows Mo and Ramy, and what sets them apart from other television series focused on Muslim communities in the US:

Not all Muslim-centered shows are interested in questioning this representational paradox. In United States of Al, for instance, Islam is thoroughly assimilated and digested through the gaze of whiteness. Muslims go from being the object of Americans’ fears to the object of their amusement. We Are Lady Parts, a joyful ode to the enduring power of female friendship and the autonomous language of music, entirely sidesteps any meta commentary on its historic arrival. Instead, it lets the diversity of its bold characters do the talking. In We Are Lady Parts, whiteness and Islamophobia are a daily nuisance, something to be endured and managed so that one can get on with her day to make a living, to make art. Shows like Mo and Ramy, however, are more explicit about their desire to not only represent Muslim lives on TV but also explore the perils and potentials of making art under the white gaze.

• You know those stunning photos from the new James Webb telescope we’ve all been fawning over? Telescope administrators are considering lifting a restriction that keeps them out of the public eye until one year after they’re taken, sparking mixed reactions from scientists:

Now, though, with the federal government pushing for more taxpayer-funded research to be made public instantly, telescope managers are pondering whether all of the data collected by JWST should be available to everyone right away.

They’re considering a similar change for the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. Currently, scientists who get a chance to use that instrument generally enjoy six months of exclusive access to their observations.

Proponents of open access say that sharing all of these space telescopes’ findings immediately could accelerate new discoveries and maximize the return from these powerful scientific assets.

Critics, however, worry that this could exacerbate existing inequities in who gets to do astronomical research, and perhaps even result in shoddier science as scientists race to be first to find hidden gems in the data.

• Clare Thorp unpacks our fascination with TV shows’ opening sequences, starting with the intricately animated, Game-of-Thrones-esque intro to the popular show The Last of Us:

In the case of The Last of Us, which premiered last month, that world was a post-apocalyptic landscape ravaged by a fungal pandemic which turns much of the population into zombie-like creatures – part human, part terrifying mushroom. An adaptation of a hugely successful video game, the show’s set-up was already familiar with many. But for those who’d never played the game, the show’s opening credits gave them a few clues.

Various types of fungi slink rapidly across the screen, spreading outwards and upwards, a microcosm of the natural world consuming everything it comes across – beautiful, yet devastating. Look carefully, and you might spot the fungi morph into a map of the US, a city skyline, a screaming face or two human figures – signs of hope in the darkness.

• Beyond despicable. Universities are forever professional lingo-ing students out of their basic needs:

• The feline cinematography you didn’t know you needed!

• And if you’re not much of a cat person, here’s an adorable peek at the painterly puppies of New York City’s only dog museum:

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.

In 1926, Italian Futurist painter Fortunato Depero debuted “Squisito al selz” at the 15th Venice Biennial. The painting advertised Campari, a popular Italian aperitif, and belonged to a genre Depero called quadro pubblicitario or “advertising painting.” Depero’s Biennial presentation was an offshoot of a half-decade collaboration between the artist and the brand; in 1924, he was put in charge of the company’s advertising brand and campaigns, and produced many materials for them in his signature style.

This fine art crossover of Depero’s commercial art triggered a movement within avant-garde Italian art that lasted a solid 30 years, through Italy’s economic boom following World War II. This blurring of influences between experimental art and advertising is the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York. From Depero to Rotella: Italian Commercial Posters Between Advertising and Art opens mid-February at CIMA, and will feature nearly three dozen examples of crossover art within this movement.

From pasta, to men’s hats, to theater performances, to typewriters, and beyond, artists of the time applied modern aesthetics to create graphic, engaging, color-blocked posters (among other advertising materials) that not only forwarded Modernist and Futurist thinking among artistic circles into the common visual vernacular, but made advertising a form of artistic expression in its own right. New headway was made by Depero and his fellows, regarding lithographic techniques, photomontage, and typography. These techniques and artist vision promoted the products of iconic companies integral to Italy’s economic boom, including Barilla, Campari, Olivetti, Fiat, and Pirelli.

The exhibition features numerous posters from major Italian institutions and corporate collections, and private collections in the United States, made by a cohort of artists including Erberto Carboni, Fortunato Depero, Nikolai Diulgheroff, Lucio Fontana, Max Huber, Bruno Munari, and many others.

A lot of writers, myself included, have connected Judy Ledgerwood’s exuberant abstractions to the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Historically speaking, Pattern and Decoration (1972–1985) challenged the canon-making orthodoxies and conventions that dominated much art in the 1960s and ’70s, and that continue to cast their shadow. This challenge to the canon, which manifests itself as celebrations of the female body and sexuality in Ledgerwood’s work, is inseparable from her vocabulary of hand-painted quatrefoils, interlocking triangles, and thickly painted labial shapes. What distinguishes Ledgerwood’s work from the earlier generation of women artists working in the domain of Pattern and Decoration is its bluntness and humor. 

Like Mary Heilmann, whose bright geometric abstractions loosened the rigidity and joylessness of Minimalism, Ledgerwood has a current of impropriety, painterliness, waywardness, and humor in her work, upending the symmetry and repetition that are common to decorative and ornamental arts. Ledgerwood’s ribald interruptions and optical shifts are part of what holds the viewer’s attention. 

“Jaywalking” (2022), the largest painting in her debut exhibition, Judy Ledgerwood: Sunny, at  Denny Gallery (January 7–February 11, 2023), exemplifies how far the artist will go to undo P&D’s conventions of structure and repetition without abandoning them altogether. Starting on the left side of the sagging top edge, Ledgerwood has painted irregular yellow, turquoise, blue, and black triangles in varying sizes, along with a few rectangles that fit together. The monochromatic triangles, which contain incomplete and complete quatrefoils, descend down the surface, with a few drips of color here and there.

The exception is a large, oddly shaped white area descending from part of the top edge. In this area, Ledgerwood has outlined incomplete black quatrefoils with a red dot in the center. This incomplete quatrefoil is echoed by the flat ones painted within the triangles. Other than the use of the same vocabulary throughout, there is no underlying pattern or order to the arrangement of the triangles. 

The cropped, cartoonish quatrefoil shapes of “Jaywalking” evoke male and female genitalia; the repetition of an irregular red orb works both formally and evocatively. Working with a limited vocabulary, Ledgerwood’s improvisational approach is anarchic, playful, matter-of-fact, and direct. She does not seem to go back over the painting or feel the need to revise and fuss. It’s as if Henri Matisse’s cut-outs were romanced by anthropomorphic cartoon mice. That humor — which is rarely seen in art associated with the P&D movement — is just one of the many aspects contributing to the artist’s singularity.

In “Footsteps” (2022), Ledgerwood divides the painting into three vertical bands, in yellow, red, and turquoise. In the yellow area is a staggered arrangement of white quatrefoils, while in the red band are quatrefoils within turquoise diamonds. And in the turquoise band are black quatrefoils within black diamonds. The suggestive metallic outline of a thick vertical almond is added to the shapes in this band. The balance between symmetry and repetition is always off-kilter and tweaked, largely because Ledgerwood paints directly onto the canvas without going back into the work. 

Using a simple, open vocabulary in conjunction with a palette of bright yellows, deep blues, reds, black, and turquoise, Ledgerwood keeps finding ways to be improvisational within the domain of Pattern and Decoration. Interruptions and shifts in the patterns lift the work out of the soothing predictability of repetition. Sometimes her quatrefoil drawings are positively goofy, underscoring the elasticity of the shape. Given her commemoration of female sexuality, how might we read these material signs of change and adaptability? Paint is always both form and symbol in these works, which significantly distinguishes her paintings from those of her predecessors. 

The deeper tension running through Ledgerwood’s work is between structure and improvisation, order and play. By always keeping both in close proximity, she has found a way to be painterly and direct — something associated with Abstract Expressionism more than Pattern and Decoration. More importantly, she has expanded on something that was central to Abstract Expressionism, which subsequent generations have suppressed or ignored: its vulgarity, as found in Willem de Kooning’s “Women” paintings. However, the vulgarity in Ledgerwood’s work is explicitly female — preposterous and candid. Indecency and decorum are never completely cleaved from each other in her art, and that combination offers a lot to ponder. 

Judy Ledgerwood: Sunny continues at Denny Gallery (39 Lispenard Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through February 11. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

SALT LAKE CITY — In a small but impactful exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA), independent curator María del Mar González-González brings together the work of four stylistically divergent Latina/x artists. 

Beyond the Margins: An Exploration of Latina Art and Identity succeeds in two critical respects. First, it demonstrates the simple fact that not all Latine artists make work exclusively about their own ethnic experience. Second, identity-based art may seek not simply to destroy the Western canon but instead to exploit contemporary art’s lexicological familiarity with Western art history to disrupt, complicate, or expand audience associations with this canon.

The term “Latina/x” denotes “both a femme and gender-neutral term for a person of Latin American origin or descent who now lives in the US,” according to a museum didactic label. The exhibition features work by Nancy Rivera (Mexican-American), Tamara Kostianovsky (Argentinian-American), Frances Gallardo (Puerto Rican), and Yelaine Rodriguez (Afro-Dominican).

Rivera is a celebrated artist and arts administrator based in Salt Lake City. Her 2018 series Impossible Bouquets: After Jan van Huysum features striking inkjet photographs of lush floral arrangements, inspired by 17th- and 18th-century Dutch still life tradition. With flowers set atop boldly colorful backgrounds, these works relish in academic and formal properties of artmaking.

Hanging from the ceiling beside Rivera’s photographs is Kostianovsky’s “Every Color in the Rainbow” (2021), a sculpture of a turkey carcass that harkens from the same visual Dutch tradition of still lifes and market scenes as Rivera’s. The work, made from discarded fabric, exudes a haunting quality, linking the corporeal mechanized destruction of factory farming with the wasteful mass consumption of clothing often overflowing in landfills.

Gallardo’s “Carmela” (2012/2022), from a larger series, is an utterly spellbinding paper collage that’s as fascinating visually as it is conceptually. With intersected patterns based on meteorological data such as rainfall and wind speeds, Gallardo combines layers of paper cut to a painstakingly detailed and mesmerizing effect.

Rodrigez’s striking multimedia fabric portraits “Saso” (2021) and “Yaissa” (2022) feature Afro-Dominican artists whose work highlights the debt owed to the African voices in Dominican culture, and who, despite the monumental cultural influence of African diaspora, have been long neglected from historical narratives.

Such narratives are noteworthy in their own respect, but especially given Utah’s overwhelmingly White population (92% according to the 2022 U.S. Census Bureau). Importantly, Utah’s Latino community is included in the state’s second largest ethnic demographic at 12.7% and this demographic is projected to constitute the greatest numerical increase by 2065, according to research from the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.

Some may argue hosting such an exhibition within a contemporary art museum in Utah’s most liberal city is preaching to the proverbial choir. Yet, there is something powerful about visualizing each artist’s creations mere steps from the gallery’s entrance, as if to solemnize that these figures and the communities they descend from are here to stay, equipped to situate themselves within an art historical trajectory that transcends contemporary art’s focus on identity as art and on a more inclusive view of what we know as American history.

Beyond the Margins: An Exploration of Latina Art and Identity continues at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (20 South West Temple, Salt Lake City, Utah) through March 4. The exhibition was curated by María del Mar González-González.

ALBUQUERQUE — Twenty-one vinyl records played simultaneously over three days last November, during the opening weekend of The Mountains Wore Down to the Valleys, a semi-durational sonic and visual art installation created by artists Marisa Demarco and Adri De La Cruz. The needles bore deeper and deeper into their locked etched grooves, distorting (though the term is debatable) Demarco’s urban sound compositions. Because the vinyl was etched, not pressed, the records’ number of plays were finite. Dust formed on the surface, evidence of things breaking down and, eventually, stopping.

Today, each record sits motionless in its respective player, on a pedestal custom-made by De La Cruz, arranged in a single-file line down the center of a wide corridor leading to a small gallery. The varying heights of the pedestals create a ridgeline-like effect that mirrors that of the Sandia Mountains as seen from Albuquerque. Many of us in this high desert city orient ourselves by those mountains or the Bosque, the woods that border the Rio Grande, some welcoming the chance to wander through either.

It’s easy to miss things the first time ’round, so I appreciated the structure of the show, which encourages repeat visits, not only to witness how the sounds (and silences) of the installation changed, but to consider other components in relation to change and the passing of time, a lineage of sorts.

Some of the records have labels with text comprising a poem that reads, in part, “When our scale of time is small / Just those days, these hours … With so much loss / But even those peaks will wear down / the wind and rain and sun.” The few records without labels act as line breaks, maybe even infinite pauses, between the phrases. The scale of the pedestals facilitates visitors stopping at each and bowing at the waist to get closer, to hear more clearly, not unlike bending down to see a flower or bug or some other curiosity while hiking in the mountains or walking along the water — in essence, to understand. Inevitably, I read much of the work in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and questions of proximity.

The small gallery houses vinyl records — absent during the opening but now framed and hung on the walls — onto which De La Cruz hand-etched portraits of their family members. One record player, in the center of the room, plays the artist’s recorded interviews with those family members, two chairs and headphones beckoning visitors to spend time listening to the stories. These informal oral histories, while specific to the artist’s family, speak to broader shared experiences — the struggle to survive, life lessons, sadness, joy, love, resilience. Framed by the room’s far opening, small plaques, stacked vertically on the wall, display the poem from the records, offering another chance to consider how experiences and memories are communicated, how connections are formed, and how relationships change.

A deep royal blue effectively grounds the installation, applied to the walls, pedestals, frames, and chair cushions, as if to make visible the swells of emotions, the hue of sleepless nights, the feel of watching the sky through a window — to fill the otherwise seemingly empty spaces, for the record.

The Mountains Wore Down to the Valleys continues at the National Hispanic Cultural Center (1701 4th Street, Albuquerque) through April 23. The exhibition was curated by Jadira Gurulé.

Often referred to as tzitzit after the name of the fringes that are attached to its four corners, the tallit katan is a garment traditionally worn by Orthodox Jewish men under their clothes, a constant reminder of their connection to God. In November 2021, Los Angeles-based artists Julie Weitz and Jill Spector launched the Tzitzit Project with the goal of making tzitzit for a wide spectrum of gender identities, body types, and spiritual practices, offering the “opportunity to reclaim the divine in the everyday.”

The roots of the project lie in My Golem (2017–2020), Julie Weitz’s reinterpretation of the sculpted figure that is brought to life to protect the Jews of 16th-century Prague from persecution, according to Jewish folklore. Weitz’s Golem tackles contemporary issues, from rising Fascism and intolerance to ecological collapse. In her 2021 film project Prayer for Burnt Forests, Weitz appears as a firefighting Golem confronting the devastating Southern California wildfires. Her character wears tzitzit, which she co-designed with Spector, a self-taught textile artist. In the video, Weitz removes her tzitzit and wraps it around a burnt tree trunk, as though covering a dead body, in a kind of mourning ritual. In doing so, she came to appreciate how “this garment has real power, it’s not just a costume,” she told Hyperallergic. She began thinking about what it would mean to wear tzitzit outside of a performative context.

Jewish law does not forbid women from wearing tzitzit; however, the practice has traditionally been reserved for men, and women who don the garment are often subjected to harassment. Given this history, the pair collaborated on a garment for Weitz and came to a realization. “Wow, maybe this isn’t a one-garment thing,” Spector recalls.” If you want to do this, there must be other folks.”

In the summer of 2021, they began conducting a series of interviews and surveys with approximately a dozen women, nonbinary, and trans progressive Jews, asking them how they would want the garment to fit and feel as well as questions about spiritual practices. They then began prototyping, getting feedback from testers before arriving at their final designs. Last fall, Spector and Weitz opened their online shop, offering an inclusive way to fulfill the mitzvah (commandment) of wearing tzitzit. 

Weitz and Spector were not only concerned with how their tzitzit would feel and look on a variety of bodies, but also with serving the spiritual needs of their community. The fringes that hang from each of the four corners must be twisted a certain number of times before being double-knotted, twisted again, and repeated. For Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, the pattern of twists is 7-8-11-13, while for Sephardic Jews from Spain and the Mediterranean, the pattern is 10-5-6-5, each with special significance within Hebrew Gematria, the practice of assigning numerical value to letters. Tzitzit Project offers customers both options.

It was also important that their tzitzit were in keeping with Jewish law; namely, that they be kosher. There are various regulations regarding how and from what material tzitzit can be made.  The bodies of the garments are made from deadstock nylon mesh at Ari Jogiel, a small fabrication company in downtown LA, with a focus on minimizing their ecological footprint, while the fringes are hand-knotted from Tencel, cotton, or wool. They recite the phrase “l’shem mitzvat tzitzit / for the sake of performing the mitzvah of tzitzit” as they twist and knot the strings. The wool is hand-spun by textile artist Channing Hansen, who also recites a prayer as he works. It is important that the yarn be made for the sole purpose of being part of tzitzit, and Hansen’s hands-on approach means that “from the raw wall to the spun yarn, it’s all done with intention,” he said.

For all three artists, the Tzitzit Project offered a new way to connect with their Jewish roots, merging artistic and spiritual practice. Weitz’s maternal great-grandfather worked as a cutter for a suit company in Chicago, while Spector’s great-grandmother was an “invisible mender” in Łódź, Poland, repairing damaged bolts of fabric by hand. She died in the Łódź Ghetto during the Holocaust. Hansen comes from a line of “anarcho-socialist Jews,” and his great-great-grandfather was union organizer for the Ladies’ Garment Workers in New York. A year ago, he inherited a trove of Judaica books after the death of a relative including volumes on Kabbalah and esoteric Jewish mysticism. He took it as an invitation to explore his own spiritual practice, of which his collaboration with the Tzitzit Project is a part.

As much as it has rekindled their own Jewish identities, the Project has also opened up new ways to express them. “What I’ve learned through this, is there’s such a variety of folks practicing Judaism in different ways, taking on rituals in different ways,” Spector said. “It’s so liberating.”

For Hansen, the sense of continuity with tradition was balanced with a hopeful rupture with the past. “So many people at the fringes are now sitting at the table, deciding what Judaism will look like,” he said. “There’s never been a better time to be a Jew because of all this experimentation.”

If life as a kid in the 1980s and ’90s taught me anything, it’s that the rise of our machine overlords is a certainty. A new study shows remarkable progress being made in this area, with the development of a hyper-flexible multi-state material that is pretty clearly one more step towards realizing T2-series Terminator robots that can melt through any opening.

The material, technically known as “Magnetoactive Liquid-Solid Phase Transitional Matter” (MPTM, but we can also call it “robot juice” for brevity), was developed by research teams working out of labs at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and took its inspiration from an unexpected source: the humble sea cucumber.

“The original idea is inspired by sea cucumbers that can shift their bodies’ stiffness for environmental adaptation,” researcher Chengfeng Pan told Hyperallergic. “Thus, we were thinking how about we make robots that can also switch their stiffness or even push to the shifting between solid and liquid.”

It seems ironic that one of nature’s most passive creatures has become party to developing a technology that seems like it will give rise to unstoppable robots. But Carmel Majidi, another scientist on the project, sees other possibilities for the material.

“In terms of vision, I feel that this material demonstrates the extraordinary potential of low melting point metals like gallium, which can be used for shape morphing and stiffness tuning machines and electronics,” Majidi told Hyperallergic. Researchers predict its possible use in smart soldering and medical applications such as foreign body removal and drug delivery. Currently, these last have been performed in a model stomach, but it is only a matter of time before the public submits — nay, demands! — to have ultra-flexible robot juice sent into our very bodies to perform tasks that seem for now to be readily handled by existing medical technology.

These MPTMs can toggle between solid and liquid phases by way of heating with alternating magnetic fields or through ambient cooling. This results in a material that combines high mechanical strength, high load capacity, and fast locomotion speed in the solid phase with excellent morphological adaptability (elongation, splitting, merging) in the liquid phase. Sounds like all it needs is self-awareness and a (micro)chip on its shoulder!

Of course, why wouldn’t we make ever more lifelike and motile engineered system that cannot be stopped? It’s not like they could just flow inside your nostril and then into your brain and then the robo-cucumber will wear you like a skin suit and then eat batteries or do difficult equations or sit peacefully on the sea floor. Honestly, it sounds like an improvement over my current lifestyle, so bring on the bots!

The Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam has announced that an adapted version of its 2021 Slavery exhibition will be making a trip to New York City for a five-week display at the United Nations (UN) headquarters. Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery focuses on the 250 years of Dutch involvement in the transcontinental slave trade through two major components, “Ten Stories” and “Tronco.”

The original iteration of the exhibition took four years to come together with efforts beginning in 2017. It was highly acclaimed for its confrontation of the deep but quietly ignored history of Dutch colonialism, especially as the modern-day Netherlands is largely admired for its progressive policies and moderately high standard of living. Visitors entering the show would see Romuald Hazoumè’s “La Bouche du Roi” (1997–2005), an installation of 304 inflated petrol jerry cans fashioned into masked faces that were positioned to emulate the astonishingly cramped arrangement of enslaved people on the ships that trafficked them across the Atlantic ocean. Afterwards, the exhibition transitioned to the “Ten Stories” and their supplementary objects.

This first section shines a light on the experiences of enslaved people from Brazil, Suriname, the Caribbean, South Africa, and Asia alongside those of enslavers or other players operating in the transcontinental trade between the 17th and 19th centuries. This section illuminates the personal experiences of “ten true personal stories of people who were enslaved, people who profited from the system of slavery, and people who raised their voices against it,” according to an exhibition statement. In the online text that supports the short film renditions of the stories, the Rijksmuseum states that both entities “are an inextricable part of our history.”

“Tronco” (c. 1600–1800), meaning “tree trunk” in Portuguese, will be displayed at the UN as well. The tronco is a long, split wooden stock with holes that clasp around the ankles of multiple enslaved people at a time, subjugating their movement to prevent escape and keep them in place for corporeal punishment. The museum states that the contraption represents “the suppression of over a million people who were shipped from around the world and forced to work.”

There are a few related events taking place in conjunction with the New York iteration of the exhibition, including a screening of the documentary New Light (2021) on March 29. Directed by Ida Does, the 57-minute film provides context on how the Slavery exhibition was developed at the Rijksmuseum and how its broader impact was both painful and healing. On March 30, there will be a talk and panel discussion surrounding the exhibition and the Dutch involvement in slavery.

Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery will be on public display in New York from February 27 through March 30, after which it will travel to different UN headquarters internationally until 2024.

A hobbyist archaeologist has found a fragment of a Roman-Gallo object known as a dodecahedron in Kortessem, a small town in an eastern Belgian province. Patrick Schuermans discovered the artifact, believed to be over 1,600 years old, while searching the province of Limburg in December using his metal detector. 

Dodecahedrons are 12-sided, hollow, geometric shapes that have small knobs at their corners and holes of different diameters on each pentagonal face. They have stumped researchers for centuries, considering the polygonal object does not feature in Roman writings or drawings. 

Guido Creemers, a curator at the Gallo-Roman Museum, suggests that people may have used the artifact for occult practices. “There have been several hypotheses for it — some kind of a calendar, an instrument for land measurement, a scepter, etcetera — but none of them is satisfying,” Creemers told Live Science. “We rather think it has something to do with non-official activities like sorcery, fortune-telling, and so on.” However, no definitive explanation exists.

After he reported his finding to the Flanders Heritage Agency, Schuermans donated the object to the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren, which will display the fragment in February next to a complete dodecahedron found in 1939.

The Flemish agency believes the whole dodecahedron could have been over two inches wide and was possibly broken during a ritual. But archaeologists are most enthusiastic about what the find means for research into Ancient Roman history. “Thanks to the correct working method of the metal detectorist, archaeologists know for the first time the exact location of a Roman dodecahedron in Flanders,” the agency wrote in a statement, adding that it plans to monitor the area where Schuermans uncovered the fragment in case of future discoveries.   

Dozens of theories published in academic journals speculate how Celts used dodecahedrons in the second to fourth centuries CE. English Heritage, which oversees over 400 historic sites in England, which houses one of the figures at the Corbridge Roman Museum, shares one popular but unlikely theory that knitters crafted gloves using the object’s holes to create the fingers. The Flanders Heritage Agency notes that dodecahedrons might have had more practical uses as agricultural tools or links to the occult.

Approximately 120 dodecahedrons have been found in modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Great Britain, which were all a part of the Celtic territory that the Romans conquered between 224 and 220 BCE. 

Through a gift from late benefactor Assadour O. Tavitian, an exceedingly rare Renaissance marble portrait has entered the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: Roman artist Francesco Salviati’s c. 1545 depiction of wealthy Italian banker Bindo Altoviti, an enemy of the powerful Medici family.

Bindo Altoviti lived in Rome and enjoyed a lucrative career of distributing loans to European powers including the king of France, a line of popes, and the Venetian government. Shortly after Salviati painted his portrait, however, Bindo assumed a publicly anti-Medici stance and in 1554, the family declared him a rebel.

Salviati’s depiction of Bindo is The Met’s only painting created on marble, and the museum’s curator of European paintings Stephan Wolohojian said the work is also the only large 16th-century marble portrait that he knows of (Roman artists from this time period typically opted for slate). In addition to employing a rarely used material, Salviati’s dark, lush painting also diverged from the dominant artistic styles of Florence, trends which the Medicis would have helped to cultivate through their extensive patronage of the arts.

“It is easy to imagine Bindo engaging an artist to create his likeness on marble in a non-Florentine manner as a defiant gesture against the Medici,” Wolohojian said in a statement. While the painting’s stylistic choices likely sent a message to Florence’s ruling family, the painting is also infused with allusions to Bindo’s wealth. The banker wears a fur-lined coat and is enveloped by velvet, delicately constructed tassels, and silk.

Salviati was successful in his own right. He spent extensive time in Venice and Bologna before returning to Rome, earned commissions from important political figures, joined the workshop of painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari, and even spent a year in France, where his work had become popular.

Salviati’s c. 1545 rendering is the second of three masterful portraits of Bindo. The first is Rafael’s painting of the banker in his youth, created around 1515 when the sitter was 24 years old. Rafael forgoes velvets and fur but crafts Bindo with astounding flattery, delicately painting the young man’s blonde curled hair, green eyes, and flushed cheeks.

A few years after Salviati painted his marble portrait, Benvenuto Cellini created a bronze bust of Bindo’s likeness. The sculpture, in the collection of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, was included alongside Salviati’s painting in The Met’s 2021 exhibition The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570.

Salviati’s portrait of Bino is currently on view in The Met’s Italian Renaissance sculpture and decorative arts gallery and will be moved to the pre-1800s European painting room in November 2023.

STONY BROOK, New York — University museums and galleries don’t often get the credit they deserve for the important roles they play in art history. I was reminded of this when I went to see the exhibition Revisiting 5 + 1 at the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery at Stony Brook University (November 10, 2022–March 31, 2023), curated by Elise Armani, Amy Kahng, and Gabriella Shypula. Artist and Stony Brook professor Howardena Pindell, art historian and curator Katy Siegel, and the Zuccaire’s director and curator, Karen Levitov, also helped shape the exhibition. In Revisiting 5 + 1, the three curators examine and expand upon 5 + 1, a groundbreaking exhibition held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) in 1969. The timing of this exhibition resonates with the original on many levels. 

In the late 1960s, during a violent era marked by the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam War, and political assassinations, the English curator, art critic, and new Stony Brook professor Lawrence Alloway invited the Guyana-born British abstract artist and art critic Frank Bowling to curate a show of work by Black artists. The original exhibition, 5 + 1, was held (as we learn from the catalogue) in a “makeshift” gallery combining “two small classrooms,” and was sponsored by the university’s new “Afro-American Studies Program.” While the updated exhibition focuses on the absence of women in the original selection — which Bowling later publicly reflected upon and regretted — and the impending retirement of Howardena Pindell, who has taught at Stony Brook for 43 years, it also pushes back against the ongoing threats and damage to public education and free thinking across the United States. 

Bowling chose five US-born Black artists (Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams), all of whom he met after moving to New York from London in 1966. In the midst of the Black Arts Movement, which the poet Imamu Amiri Baraka founded shortly after the assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, Bowling chose to open up the discourse, even if no immediate conversation followed. 5 + 1 opened on October 16, 1969, two days before New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970 opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 18, 1969-February 1, 1970), curated Henry Geldzahler. Of the 43 artists that Geldzahler chose, none were Black and Isamu Noguchi was the only artist of color. 5 + 1 was not covered in art magazines.

The original exhibition is a reminder that the history of Black Art in the United States is diverse rather than monolithic. Accompanying the six original artists, Revisiting 5 + 1 includes Pindell and five artists she chose: Vivian Browne, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Betye Saar, Alma Thomas, and Mildred Thompson. In addition, the curators included a painting by Adger Cowans, who was friends with many artists in the first show and photographed the opening. Along with Cowans’s exhibition photographs (some of which were not developed until recently), his painting “Golden Future” (1969) adds another wrinkle to our understanding of the diverse approaches Black artists took to abstraction in the 1960 and ’70s, when New York museums briefly opened their doors before shutting them again.

The wavy, rhythmically striated surface of “Golden Future” anticipates Whitten’s paintings of the mid-1970s, when he began using squeegees and Afro combs, suggesting that abstraction by Black artists must be seen as following a very different trajectory than White, mainstream abstraction. In a 1994 interview for Bomb magazine, Whitten said to Kenneth Goldsmith: 

My background — coming to New York in 1959 and studying painting at Cooper Union Art School, in and out of the museums and the Cedar Bar, knowing other painters, the Abstract Expressionists in particular — I had no choice but to be well versed. It took 20 years to get into a position where I could work myself out of history. Every painter wants to escape art history. And now there’s a curve that’s leading me out.

The exhibition’s works by Whitten and Loving predate their decisions to extricate themselves from mainstream art history and go down an unprecedented path without a safety net. In this context, Cowans’s painting is important, as it might have inspired Whitten to develop a different technique for applying paint. Another inspiration on Whitten might have been Loving, whose early hard-edged, geometric, modular abstractions helped him become the first Black artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum. And yet even as he received these accolades, he felt he had lost his artistic freedom. In an essay by April Kingsley for his exhibition Al Loving: Color Constructs at the Neuberger Museum (1998–99), he is quoted as saying: 

I felt stuck inside that box. I mean, this was 1968 — the Democratic convention, this was the war — and I’m doing these pictures. The contradiction between my life at that time and these pictures.

In order to get out of this box, Loving began cutting up his own paintings. The history in which he felt stuck was one that Donald Judd partially constructed in his essay “Specific Objects” (1965), in an attempt to step away from the traditional history of sculpture. What seems apparent and oppressive in retrospect is just how quickly different rivers of formalist thought, and the pressure to remove content and the hand, became codified. 

Pindell’s two paintings, “Untitled (Space Frame)” (1968) and “Plankton Lace #2” (2020), Saar’s short collage film, “Eyeball” (1971), which has never been exhibited, plus memorabilia from the 1979 Alloway-curated exhibition Howardena Pindell: Works on Canvas and Paper, 1977–79, and Video  Drawings, 1975–1979 at Stony Brook’s former art gallery comment on and complement Bowling’s original choices. 

Pindell’s paintings beg the question of why she hasn’t received significant attention from a New York museum. Influenced by Larry Poons, as she readily acknowledges, the red circles in “Untitled (Space Frame)” allude to the marks that distinguish dishes, glasses, and silver used in restaurants to serve Black people in South, during the Jim Crow era and institutionalized segregation. The autobiographical current running through her abstraction set her on her own path that has just started to get the attention it deserves. In the glittering, monochromatic, unstretched “Plankton Lace #2” (2020), it is clear that Pindell has also worked herself out of history, and that she has been able to do this by staying true to the particulars of her life. 

Everywhere I looked I saw something that held my attention and made me want to know more. Shouldn’t the linoleum works by William T. Williams in the first 5 + 1 be better known? What happened to Daniel LaRue Johnson and his work? How many films did Saar make? Revisiting 5 + 1 left me full of revelations, unexpected discoveries, and questions. Not concerned with turning art into merchandise or promoting art as a perfect blend of cultural and financial commodity, this exhibition was a joy to experience. 

Revisiting 5 + 1 continues at the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery at Stony Brook University (Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook, New York) through March 31. The exhibition was curated by Elise Armani, Amy Kahng, and Gabriella Shypula, with consultation Howardena Pindell. Katy Siegel and Karen Levitov served as advisors.

BALTIMORE — In July 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave an address in Dakar aimed at appeasing French-African postcolonial relations, in which he lamented that Africans had “not yet entered into history.” In Political Animals, Senegalese artist Omar Ba seemingly sets this nonsensical record straight with compelling portraits and tableaux that denounce Western-imposed violence and uphold African pride. The show, Ba’s solo US museum debut at the Baltimore Museum of Art, presents over a dozen large format paintings, site-specific installations, and drawings, including new works and commissions.

Feathery-like brush strokes, vegetal motifs, and stitching patterns bring dimensionality and texture to these figurative paintings, while Ba’s color palette often alternates between blue and brown, as if his characters fundamentally traversed two possibilities within the intricate nature of the human scale itself, surviving between the sky and earth.

Ba’s paintings reverse art school conventions and often start with corrugated cardboard painted black, therefore proposing Blackness as the foundation to any creation. In the way he commonly centers his characters on the canvas, Ba assumes their political nature — whether in history or everyday acts — of existing and changing our gaze.

For instance, Ba resurrects the ghosts of a massacre in “Le Camp de Thiaroye 3” (2009). In 1944, in a camp just outside Dakar, French colonial forces killed dozens of Senegalese war veterans who protested against defaulted pay and hardships. White splatters against the spectral side silhouette of an officer attempt to convey the magnitude of this atrocity. France has yet to pay meaningful reparations to the survivors and descendants of Thiaroye.  

Ba is also concerned with contemporary tragedies, such as the one African asylum seekers face in death boats on the Mediterranean Sea. In “Naufrage à Melilla” (2014), an oversized male figure closes his eyes at physical and allegorical shipwrecks. Is he mourning or averting his gaze? His hands are tied in front of his body and we wonder about the true nature of his sentiments and affiliations. This ambivalence is further underscored by the medals worn on his suit: one reads,  “FMI,” which stands for the French acronym of the International Monetary Fund, and others read, “for countries of the South” and “West.”

Gripping charisma and poise emanate from Ba’s matriarchal portraits of older women. Their magnetic presence holds totemic qualities. “I Am Not A Toy” (2020) echoes like a proclamation as much as a warning. They stand tall, proud, undefeated. 

Ba’s large installations, conceived as monuments, painted over brick-like shapes, recall the storytelling power of ancient frescoes. Other discursive paintings acknowledge wounds: the devastating effects of fake news, the Transatlantic slave trade, US and NATO-led invasions of Iraq and Libya, war in the Sahel, and the farcical concert of the world incarnated in the United Nations Security Council. 

In art coalescing with a public-facing affirmation of identity, Ba’s contemptuous — and, at times, satirical — take on oppression gives way to a new history, in which Black people choose to remember as they please. 

Omar Ba: Political Animals continues at the Baltimore Museum of Art (10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, Maryland) through April 2. The exhibition was organized by Leslie Cozzi.

The Brazilian proverb “Quem conta um conto, aumenta um ponto” translates to “who adds a tale, adds a point,” reminiscent of the telephone game many of us played as children. The game wasn’t just about a moment of play; it illustrated how quickly a message could be distorted from person to person. Who tells a tale adds a tail: Latin America and contemporary art on view at the Denver Art Museum, names and playfully explores this paradox and is the first major exhibition curated at the museum by inaugural Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art Raphael Fonseca, who currently resides in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

As we relay observations from one person to another, or one culture to another, the core understandings are often mangled, sometimes so much so that true meaning is completely lost. Though the game of telephone is a simplified way of understanding the complexities of sharing Latiné art, it examines the difficulties of when those artists explore diversity within their own stories and how they chose to visually depict their experiences. The exhibition is an exploration straight from the “horse’s mouth” without conforming to external expectations. With works by 20 artists from all over Latin America, the diaspora, and the Caribbean, the exhibition explores what Latinidad means in the context of global hegemony. 

Yuli Yamagata’s “Pajama Spiders” (2022) makes immersive use of the unique architecture in the galleries. Her otherworldly spider-filled dreamscape effortlessly accentuates and unites with the captivating architectural geometry by focusing on the tension between fear and beauty. Fabric legs hang from the walls and ceilings, and the creatures crawl on hands, in bare feet, and in battered shoes to bring the dreamlike figures into what could be considered a nightmarish fantasy.

Tessa Mars’s main body of work is centered on her alter ego, Tessalines, a hybrid character based on Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the leader of the Haitian revolution. Through Tessalines, Mars investigates gender, history, and traditions, and she challenges dominant narratives that seek to simplify and flatten the experience of people in the “margins.” “Travelling Root I & II” (2022) do not specifically showcase that the artist is from Haiti; she is not explicitly or didactically commenting on her culture. Instead, her acrylic works come across as unapologetic yet welcoming, with their warm palettes that ease the viewer in as they begin unfolding what may lie beneath the surface. 

Alan Sierra’s mixed media installation “Club Descreto (Discreet Club)” (2022) also incorporates the museum’s sensational architecture and uneven rooms with vaulted ceilings and opposing angles, which can easily distort reality. The neon works that surround the tables, chairs, and microphone harken back to the lost art of neon signage but also remind me of humid summer nights in Miami as many drowned their true selves in the club scene. “Club Discreto” is designed to host oral recitations of homoerotic literature written in Spanish. A recording of the anthology read by the artist is played on loop, taking poetry readings into a multifaceted cultural space with multisensory experiences.

Though Who tells a tale adds a tail can not bring forward the perfect idea of what Latin American or Caribbean art is, it dispels the fantasy that US society clings to, consumed by ideas of borders and the complex disarray of the imposition of these boundaries, whether because of nationality, religion, or sexuality. The exhibition explores fragments of Latin American and Caribbean arts’ richness and the possibilities it can bring to audiences, without resting on ethnographic interpretations which, in an attempt to homogenize the work into a singular “authentic” narrative, have been socially ingrained in the masses as fundamental to our visual culture.

Who tells a tale adds a tail: Latin America and contemporary art continues at the Denver Art Museum (100 W 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver) through March 5. The exhibition was curated by Raphael Fonseca.

In this time of social media doom and gloom, I think back fondly to the early days of the “fail whale,” a cutesy image of a whale being held up by birds when Twitter was down. We no longer see the whale even while we see many digital fails happening in public. But the fail whale served as an ongoing reminder that technology is built, technology evolves, and technology starts with sketches of ideas.

Monica Rizzolli’s Night Shoots is a PDF catalogue that shows a generative landscape coming together under a digital moon. While people often consume digital art in its final form, Night Shoots invites us into the process, with 100 works presenting variation upon variation. Many of us think of generative work as developed by artificial intelligence, but the more useful way to see works such as Rizzolli’s might be as augmented intelligence — a dance between human and machine.

Rizzolli’s work is part of Simulation Sketchbook: Works in Process, an ongoing online exhibition of 10 works at Feral File that opened October 20 (with a brief display at Vellum LA). The exhibition takes as its starting point the reality that digital artists, like all artists, sketch out their work as well. Rather than paper and pencil, they often use the very same tools that compose the completed work, but the ideas come across as impressions and echoes, revealing the process of both creating and emoting that precede a finished piece. Each work — available for purchase as an NFT on Tezos, a popular blockchain for creatives — is a moment of creation. 

Process is evident in Reeps One’s “Machine Inspired Voice 00.1,” in which the audience listens as AI responds to Harry Yeff’s beatboxing. (The finished work will eventually have 300 human-AI pairings.) “Cluster: #069” by Botto is a digital collage developed by a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) whose members vote on synthetically generated images. David OReilly’s “ORBSKETCHES.mp4” provides a glimpse into the minting process in action, showing an orb generated through math experiments the artist developed, all within the frame of the artist’s desktop. And in Qianqian Ye’s “Braiding Rage 怒辫,” hair braids in dozens of variations reference the tribe of  “self-combed women” (自梳女), who braid their hair to mark a commitment to independence over marriage.

In the context of the growing impact of artificial intelligence and blockchain in our society, perhaps the most important framing of Simulation Sketchbook is the notion that technology — in this case, expressed through mostly visual artworks — is not a magic object appearing from the black box of Silicon Valley office parks. Rather, technology, like art, is made through a series of sketches, negotiations, and explorations. This idea is explored most explicitly in Mimi Ọnụọha’s “Machine Sees More Than It Says”; a composite of archival footage videos from the 1950s through the 1980s, the work tells the story of a machine imagining its own development.

The most stunning — and timely — piece in the show is Behnaz Farahi’s “Unveiling,” produced last September in response to what were then emergent feminist protests in Iran. The video starts with a feminine, cloaked figure in gold and turquoise disintegrating into a swarm that expands and reemerges into an image of the artist before scattering again.

This work demonstrates the potential for sketches to respond quickly to timely and time-sensitive world events. Farahi had intended to present a different piece in the show but switched it up given the unfolding protests. A more developed work may attempt to help us make sense of the protests, but it may be months or years until we fully understand their ramifications and ripple effects on Iranian society, and the world at large. 

“Unveiling” lays bare the raw emotion of Farahi, an expat working in the US, grappling with questions of bodily autonomy: “Why are there various laws controlling the bodies and lives of women?” she writes of her work. “Where does the autonomy of the female body reside? While much feminist discourse is informed by a Western woman’s perspective, some of the largest-ever feminist protests are happening right now on the streets of Iran.”

Simulation Sketchbook: Works in Progress can be viewed online. The exhibition was curated by Jesse Damiani.

Last week, Twitter announced via the @TwitterDev account that it would no longer be supporting free Twitter application program interface (API) access as of February 9. The API enables programmatic access to the social media platform, allowing third-party developers to gather, analyze, and create data automatically through “bot accounts” that tweet information or images without a physical user operating the application. Many popular bots, such as those that post from museum collections or archives of long-gone artists, are at risk of future inactivity if Twitter begins charging its developers.

Following the announcement, Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk clarified that the tiered subscription model starting at approximately $100 per month would combat the API misuse from “scammers and opinion manipulators.” However, a majority of developers are independent hobbyists and scholars who make no money from their bots. In an interview with Hyperallergic, Andrei Taraschuk, the co-founder of @BotFrens and developer behind hundreds of art appreciation bots for artists and museums, said that this decision is “probably going to cut out 99% of developers who are just playing around, experimenting with Twitter, building something that doesn’t have a business model.”

Taraschuk’s art bots tweet from the archives of deceased artists such as Amadeo Modigliani, Artemisia Gentileschi, Vasily Kandinsky, and Natalia Goncharova. Access to these elements of art history beyond the museum setting has sparked joy and appreciation from Twitter users all over the world — Taraschuk even shared a screenshot of an email from a fan stating that they had chosen to pursue a degree in art history because of his bots after news of the API restrictions broke.

One bot owner that documents the periodic return of a little black cat named Pépito through a cat flap replied to Musk’s tweet indicating that the new subscription model would “kill [their] account,” which has been active since 2011. Musk responded that Twitter will enable a “light, write-only API for bots providing good content that is free.”

It’s unclear what Musk qualifies as “good content,” nor can we really unpack what his definition of “opinion manipulator” is considering the slew of blocked hate-speech and neo-Nazi accounts he reinstated at the end of last year. Neither Musk nor the Twitter Development team has provided any further clarifications regarding the new policies for tiered Twitter API access which are reportedly set to begin tomorrow.

Taraschuk also refuted Musk’s claims that scammers and bad actors were abusing the platform’s API access, saying that he “strongly doubts” that users engaging in nefarious activities would go through the developer verification process that Twitter currently implements.

“Twitter is probably trying to intentionally kill off some of the unprofitable usage,” he hypothesized. “Maybe kill off some of these zombie applications that keep on running, but that haven’t been maintained or upgraded in ages.”

Taraschuk’s some 500 art bots have garnered nearly 7 million followers since 2014, yielding innumerable impressions, likes, and retweets without earning a cent from the website. “The project is losing money every month,” he clarified. “We have a tiny revenue stream coming from Patreon, but depending on how much Twitter is charging for the API access, we’ll have to see whether we can afford it. There’s a huge difference in if we’ll have to pay for every single account versus a blanket $100 to maintain the same API level access.”

Brooklyn-based creative technologist John Emerson told Hyperallergic that if free API access ends, so will his bots. Emerson also maintains a collection of art museum bots as well as advocacy bots that monitor the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) web activity on top of broader police behavior and media mentions.

“The museum bots brought little sparks of joy, serendipity, and occasional provocation to followers throughout the day,” Emerson explained. “It was a fun, lo-fi way to explore vast collections of more objects than would ever fit into a gallery — and get to know the personalities of these institutions over time. The advocacy bots were an experiment in realtime collective monitoring.” Emerson’s @NYPDedits bot that highlights NYPD’s anonymous edits to Wikipedia pages inspired from an original report from Kelly Weill supposedly discouraged such behavior from the department by means of raising awareness to each instance.

Both Taraschuk and Emerson lamented that this “money grab” would be an immense blow to Twitter’s developer community, likely to pump the breaks in the face of uncertainty and Musk’s impulsive decisions and retractions. Beyond the threat to artistic appreciation, Emerson pointed out how the new restrictions on the search API element in particular would “smother critical research.”

“Without free access to the search API, researchers are also going to have a much harder time studying the spread of ideas, misinformation, and sentiment around the world,” Emerson elaborated.

Both developers also mentioned that Mastodon might take center stage for third-party development moving forward, but it’s going to take time to rebuild the community after Twitter stood as the paragon for real-time data sharing and analysis for so many years.

LIVERPOOL — A multisensory apocalyptic ecoscape. Assemblages of crocheted sacks and fruit sculptures. A K-Pop-style boy band in ostentatious drag. Racist pub signs and menacing moving sculptures. This is the Turner Prize 2022 exhibition at Tate Liverpool, featuring a series of eye-catching and intelligent contributions by its four nominees: Sin Wai Kin, Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, and Veronica Ryan.

The exhibition is a feast for the eyes. The gallery space loops around so that all the artists have their own mini-exhibitions, marked out from one another with statement wall and floor colors. First up is artist-cum-musician-cum-poet Heather Phillipson with her maximalist and anxiety-inducing installation “RUPTURE NO 6: biting the blowtorched peach.” Monstrous animal eyes blink, a violent wind shrieks, and a tin cabin tips to one side on a sandy bed. In contrast, Veronica Ryan’s neighboring yellow-walled display is quiet and contemplative. Her elegant works engage with urgent questions of our time (consumerism, the environment, the legacies of British colonialism), but always with a poeticism and light touch. 

In another room, Sin Wai Kin shape-shifts across different works in the guise of various comically named characters. The best piece in their display is a mesmerizing music video featuring a four-piece boyband, all played by the artist, alongside branded merch such as wallpaper, posters, and cardboard cut-outs. The artist conducts a sharp takedown of celebrity culture and brings viewers along for the ride. There’s another tonal shift on entering Ingrid Pollard’s space, which features an array of racist British memorabilia and powerful archival photographs, meticulously researched and compiled by the artist over several decades. In a small final room are three kinetic sculptures by Pollard made from rope and saws, which look (and sound) like torture instruments. 

Despite the obvious differences, each year there’s a certain synergy among the shortlisted artists, a shared preoccupation or approach which somehow captures the current mood. This year it’s polyvocality, an intermingling of multiple voices and an encouragement of diverse readings. “I see my selves in you, reflected back at me; it’s always you, you show me I’m many,” chants Kin’s boyband. Phillipson’s installation is abuzz with disparate colors, images, objects, and sounds. Pollard mines archives and histories to create her multilayered installations, and Ryan turns familiar household objects into surprising and enigmatic sculptures.

But this year’s shortlist also feels quite imbalanced. Pollard and Ryan are in their late 60s and 70s, artists who have made art for many decades but have only recently been recognized by an art world that systematically overlooks women and artists of color; indeed, much of their work draws on their feelings of invisibility and exclusion. The other two — 45-year-old Phillipson and 32-year-old Kin — are in the early stages of their careers, working on their first major shows and commissions. In 2017, the rules were changed so that artists over the age of 50 could be shortlisted — a necessary intervention to combat ageism, but one that means artists at very different points in their careers are compared on an equal footing. 

More controversially, this year’s prize has been leveled with accusations of jury bias. Each year the judges are supposed to spend 12 months visiting hundreds of exhibitions across the world before making their shortlist. This year, though, the nominated exhibitions were very close to home: three of the artists were nominated for shows at museums where members of the jury serve as directors — Ryan for her solo exhibition at Bristol’s Spike Island, Pollard for her retrospective at MK Gallery, and Phillipson for her commission at Tate Britain. The nominees’ individual merits speak for themselves, but this type of favoritism does nothing to dispel the prize’s reputation for insiderishness. 

As well as emphasizing how arbitrary the shortlisting process is, it begs the question of whether the prize has become a bit of an anachronism today. How does a selective competition fit with the contemporary art world’s aspirations toward greater inclusivity? The idea that one artist can be “the best” seems strange in a time when ideas about artistic value are being radically redefined and many museums are making efforts to become more democratic. 

The last three Turner Prizes have thrown this into light. The 2019 nominees — Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani — decided to form a collective and share the prize as a “statement of solidarity and collaboration.” The 2020 exhibition was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic and instead 10 artists were awarded £10,000 ($12,061). All five 2021 nominees were collectives whose work focuses on social justice issues. Although this showed an expansive definition of what art can be, it may have gone too far: One of the groups had never even publicly displayed their work in an exhibition. 

The paradox, however, is that a prize, which is inherently exclusive, appeals to the broadest kind of audience. People who usually do not engage with contemporary art go and see the Turner Prize exhibition, just as people who usually do not consume contemporary fiction read the Booker Prize shortlist. Other than its obvious popularity, there is a sense that justice should belatedly be done for artists who have been historically passed over. When Ryan was named as the winner last December, she shouted, “Power! Visibility! We are visible people!” from the podium. Her point is a political one: If for 38 years the Turner Prize was (predominantly) awarded to the Damien Hirsts and Grayson Perrys of the world, why shouldn’t artists like Ryan finally have their turn in a high-profile, heavily publicized exhibition? Why shouldn’t these artists be visible too?  

The jury knows this. That’s why this year’s shortlist includes women artists, an artist who identifies as non-binary, artists of color, artists over the age of 60, artists who deal with politically charged issues. At the same time, it’s a competition that necessitates that the jurors and curators must stoke a sense of rivalry. At the end of the exhibition, there are four boxes with the names of the shortlisted artists where visitors can vote for their favorite with a plastic token. Without this competitiveness, the exhibition wouldn’t have the same mass appeal. And that’s the source of the Turner Prize’s current identity crisis. On the one hand, it embraces artists who up until now have been ignored; on the other hand, it pits them against each other. It’s an inner conflict at the heart of the prize — one which may not be resolved any time soon.  

The Turner Prize 2022 continues at Tate Liverpool (Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool L3 4BB) through March 19. The prize was juried by Irene Aristizábal, head of curatorial and public practice at BALTIC; Christine Eyene, lecturer in contemporary art at Liverpool John Moores University; Robert Leckie, director at Spike Island; and Anthony Spira, director at MK Gallery.

Ahead of the 2022–2023 school year, the College Board rolled out a pilot version of its new Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies course. The class had been in the works for over a decade, and this pilot version is currently offered to students at only 60 high schools across the country. Last week, the College Board announced an updated official curriculum framework in advance of the course’s expansion into hundreds more schools that some critics say is missing a host of important artists, writers, and concepts.

A few glaring omissions include a number of influential Black scholars and authors, among them Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneer of critical race theory; Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose writing explores systemic racism and white supremacy and who popularized the idea of reparations; and the late bell hooks, whose body of work considers race, class, feminism, and queerness. Contemporary topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement and criminal justice were omitted from the regular curriculum and included in a list of “Sample Project Topics.” Critical race theory, which has been limited by conservative lawmakers in 18 states, is conspicuously absent, as are many contemporary and living Black visual artists.

At the end of each unit, the College Board includes “source materials,” and while the first half of the framework includes African art and elements of visual history relating to colonization and slavery, these are gradually replaced by photographs and works of literature. The contemporary artworks that are included seem to offer meditations on the past rather than contemplations of Black life or examinations of systemic racism today. One of the few contemporary artworks, for example, is Bisa Butler’s 2021 painting “I Go To Prepare A Place For You,” a stylized portrait of Harriet Tubman.

The course’s most in-depth art historical topics examine 20th-century artworks. A unit titled “Photography and Social Change” considers W. E. B. Du Bois’s exhibition American Negro at the 1900 Paris Exposition and James Van Der Zee’s Portfolio of Eighteen Photographs, 1905-38, two bodies of work that employed images of largely affluent Black people in an effort to counter racist stereotypes. Other cultural and art historical sections include segments dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance, the 1960s Black Is Beautiful movement (including a work by Elizabeth Catlett), the Black Arts movements, Afrofuturism, and the evolution of African-American music. Another covered topic is the Négritude movement, in which the works of visual artists Wifredo Lam and Loïs Mailou Jones are listed as source materials.

Kelli Morgan, the director of curatorial studies at Tufts University, whose work focuses on anti-Blackness and anti-racism in the museum field, pointed to a handful of successful living Black artists whose work is not — and she says should be — included in the framework: Firelei Báez, Titus Kaphar, Harmonia Rosales, Alison Saar, and Renée Green among them. (Morgan is a recipient of Hyperallergic’s 2022–23 Emily Hall Tremaine Fellowship for Curators.)

Morgan, however, told Hyperallergic she was not surprised at the College Board’s amendments.

“I feel like we’re in this moment where White, capitalist, patriarchal supremacy is on its last legs — it kind of sees its own demise,” Morgan said. “So anything or anybody — Black scholars, Black authors, Black artists — who are producing work that not only demonstrates the dysfunctionality of White supremacist patriarchal capitalism but offers other options … There’s no way that’s gonna be handed to Black teenagers in high school.”

Morgan also spoke to the histories of African American Studies and Art Histories, stating that part of the reason she entered her line of work (which lies at the intersection of the two fields) is that Art History was behind the curve when it came to examining Black and African diaspora work, and African American Studies lagged behind in examining visual art at all.

“Music’s there, history and politics are there, but in terms of visual art, it was really small,” Morgan said.

The new framework also elicited speculation that the College Board edited its course in response to Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s denunciation of it. (The College Board did not publish the 2022–2023 curriculum, but a draft was leaked to conservative news outlets.)

In a January 12 letter announcing his rejection of the AP African American Studies class, DeSantis stated that the course “significantly lacks educational value” and accused the curriculum of being “contrary to Florida law.” (The governor crafted a legal framework limiting how race can be discussed in Florida schools and banned teaching critical race theory in his state.)

“In the future, should College Board be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion,” DeSantis wrote.

A little over two weeks later, on February 1, the College Board announced its updated curriculum. The New York Times published an article accusing the College Board of stripping more radical ideas from its framework in response to DeSantis’s criticisms, an allegation the organization vehemently denied in a response to the story. Jeremy C. Young, the senior manager of free expression and education at advocacy nonprofit PEN America, issued a damning statement on the College Board’s revisions, writing that the changes “appear to be an effort to dilute the curriculum, a capitulation to education censors for political expediency” and warning that the decision “risks empowering [De Santis’s] attempts to exert ideological control over the freedom to learn.”

More radical concepts exist at the end of the framework in a list of suggested project topics, alongside the sole mention of Black Lives Matter. Some include “Intersectionality and the dimensions of Black experiences,” “Gay life and expression in Black communities,” “The legacy of redlining,” and “Crime, criminal justice, and incarceration.” This is notably the only mention of criminal justice or incarceration in the curriculum, despite the fact that racial disparity in US prisons is a key issue of contemporary movements for justice and equity.

In an interview with NPR in light of the backlash, College Board CEO David Coleman explained that these changes began being discussed in September and were finalized in December.

“We took out all secondary sources, whether it was by Skip Gates or Evelyn Higginbotham, regardless of their political qualities,” Coleman said in response to specific criticism of the removal of thinkers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and bell hooks.

The College Board’s director of the AP African American Studies course Brandi Waters emphasized that the framework had been “streamlined” to focus on primary sources. “These primary sources based on everyday life is what really opens up students’ understanding for bigger concepts and theories,” Waters stated.

The curriculum ends with two segments titled “Diversity Within Black Communities” and “Identity, Culture, and Connection,” sections which include topics such as “Black Political Gains” (it lists figures such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Kamala Harris) and “Black Achievements in Science, Medicine, and Technology.” The last area of focus in the course is contemporary Afrofuturism, which the College Board defines as “a cultural, aesthetic and political movement that blends Black experiences from the past with Afrocentric visions of a technologically advanced future that includes data science, forecasting, and AI.” The original Black Panther (1997) is listed alongside authors Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler and musicians including Jimi Hendrix, Janelle Monáe, Missy Elliot, and OutKast, but visual art is absent from this section.

“One thing I love about art is how wonderful it can be to have a mind that literally is trying to create something that doesn’t exist,” Morgan said. “We have to be able to see the possibility of beginning to be able to do what we want to do – being able to create the things we love or that we think of or that we conceptualize, within a system that is designed literally for us to die.”

“Seeing Black artists, especially these days at the level that is being done, is vital,” Morgan continued. “It’s beyond critical. It’s so vital to put that there.”

On a bluff near I-90 in Chamberlain, South Dakota, “Dignity of Earth and Sky” towers over the Missouri River. Public artist, sculptor, and South Dakota Artist Laureate Dale Lamphere created the 50-foot-tall fabricated stainless steel statue to honor the Native Nations in the Great Plains region. Since its dedication on September 17, 2016, the monument has become a tourist attraction, drawing visitors to the Chamberlain Welcome Center.

But outside of local South Dakota coverage, the statue has received relatively little attention, and recently, some have wondered why that’s been the case. In a Twitter thread about the newly unveiled Martin Luther King, Jr. sculpture in Boston, which drew controversy and criticism online, one user invoked “Dignity” as a counter-example of public art that embodies “true beauty.”

In conversations with Hyperallergic, residents and members of Native communities revealed mixed feelings about the sculpture — from joy and pride to disappointment that the work was not created by a Native artist and fears that it may contribute to harmful stereotypes of Indigenous women.

Lamphere designed the statue after creating a composite of three Lakota women aged 14, 29, and 55 years old. The outfit worn by “Dignity” represents motifs and colors traditionally found in Lakota women’s dresses: The star quilt placed on her back, assembled with varying hues of blue, symbolizes honor. Lamphere consulted a Lakota quilting circle based in Rapid City for the design. At night, the statue’s LED lights illuminate the surrounding area.

Norman McKie, a retired business person and 2011 South Dakota Hall of Fame inductee, first approached Lamphere to build a large-scale female statue honoring the Native Nations in 2014. McKie financed the sculpture’s construction, which Lamphere said totaled around $800,000. “He saw that Native women are the backbone of their society,” Lamphere explained. “They’re the ones that hold things together, and he wanted to acknowledge that.”

For the next few years, Lamphere worked with Albertsons Engineering in Rapid City to bring his designs to life while factoring in the role of natural elements like the wind and the sun. Wind moves through “Dignity,” an aesthetic choice Lamphere made with the help of structural engineers. The diamonds in the quilt are offset and vibrate as gusts pass through the area, known for its blustery climate.

The monument’s lighting ceremony included speeches from state and local officials, such as former Governor Dennis Daugaard, and a performance by Grammy-nominated Native American flutist Bryan Akipa, among other tributes. In the years since its dedication, the Department of Tourism’s website has featured “Dignity” as a state attraction. 

Speaking about her reaction to the memorial, Hoop dancer and Sicangu (Rosebud) Lakota Sioux Tribe member Starr Chief Eagle told Hyperallergic that the work represents beauty and resilience. “It’s important to have works like ‘Dignity’ to remind people that we are still here,” Eagle said. “She creates awareness with her very presence.”

Clementine Bordeaux, an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and a University of California in Los Angeles graduate student researching representations of Indigenous American peoples in art and media, is excited that that statue features a Native woman. She often stopped at the rest station in Chamberlain on drives back to Rapid City from Carthage College in Wisconsin, where she earned her Bachelor’s degree. Now she brings friends and visitors to see “Dignity.” 

Despite her awe at the artwork’s scale and meaning, however, Bordeaux is concerned about the implications of a statue crafted by a non-Native man. On the one hand, she welcomes Native representation that doesn’t focus on police brutality, resistance movements, or anti-Indigenous violence. But she wonders why an Indigenous sculptor wasn’t selected.  

“How do we embrace representation when it’s coming from a non-Native person who has the luxury of designing without the pressure of a long history of oppression?” Bordeaux asked. 

These questions are further complicated when factoring in how non-Native governments and people use stereotypical images of Native women to enact harm. Manuela Well-Off-Man, chief curator at the Institute of American Indian Arts’s (IAIA) Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, told Hyperallergic that the sculpture emphasizes women’s importance in Lakota and Dakota cultures, essential to document at a time when the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women remains unresolved. However, nostalgic portraits of Native women created by non-Native men reinforce stereotypes of Indigenous cultures as “frozen in time,” Well-Off-Man notes, citing “Dignity’s” traditional Lakota dress.

Well-Off-Man echoed Bordeaux’s critique that the statue should have been created either entirely or collaboratively with a Lakota sculptor, especially since the sculpture has become a part of the state’s marketing efforts. Tourism generates about $2 billion a year in revenue, according to the South Dakota Department of Tourism. An Indigenous artist, she believes, would better represent contemporary Indigenous culture by integrating their artistic practice with their knowledge of Native Nations’ current concerns and customs.

Drawing on her research background, Bordeaux notes that a nostalgic view of Native women and cultures correlates with how governments treat Indigenous land and people as commodities. She cites Sarah Deer, a MacArthur Foundation grantee, lawyer, and professor at William Mitchell College of Law, whose book The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America connects the high rates of sexual assault against Native American women with the settler colonialist project.

“We can have this statue, but the reality is Native people are being criminalized in a way that is very violent,” Bordeaux said, alluding to the overrepresentation of Indigenous Americans in South Dakota prisons and jails. US Census data shows that Native Americans made up about 12% of the population in 2010, and according to the Prison Policy Initiative, they made up nearly 30% of the incarcerated population in the same year.

Bordeaux makes the case that, as a state, South Dakota will only endorse “safe” images and narratives of Native peoples, which is why they would promote “Dignity.” Native people are made to feel like then they should “be grateful” and “not complain” because a public sculpture was created in their honor, she said.

In 2020, hoping to provide more context about the Lakota cultures the monument honors, sculptor Dale Lamphere decided to fund the creation of signage to be displayed at “Dignity’s” base. Lamphere asked the local Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS), a nonprofit that provides educational resources about Indigenous Americans, to write and design the materials. Craig Howe, director at CAIRNS, told Hyperallergic that he suggested four signs for “Dignity,” one contextualizing the sculpture and three featuring information about the Oceti Sakowin Confederacy (also known as the Great Sioux Nation). Lamphere had the signs made and installed. They were displayed for about a year before the South Dakota Department of Transportation (DOT) ordered their removal.

According to reporting by the Lakota Times, in July 2021, the DOT consulted the Governor’s office, the Tribal Relations office, and the Department of Tourism about CAIRNS’s signs. Someone noticed the posters had grammatical mistakes that needed fixing. On October 2, 2021, the signs were temporarily displayed at “Dignity” for a ceremony. Ten days later, the Department of Transportation removed the placards and later put them into storage. 

The SD Department of Tourism canceled a 2022 meeting to review and revise the signs when the South Dakota Native Tourism Alliance (SDNTA), an ad hoc network of SD Tribal Nations as well as local, state, and federal partners, backed out of consulting on the project. Since then, the Department has called for volunteers to review and update the displays at the Chamberlain Welcome Center, but Howe says progress has been slow.

“Instead of correcting or replacing the existing signage, the department is doing all it can to prevent content-rich, historically accurate, and academically rigorous signage from being installed,” Howe said.  

The SD Department of Tourism and Department of Transportation have not responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment. 

As for “Dignity,” the monument will continue to draw visitors. “You have people that are excited about these images. There are amazing performers because they’re proud of our community, our homelands, our culture,” said Bordeaux. “But our only option is to buy into the tourist image for survival.”

On November 24, 2022, Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier published a heartfelt letter commemorating the National Day of Mourning. Incarcerated since 1977, the former American Indian Movement organizer called out the contradictions in the United States government’s occupation of Native land, which has systematically hindered any form of tribal sovereignty.

“All the world now faces the same challenges that our people foretold regarding climate damage being caused by people who take more than they need, dismissing the teachings of our fathers, and the knowledge of countless generations living upon the earth in harmony,” Peltier wrote, invoking generations of tribes and First Nations preserving history on their own terms, otherwise known as “truth-telling.”

Indigenous artists have long spoken their truth symbolically, portraying centuries of resilience in art forms appropriated from colonial oppressors. This process is central to Studio Theater in Exile’s online exhibition, Truth-Telling: Voices of First People. Narratives of ancestral pride and bureaucratic prejudice appear in paintings and sculptures from the late 20th century to the present, ranging from overt critique to more subtle rumination. 

On the surface, Truth-Telling is a multidisciplinary cross-section of well-known Native artists from across the US and Canada. Minimalist signage and metalworks by Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds and Margaret Jacobs are contrasted with more maximalist abstractions by Duane Slick and Benjamin West’s street-style photography. The renowned Kiowa painter T.C. Cannon, who died in 1978 at the age of 31, is honored for his storied lyrical portraits. One painting included here shows a woman waiting at a bus stop in warm shades of pink and blue; the curators note that she was Cannon’s first crush, who rejected him in life but chose to be buried beside him.

In this context, however, Cannon’s lesser-known sketch “Minnesota Sioux” takes center stage. On a plain sheet of white paper, the artist scrawled an empty hangman scene, referring to the 1862 execution of 38 Dakota men that was approved by President Abraham Lincoln. Rather than portray the violence enacted upon the bodies of Native people, Cannon leaves the space empty except for written instructions to “Insert Here.”

This confrontation with the colonial gaze informs much of Truth-Telling, which alludes to direct attacks on Native communities. Rose B. Simpson’s regal sculptures capture the creative labor of Indigenous women, whose murder rates are 10 times higher than the national average. In “Reclamation III: Rite of Passage,” a hairless woman with a gaping hole in her chest forms the foundations of a rounded clay pot. Simpson’s sculpture “Breathe” likewise show a woman’s head held back with mouth agape, as if silently screaming. Together, the emotionless gaze of both works evokes centuries of bureaucratic neglect.

With these works, Indigenous artists reclaim realities long denied them by US and Canadian federal governments — including moments of collective reverie. Christi Belcourt’s kaleidoscopic paintings bring this latter element to the forefront, grounding images of colorful foliage with deep, visible roots. Pieces such as “So Much Depends on Who Holds the Shovel” feel both ornamental and spiritual as brightly hued birds and flowers radiate ancestral truths against a black background.

The Métis artist employs color symbolically, too, as in her “Offerings and Prayers for Genebek Ziibiing.” Flowing blue and red brushstrokes form an outline around a symmetrical image of two women nurturing a body of water. Evoking the contamination of Ontario’s Elliot Lake due to uranium mining, the twilight scene promotes balance between humanity and nature while hinting at an imminent sunset — visualizing the climate warnings of Belcourt’s frequent collaborator, Isaac Murdoch.

For each artist in Truth-Telling, Indigenous knowledge is anathema to capitalist logic. This is perhaps best captured in Nicholas Galanin Yéil Ya-Tseen’s mixed-media work “Architecture of Returned Escape.” The Tlingit/Unangax artist rendered a blueprint of a museum on an animal hide. Is this subversive schematic a guide to freedom or a plot to win the land back? The ambiguity cleverly provokes more than it resolves, and emphasizes the necessity of a coherent path forward.

Truth-Telling: Voices of First People can be viewed online. The exhibition was curated by Jonette O’Kelley Miller.

PARK CITY, Utah — At this year’s Sundance International Film Festival, more than half the feature-length movies were made by directors who identify as women. On its own, this may not seem like such a big deal; after all, two years in a row, women nabbed Best Director at the Oscars (Chloé Zhao for Nomadland and Jane Campion for Power of the Dog). And certainly some progress in gender equity can be registered numerically; in the United States, at least, female directors moved from single-digit percentages prior to 2017 to around 20% the past two years. But on the whole, the industry remains overwhelmingly male dominated when it comes to who’s at the helm.

During my first visit to Sundance in person, I saw 14 films, and then streamed another five upon returning home. While several titles from established women filmmakers stood out — Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Other People’s Children, and Nancy Schwartzman’s Victim/Suspect — the bulk of the most compelling were from first-time female directors, many of them women of color, and the majority were made outside of the United States. Even the inconsistent debuts held promise, as did the variety of genres represented. 

Two of the most visually stunning — and emotionally gutting — films came from newcomers Glorimar Marrero Sánchez and Celine Song. Sánchez’s debut La Pecera (The Fishbowl) follows Noelia (Isel Rodríguez), a film editor who decides to forfeit treatment when her cancer returns with a vengeance. La Pecera avoids heavy dialogue and relies on the image for much of its power — from US grenades on the ocean floor to clumps of lost hair twisted into a makeshift talisman — and ends with possibly the most poetic final shot I’ve seen in years. Also plumbing the different selves women carry within, Song’s heartbreaking Past Lives explores the relationship between two childhood friends in Korea, Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who are reunited in New York after decades apart. 

In much grislier fare, Aussie filmmaker Daina Reid’s first feature, Run Rabbit Run, thematically reminded me of Natalie Erika James’s Relic, a Sundance “Midnight” favorite from 2020. Starring Sarah Snook as a mother whose daughter’s behavior takes a startling shift after she discovers a lost white bunny, Run Rabbit Run loses narrative steam toward the end. Yet, the convincingly creepy kid, hauntingly gorgeous South Australian terrain, and inventive take on maternal trauma make the film a worthy contributor to the “mommy horror” genre. Equally terrifying, if in a wholly vérité way, is psychological thriller Shayda, Iranian-Australian director Noori Niasari’s debut. Starring the brilliant Zar Amir Ebrahimi (from Holy Spider), the film reveals the horrors of escaping an abusive husband. 

British first-timers included Raine Allen Miller and Charlotte Regan, each centering their films on often-overlooked London communities. Avoiding tired gender tropes, Allen Miller’s hyper-stylized Rye Lane is the rare rom-com in which its Black leads are permitted the same quirks and follies as White rom-com characters have enjoyed for decades. Regan’s Scrapper orbits the whimsical world of Georgie (Lola Campbell), an unsinkable 12-year-old girl living on her own in public housing after her mother’s untimely death. Imagine a more wholesome version of Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank. 

In the documentary vein, women comprised more than 60% of directors — with first-timers making a solid mark. Amanda Kim’s Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV pays reverent tribute to one of the most irreverent, and important, artists of the modern age, contextualizing Paik’s eccentric brilliance and technological prescience within today’s digital culture. Kristen Lovell’s The Stroll, co-directed with Zackary Drucker, recounts the trials and triumphs of transgender sex workers in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Anchored by the voices of Lovell and other trans women who lived and labored in this rapidly gentrified neighborhood, The Stroll exposes the degree to which the stories of trans people of color have been erased from mainstream LGBTQ+ movements. Joining veteran filmmakers like Nicole Newnham and Tracy Droz Tragos, many of the new female-identifying documentarians aim to redress issues of injustice — from indigenous rights in Greenland to pervasive ableism within the medical industry.

In the narrative short category, The Kidnapping of the Bride, Sophia Mocorrea’s debut, offers a critical, often poignant, take on the ways in which marriage rituals across cultures can foster archaic attitudes toward gender and sex; when their Argentine and German families come together for their nuptials, the lead characters, Luisa (Rai Todoroff) and Fred (David Bruning), are pressured to conform to hetero norms. Mocorrea is currently developing a feature-length film around the same themes.

As I braved the Park City chill each day, the experience of watching so many very different debuts by so many very different women left my heart warmed and brain ablaze with what this might mean for the future. Male-directed titles lead the Oscars yet again this year (not one woman for Best Director, and only one female-directed Best Picture nom), but they do not reflect the reality of this evolving art and industry. It’s high time the Academy catches up to what’s going on in Utah. 

The narrator of Chelsea Martin’s debut novel Tell Me I’m an Artist is a main character with a minor-character complex. An art student in San Francisco in the early aughts, Joey is smart but self-doubting, resourceful but broke, living on student loans and Cup O’ Noodles while her classmates have mid-century shoe racks and family homes in Tahoe.

She’s also grimly funny — an astute observer of her scene, which she documents in handwritten notes, Craigslist ads, search histories, Venn diagrams, to-do lists. The book is an addictive coming-of-age story and a shrewd novel of manners. As Martin brings into focus the contemporary relationship between cultural production and social mobility, her deadpan satire gives way to a big-hearted, boom-box-thrust-in-the-air defense of making art.

When she’s assigned to make a self-portrait in her Experimental Film course, Joey decides to remake Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, a film she’s never seen. The idea, she explains to the class, is to draw on collective cultural memory: “I knew that Jason Schwartzman wore a red beret, for example. I knew that Bill Murray went to a pool.”

The novel follows the course of the project through stages of ambivalence, anxiety, self-sabotage. “The act of not working on Rushmore was an artistic gesture,” Joey decides, flailing. The project’s doomed concept is an apt analogy for any young person trying to fashion an identity or creative vision by picking up social cues.

For Joey, raised in a trailer in California’s Central Valley in a pre-Instagram era, decoding the vibe among her peers and positioning herself in it is especially hard. She doesn’t have the right references or social connections or clothes. She has a mom who struggles to hold down a job and an older sister who’s addicted to hard drugs and chaos. When her sister skips town, leaving an infant son with their mom, Joey’s plagued by guilt for having gotten out and by the fear that her goals are self-indulgent.

At school, she has her friend Suz, who’s talented, privileged, and art-world savvy, and who brings Joey easily into her orbit. Their pairing — the cool kid and the try-hard — often makes Joey feel like shit, in part because Suz is generous and good. She seems to like Joey as she is — or what little Joey shares about herself.

For her part, Joey approaches people with a kind of needy hostility, which comes through even in the book’s title. She has a poor kid’s chip on her shoulder; a watchful, anxious craving for acceptance; resentment born of scorn and desire for what other people have. In her social interactions, she often miscalculates her angle of approach, then turns on herself or judges others. Martin is canny about how self-loathing can fuel disdain for other people — usually one’s peers or family — or how social and economic precarity can cause someone to turn on herself.

Joey’s refuge is art. It seems to offer a way to opt out of daily life, with its crushing social requirements. But to see art as an escape from a hard life presumes a rigid distinction between life and art. This line is tough to maintain when you’re deep in debt for a BFA; when your friends are artists; when your creative drive makes you the family scapegoat; when the way you feel about yourself and your life relies on your ability to make art. That is, pursuing art with intention is bound up with just about every other practical life choice and its consequences. Perhaps for this reason, Joey’s art school project forces her to confront her own agency and her relationship to it.

In a recent piece for the New York Times’s T magazine, Adam Bradley points to “a new wave of campus satires, many of which are written by women, that aren’t really satires at all. By exposing their characters’ human motives, their frailties and failings, deflated aspirations and unarticulated hopes, they offer something more radical than righteous critique: avenues for empathy and, perhaps, pathways back to community for those who have strayed far away.”

Bradley cites Elaine Chou’s 2022 novel Disorientation and Netflix’s 2021 series The Chair, among other works that enlist the campus as a setting for individual renewal. We could add the spiky Tell Me I’m an Artist to this list. While the book sends up the conventions of art school and creative ambition, it also clings to what these things offer. Art school, Joey makes clear, has saved her from a do-nothing family in a go-nowhere town. It’s the only thing she wants.

But when you grow up poor, the author suggests, you learn pretty quickly that it’s shameful to want something; you’d be a fool to want what you can’t have. Joey’s path of self-discovery requires reckoning with her wants and with the role that other people play in supplying them. And what role does art-making play? “Making art is my way of tricking myself into believing that the past is something I can continue shaping,” Joey reflects late in the book. She’s figured out something about being the main character and, in the end, it’s a big rush.

Tell Me I’m an Artist by Chelsea Martin (2022) is published by Soft Skull Books and is available online and in bookstores.

A Trump-era policy barring artwork by Guantánamo detainees from leaving the prison has been lifted. As initially reported by the New York Times, detainees are now permitted to take a “practical quantity of their art” with them upon departure. The ban was initially implemented in 2017, following a selling exhibition of artwork by then-current and former detainees at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan that year.

Pentagon Spokesman Cesar H. Santiago declined to identify when the ban was lifted and did not offer the New York Times any clarifications on what constituted a “practical quantity,” but he did specify that despite the release, the Defense Department still considers the artwork to be “the property of the US government.”

Santiago has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.

Last October, eight former and current detainees issued an open letter to President Biden, first published on Hyperallergic, urging him to revise the policy and free their artwork. The letter detailed how from 2010, access to art classes and art materials in the military prison gave them the means to connect to their memories, their families, and the world.

“Art was our way to heal ourselves, to escape the feeling of being imprisoned and free ourselves, just for a little while,” the letter read. “We made the sea, trees, the beautiful blue sky, and ships. We painted our hope, fear, dreams, and our freedom. Our art helped us survive.”

The letter mentioned that prior to 2010, detainees were not allowed to make art but covertly channeled their creativity through bare-bones resources such as tea powder on toilet paper, carved styrofoam food containers, and soap “paint” on walls. After being granted access to materials, the detainees were thoroughly invested in their creative practices and shared their work with each other, their family members, legal representation, and even some of the prison workers.

Khaled Qasim, a current Yemeni detainee whose painting “Titanic” (2017) was featured in the John Jay campus exhibition, was cleared for release last summer since he was detained without charge since 2003. The process of initiating a release can take months or years, but Qasim was cited in the letter saying that he refuses to leave Guantánamo without his artwork. He even told BBC that “the art I made is me,” and that his soul would be left behind if his artwork was kept at the prison or destroyed.

Despite the lack of clarity on when the ban was lifted, the timing of the release could relate to the fact that 20 of the 34 remaining detainees have been recommended for transfer if the security conditions have been met.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City have upped the ante for Super Bowl LVII, putting art on the line. Both museums will watch with anticipation as the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs face off this Sunday, February 12, and the institution with the losing team will temporarily loan one piece from their permanent collections to the winner.

PMA and Nelson-Atkins announced the friendly wager yesterday, February 6, and have yet to reveal which piece they will each bet on this weekend’s game.

“When the Eagles soar to victory, we will warmly greet our friends from the Nelson-Atkins and treat them to unforgettable cheesesteaks here in Philadelphia,” Sasha Suda, the PMA’s director, said in a statement. “They have such a remarkable collection, and we will be thrilled to share a piece of it with our visitors, in a very special Point After Touchdown (PAT). We’ll make it feel right at home in our galleries and display it with Philly pride.”

The Nelson-Atkins responded to PMA’s light ribbing, assuring that if the Chiefs win the Super Bowl, PMA’s loan will look stunning in the Kansas City art museum.

“We expect to offer our Philadelphia friends something they’ll long remember after the Chiefs make short work of the Eagles,” said Nelson-Atkins Director Julián Zugazagoitia.

Last year, the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens wagered with the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) for the Super Bowl LVI. When the Los Angeles Rams defeated the Cincinnati Bengals 23-20, CAM loaned Huntington “Patience Serious” (1915) by Robert Henri. 

The tradition started 13 years ago, when art writer Tyler Green proposed getting art museums involved in the football mania that occurs in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. When the New Orleans Saints won against the Indianapolis Colts that initial year, the Indianapolis Museum of Art loaned the New Orleans Museum of Art J.M.W. Turner’s 19th-century painting “The Fifth Plague of Egypt” (1800).

“I thought that I’d like to see more art museums come down off the hill, so to speak, and be part of their communities in a more engaged way,” Green told CNN in 2011.

LOS ANGELES — Culture and sport occupy discrete spheres in contemporary society, each with their own dedicated temples: museums and stadiums, respectively. But at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, the two share the same space, with a pair of exhibitions focused on African-American art and history unfolding throughout the second-level mezzanine — just steps from the roaring crowds at the largest stadium in the NFL, home to the Rams and the Chargers.

Highlights from the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection have been on view for the past year, including objects and artworks spanning hundreds of years. Assembled by Bernard and Shirley Kinsey over the past five decades, the collection showcases work by African-American artists dating back to 1865 alongside historical documents and photos chronicling Black life from the late 16th century through the present day. These include a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, letters written by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and a first edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. An 1854 letter written from one enslaver to another painfully and bluntly illustrates the inhumanity of a system that treated people as property. Carried by an enslaved woman named Frances, the letter explains that she was sold, and torn from her family, to pay for horses and a stable.

Nearby sits the inaugural address of the second president of Mexico, Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldana, believed to have been Afro-Mexican, who abolished slavery in Mexico in 1829. It is a reminder of the relative freedom that existed just south of the border.

Against this backdrop of trauma, struggle, and cultural resilience, the collection surveys over 150 years of African-American art. It spans the gamut from the work of figurative artists Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, and Ernie Barnes to abstractions by Sam Gilliam, William T. Williams, and Ed Pratt. As a whole, the exhibition shows that African-American Art is American Art, not an offshoot of it, and intrinsically linked to the nation’s social, political, and cultural history.

Last August, the Kinsey Collection at SoFi Stadium was joined by Continuum, a group show featuring 23 contemporary artists of color co-curated by Khalil Kinsey and Rick Garzon, director of Residency Art Gallery in Inglewood. It extends the story begun with the Kinsey Collection, which is stronger in art of the 20th century than the 21st. Garzon told Hyperallergic that the curators focused on emerging artists who are “making noise in the art world right now” alongside mid-career and more established names. Some of those noisemakers include Patrick Martinez, whose neon signs immortalize the words of MLK and Marvin Gaye; Troy Lamarr Chew II, whose paintings incorporate African textile designs with icons of Black culture; and Yasmine Nasser Diaz, whose intricately cut paper collages investigate the facets of interwoven identities.

SoFi Stadium is just the latest of nearly 40 venues that have hosted the Kinsey Collection since 2006. “This isn’t our first rodeo in terms of left of center activations,” says Khalil Kinsey, the COO and chief curator of the collection and the son of Bernard and Shirley. Various versions of the current presentation have been shown at cultural institutions such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and Pepperdine University’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art as well as less conventional sites including Disney’s Epcot Center and American Airlines airport lounges around the country.

“This is an example of meeting people through the lens of everyday experiences,” Khalil Kinsey told Hyperallergic.

Links between generations are illuminated as with Mike Reesé’s elegiac “Tears of Joy (Ellis)” (2019), a densely layered abstraction made from taxidermy, resin, and automotive flake that recalls Howardena Pindell’s hole-punch paintings; Jaimie Milner’s 2015 photograph of the late assemblage pioneer John Outterbridge leaning out the window of his car, smiling; and “Barbershop: Two Good Friends” (1991) by veteran painter George Evans, which captures an establishment that has a deep significance within African-American life. Lyndon Barrois Sr. offers a whimsical nod to the venue’s purpose with “19 (Depicting Nineteen Historic LA Rams Players From 1946-2022),” small effigies crafted from gum wrappers, visible through magnifying lenses.

The goal of accessibility and inclusion that brought the Kinsey Collection to SoFi Stadium does come with some compromises. Viewers must contend with the site’s narrowness (compared to most museum galleries) and a glare on the plexiglass covering unframed works, exacerbated by large glowing orbs on the ground. During games or other events, the exhibition is only accessible to those with VIP tickets; otherwise, tickets cost $15 ($12 for Inglewood residents) for art tours on Friday and Saturday afternoons. A portion of proceeds from ticket sales goes towards the Hollywood Park Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports youth programs focused on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) education.

A representative for SoFi Stadium told Hyperallergic via email that “over 15,000 guests have bought tickets to tour the Collection, but hundreds of thousands have viewed the collection via stadium tours, sporting events, concerts, and private events.” They added that approximately 5,000 students from the Inglewood Unified School District and other nonprofit organizations have toured the exhibitions. (By comparison, LACMA had 621,000 visitors in 2021, according to the Art Newspaper’s Visitor Figures Survey.)

For Kinsey, the venue allows different groups of people from those who frequent traditional cultural institutions to see the art.

“We want to serve as an example to institutions and venues that we can think differently about arts and culture everyday,” Khalil Kinsey told Hyperallergic. “I see it every time I go to a game or a concert. [People are] captivated by something hanging on the wall. They go over, sit with it, maybe miss a few plays in the game to see more of it. That’s what’s exciting. You’re touching people in different ways.”

LOS ANGELES — “The ugly, the strange, and the gruesome.” The phrase introduces Reexamining the Grotesque: Selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and serves as a kind of working definition of the grotesque, a concept that’s shape-shifted its way through art history for centuries. 

The text on LACMA’s website goes on to describe the grotesque as “a persistent undercurrent in German art of the early 20th century.” The exhibition itself, tucked away in a small room within the museum’s modern art galleries, features prints, drawings, and illustrated publications by artists associated with German Expressionism and New Objectivity.

The Rifkind Center, LACMA’s expansive and often under-utilized collection of German modern prints and drawings, is a treasure trove of the ugly, strange, and gruesome, but the question this show raises is what distinguishes this “grotesque” from any number of artworks in the adjacent galleries — for instance, Cubism’s faceted women, who savagely reify what Mikhail Bakhtin called the “partitioned body” of the grotesque; Giacometti’s quivering, attenuated bodies; or the weathered, almost anthropomorphic chair and lamp of Edward Kienholz’s “The Illegal Operation” (1962).

The closest it comes to an answer is war. World War I and its aftermath in the Weimar Republic are recurring themes, central enough to be cited in the introductory text, but not quite enough to cohere the exhibition. It’s a shame because the works that best exemplify a uniquely German grotesque, and a raison d’etre for this show, are those that reflect the war and Weimar years.

Among the most shocking is Otto Dix’s “House Destroyed by Aerial Bombs (Tournai),” one of three exhibited works from his 1924 etching portfolio War (Der Krieg). The print is a response to Goya’s Disasters of War etching series (1810–20), but Dix abandons the visual logic that underpinned Goya’s didactic images. Instead, he manipulates perspective to produce a vertiginous house of horrors. A mis en abyme of openings in the bombed-out building creates a dizzying effect, while bullet holes and bloody wounds form a constellation that connects the bodies. 

The print’s emotional core is a small child killed by a head wound. Dix mitigates the gratuitous violence of even illustrating a dead child by situating the infant at the periphery, resting on a bare-breasted dead woman along the bottom edge. In the overall context of War, the mother and child are an indictment of war’s collateral damage; another dead child appears in the portfolio alongside a shell-shocked mother (not on view here).

Other works fit the grotesque theme but feel like afterthoughts or nods to big names (e.g., Kokoschka, Kirchner). And some pieces that call for context, like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “The Murderer” (1914) and Walter Gramatté’s “The Murder” (1925) — examples of the era’s vile “lustmord” genre — have no accompanying wall text; a text wouldn’t excuse the images, but it would make sense of their inclusion beyond the idea that femicide is obviously grotesque.

Some examples related to war are also stretches. George Grosz’s “Blood Is the Best Sauce” (1919) captures the acidity of the artist’s political caricatures, but it’s tame in comparison with viscerally grotesque cartoons like his “German Doctors Fighting the Blockade” (1918), and Otto Schubert’s “Ration Carriers 1” (1917) is a more or less straightforward illustration of a wartime ration carrier. More problematic are the inclusion and juxtaposition of Conrad Felixmüller’s angular “Soldier in a Madhouse 2” (1918) and Dix’s borderline-cartoonish “Skin Graft (Transplantation)” from War.

The wall text fails to clarify whether viewers are meant to see the subjects — a veteran with PTSD and one with a disfiguring facial wound, respectively — as grotesque or question their characterization as such by the artists and Weimar viewing public (presumably the latter). It also aligns physical and psychological wounds, within the context of the grotesque, without addressing either the vast difference between the two — e.g., the different types of abuses they suffered at the hands of the government, medical establishment, and bourgeois public — or the sociopolitical consequences of seeing them as grotesque, then and now.

After the war, many veterans with facial injuries were hidden from public view in out-of-the-way hospitals, and some were reported as dead to their families; antiwar activist Ernst Friedrich detailed this in his 1924 photo book War Against War, which includes photos on which Dix drew for images like “Skin Graft.” In contrast, PTSD sufferers were frequently on full public view as “invisible” wounds left many ineligible for state assistance, and as a result, destitute and unhoused. In both cases, featuring the images in a show on the grotesque risks exploiting the men all over again. (As an aside, the joint wall text might have mentioned that Felixmüller taught Dix the etching technique he used in War.)

These issues are relatively minor, however, compared to the gift of seeing the artworks in person. The show is too easy to miss, wedged between sprawling galleries filled with the giants of Euro-American Modernism. A small Cubism show in the next room at least gets a prominent wall label — the title is barely noticeable in this one. But as the best works bend reality toward the bizarre, they reflect the world’s perpetual cycle of disasters like a hall of mirrors. Georg Scholz’s satirical “Industrial Farmers” (1920), a smaller lithograph of his 1920 painting, is the political grotesque at its subversive sharpest: a family portrait of Weimar Germany’s profiteering farmers, it monstrously inverts the “noble peasant” trope. That it was made more than a century ago reaffirms that cynicism and exploitation are cornerstones of modernity.

In terms of Germany and WWI, all roads lead to Dix, who served throughout the war’s four years and returned to it over and over in his art. “Dead Man in the Mud,” from War, is everything that the exhibition promises: ugly, in its portrayal of a body trapped in the relentless mud of the trenches; strange, in the man’s uncanny slippage between volume and flatness, body and skeleton, sleep and death; and gruesome, most of all because Dix saw it in the flesh. 

Reexamining the Grotesque: Selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Collection continues at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile, Los Angeles) through March 5. The exhibition was organized by the museum.

The 65th Annual Grammy Awards, held last night, February 5, were a standard affair that seemed to generate the most buzz over two wildly unsurprising topics: Beyoncé breaking the record for most career wins while again being passed up for a big award, and Ben Affleck apparently having a horrible time. But amidst an otherwise uneventful ceremony, sharp-eyed digital art aficionados may have noticed a new phenomenon: An artificial intelligence artwork — generated in real time — was displayed on the screens behind the stage.

The trippy, shape-shifting abstract images are the work of Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol, and according to a representative from his studio, the display marked the first time AI art was used in a Grammy broadcast. Anadol has minted his AI pieces as NFTs and sold them at Sotheby’s. It seems only fitting that AI and NFT art would make their Grammy debut at a stadium called the Crypto.com Arena, the new name for the former Staples Center in Los Angeles as of 2021.

“The collaboration started almost six months ago with an exciting call from the designers who are in charge of the stage design and the whole flow of the ceremony,” Anadol said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic. “Because this year they were going for an immersive stage design, they chose to license our artworks and turn them into a media experience on the giant screens on the stage.”

One of the specific pieces chosen for the Grammy’s exhibition was “Galaxy (Infinite AI Data Painting)” (2021), a swirling generative image trained on photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope. The work creates itself in real-time and never repeats itself, yielding what Anadol calls “machine dreams” of the galaxies documented by the telescope.

“This, to me, is very poetic because it’s technically photos of our past, and the memories of the universe,” the artist said.

The piece is part of Anadol’s multi-year series Machine Hallucinations: Space Metaverse, in which the artist trained a machine learning algorithm on deep space NASA photographs captured by satellites and spacecrafts. The results are detailed and life-like cosmic images, yet while many of his digital works mimic the forms of planetary surfaces and colorful galaxies, others appear more biological, pulsing and morphing on their LED screens. “Unsupervised,” part of Machine Hallucinations, is currently on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Last night’s ceremony also featured work from Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams, another generative series trained on over 300 million photographs of trees, mushrooms, flowers, landscapes, and other natural objects. Just as in Space Metaverse, Anadol’s algorithm creates a never-ending stream of final products, and similar to his cosmos-themed project, the results are incredibly varied: Some pieces mimic the petals of flowers, others the microbiology of mold, and some the insides of fruits.

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, New York — Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) makes work at the intersection of abstracted imagery, written word, and dynamic washes of sound and music. The filmmaker and visual artist foregrounds his identity and tells stories of Indigenous lifeways, diving deep into questions of his Indigeneity through quasi-autobiographical narratives that speak directly to Native audiences while not over-explaining meaning for non-Native viewers. 

“The very first film that I made was the idea to just make something without having to contextualize it, without having to spend ten minutes giving an [Indigenous] history lesson about who these people are, who we were, and what the subtext is for the film,” Hopinka told Hyperallergic. “I guess making the work that I do, it can be an idea, it can be a single gesture. Maybe the audience changes from piece to piece, something that is more focused on family and who I’m speaking to, something more broadly relating to Native peoples.”

Hopinka, a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2022, was an inaugural fellow at Forge Project in 2021 and has exhibited his work globally in major museums, galleries, and shown at prominent film festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. In addition to his work as a practicing artist, Hopinka currently serves as an assistant professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College. Hopinka noted that during his undergraduate and post-graduate studies, the absence of meaningful and in-depth Indigenous studies curriculum was palpable.

“I was frustrated because [the Native studies courses] all felt geared toward White students,” he said. “I was like, okay, this is Native Studies 101, but what’s Native Studies 201, and what’s the 300 level? What are the questions that were not being taught in these classes, and if Native Studies isn’t for us, then what is?” These questions fueled much of Hopinka’s work, integrating film as a means of and outlet for telling stories directly to the Indigenous audiences he felt were being left out of the conversation. “In some ways it felt really practical — I’m going to make this film and not contextualize anything or explain anything” he said. “It also felt like an intellectual exercise. Native peoples in this country are so marginalized, [making films for and about Native people] just seemed like an impossibility.”

Hopinka possesses a razor-sharp acumen for storytelling. However, it is a type of storytelling that is not hinged on a strict linear timeline. There is a befuddled beauty in the undulating narrative-building Hopinka crafts, one that leads the viewer through varied landscapes of story with no explicit beginning, middle, or end, essentially allowing a viewer to enter the work at any point in its timeline and still be able to have a meaningful experience with it. 

In his short film “Jáaji Approx.” (2015), Hopinka laces together audio recordings made between 2005 and 2015 of his father, Mike Hopinka, talking about and singing powwow songs. The recordings, which act as the film’s score, are articulated on the screen through subtitles in Chinuk Wawa (a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin.) The video vacillates between moments of shaky camera work and graceful fixed and panned shots that at times go in and out of focus. Footage of natural landscapes, gas stations, and highways atmospherically yet warmly play across the screen, at times dematerializing with bands of magenta, cyan, and ochre washes. The abstracted images play both visual and narrative functions within this work and others. 

“I wanted to layer the video and also just play around with the legibility of the image, to illustrate the relationship that I have with my father across time, these recordings became approximations of that relationship,” said Hopinka. “The abstractions became a way for me to communicate with his singing. I thought very literally about how I could sing along with him in terms of video work, and these images and abstraction were a way to do that.” 

One moment in the film features landscapes and, though not identical, they mirror one another. On the bottom of the frame is a natural scene, lush mountains against a clouded sky; at the top is an image of a city, cultivated and built up with structures and roads. “I want to look at the sort of duality of places without necessarily making a political statement, but more making a statement that has to do with a civil sort of reckoning or recognition of place,” he said. “Who is here now and who was here before and who continues to be here.”

In his 2022 single-channel video “Sunflower Siege Engine” (on view in Sky Hopinka: Seeing and Seen at the San Jose Museum of Art through July 9), Hopinka layers together archival footage from the occupation of Alcatraz Island, lead by the United Indians of All Tribes from 1969 to 1971, including Richard Oakes reading of his “Proclamation: To the Great White Father and All His People” in November of 1969, illuminating the parameters of inhospitality that the United States government created with the Indigenous reservation system and linking it to the carceral nature of the island and the prison industrial complex. 

The work evokes a projected nostalgia, one of resistance and resurgence of agency while concurrently linking it back to Hopinka himself, reflecting on his body, aging, and experience. It’s a nostalgia that stretches into the future with one hand and reaches back into the past with the other. “There are ramblings of myself [in the work], as I was thinking about my body in these different places, or who I am, or how I exist as a Native person.” The recurring chant “Get Them Out,” hangs in the air, a haunting call awaiting its response.

Graham Nickson’s paintings open onto vast stretches of imaginary terrain; and in the realm of palpable fact they claim impressive portions of wall space. “Turtle: Bathers: Orange Chevron” (2002/2022), a panoramic canvas at the heart of his recent show at Betty Cuningham Gallery, is 20 feet wide. The 12 figures inhabiting the sandy foreground have all the elbow room they need to unfold beach chairs, perform headstands, and more. Nickson’s people are always caught up in some action that makes their trim muscularity vivid. Along the painting’s lower edge a woman lying on her stomach reaches back with both hands to grasp her feet; pulling hard, she converts her body into an arc. Behind her, another woman arcs in the opposite direction, raising her midriff toward the sky.

The first of these figures offers an elegant variation on the painting’s lower edge; the second does the same for the upper edge. Figures to the right and left stand parallel with the vertical boundaries of the painted surface, while a man in a yellow swimsuit marks its midpoint — a function performed in concert with an orange sail. Nickson’s forms are those of a formalist, a painter who does everything he can to render the structure of his imagery perspicuous. Every stance and gesture in “Large Bridge Bathers: Ritual” (1994) echoes a vertical, a horizontal, or a 45-degree angle in the scene’s sparse wooden architecture. As it charts the coordinates of pictorial space, this linear play generates something richer: a livable environment. A formalist with an empath’s intent, Nickson feels each beach-goer’s singular way of inhabiting a place and wants us to feel it too.

Some of his people cover their faces with their hands or hide them as they remove pieces of clothing; others stand with their backs toward us. Yet each is an individual by virtue of bodily traits independent of physiognomy, never mind personality. In 2019, the Cuningham Gallery showed more than two dozen of Nickson’s close-up portraits. By definition, a portrait depicts someone in particular, yet the artist has said that any likeness he produces is “a bonus.” Wearing his portraitist hat, he works not face to face with a subject but “eyeball to eyeball.” And it is in the eyes that he finds the chromatic key to an image. With that established, he attends to “pure sensation” while keeping his own eye as “innocent” as possible. Developing an architecture of sometimes jarring hues, he aims for what he’s called a “description of form through color.”  

It is possible, for an instant, to see Nickson’s robustly painted faces as pure forms. An instant later, human presences assert themselves but not in the usual way. For these portraits do without the familiar means of conveying outward personalities or inward selves — no features inflected with feeling, no tilting of the head or shoulders to indicate attitude. Nickson’s brushstrokes acknowledge the elasticity of skin, the solidity of the underlying bone; he gives you a sense of cartilage and tendon. One could say that he treats his sitters as objects were they not so imperatively present as people. What’s powerfully felt but difficult to describe is the primal humanity of the people we meet in these portraits. Nickson evokes the vital energies that daily sociability obscures.

Some portrait painters chat with their subjects. Nickson doesn’t. Isolated under his gaze, they gaze back with an intensity that promotes no connection with him or with us, the viewers. They are not alienated so much as absorbed in their utterly self-sufficient beings. Likewise, the lack of interaction between the people in Nickson’s often densely populated beach scenes is not a sign of social dysfunction. It shows, rather, where the artist’s interest lies: in the individual’s place in a world shaped by immensities of land and water, sky and cloud — and the obvious but unacknowledged presence of other people. The vehicle for this interest is Nickson’s style.

It is easy to see artists’ styles as indices of their personalities and that is not entirely wrong. Still, a fully realized style is more than a mirror held up to the self. Ingres’s paintings, for instance, show him to have been painstaking and confident; they also reveal how deliberately he stood apart from the world, the better to assess its appearances. Nickson gives his powerful intelligence the task of opening the way to regions of experience untouched by standard categories of thought.  

To give his paintings an aura of objective truth, Ingres smoothed his brushwork into invisibility. Nickson makes each touch of paint starkly evident. Sharpening their harmonies with dissonance, his colors are not just brilliant; they are insistent, as are his delineations of form. In his charcoal-on-paper drawings, even clouds and streaks of rain show the force of his hand. Calmly passionate about the thereness of all there is to be experienced, Nickson’s style commemorates the world’s power to acquire an immediately felt significance. He focuses on light, weather, and, above all, people because our responses to these things are as quick as they are acute. If the faces of his figures were more often visible, we might drift away on currents of speculation about character or mood. To prevent that, Nickson persuades us to stay in the extended moment of the image, intuiting the feel of air on skin and the inward sensation of muscular effort.  

“Turtle: Bathers: Orange Chevron” began life in 2002, as a painting built from black, white, and endless intermediate tones of gray. Two decades later, Nickson remade it with the full range of his richly saturated palette. The only full-color work amid the charcoal drawings and grisaille paintings in his recent Betty Cuningham show, it looked entirely at home. Whether he works in color or black and white, the brusque refinement of his touch maintains tonal contrast at the same high pitch. Immersed in a quietly roiling atmosphere, Nickson’s preoccupied bathers carry on at water’s edge. His world abides, even as he reconfigures the landscape and populates it with new people.  

Beneath this variety is the unity suggested by a 2009 statement. “Black and white and gray,” says the artist, have “implications of color” that “may be translated into the most outrageous or radical color experiences.” Thus, “I like to think I am drawing in color.” Though I don’t see those implications, I have no doubt that Nickson does, and that they originate in something I feel in all his works: a deep intuition of the world’s oneness. With sky, water, and narrow strips of land, he sets the stage for a pictorial drama — a theater of the primordial that confronts us with images of the sheer being shared by everything, human and not.

MEXICO CITY — Materia estética disponible, Miguel Calderón’s current show at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, which debuted at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey (MARCO), is a perplexing survey of gritty works in installation, photography, and video spanning 30 years. The works play with fact and fiction to shed light on institutional critique and transgressions around class, violence, and corruption with humor and irony. They also draw from La Panadería, an alternative art space that Calderón, an outlier of sorts, ran with Yoshua Okón in the 1990s out of a former bakery in la Condesa. During this period, Mexico City was reeling from the aftershocks of Zapatista uprisings, the peso crisis, economic hardship, and kidnappings.

What first caught my attention was “Moribundo” (1999), a giant blue mural of a globe with the eponymous title scrawled across it in big, bold red letters. It turns out, in a witty play on words (a riff on a local mattress store called Dormimundo), the artist was evoking the death of the museum. Once I got to see empleado del mes (1998), a series of unassuming color photographs, the irony made sense to me. The cleaners are pictured reenacting scenes from classical paintings that were temporarily not on view at the Museo Nacional de Arte. These images felt like a parody of the distance between “art institutions” and those who scrub them clean. Ironically, Calderón recently slammed the Tamayo in an open letter for not paying its custodians for months late last year. 

The video El balance de las improbabilidades (2021) offers a glimpse into the life of Pedro, an affluent insurance adjuster turned art collector who tries to escape the drudgery of his work by acting in a violent play that takes an emotional toll on him. The tension between melodrama and the adversity of real life is quite disturbing. In the end, it’s the play that makes him fall apart, not the real human cost of corruption. Pedro, cold and detached, tells it like it is, eventually going back to his old life.

Materia estética disponible is macabre, and a bit tongue-in-cheek. Seeing how some US media has flattened Mexico into a place of danger is a far cry from Calderón’s brilliantly complex visual landscapes of comedy and tragedy clamoring all at once. This survey’s flippant title reminds us that aesthetics, which can also be crude and random, are always there for us to see. Calderón lays bare what’s sinister and corrosive about life in Mexico City, including his place within it. So, we can choose to face all this clever provocation head on or simply look the other way. 

Materia estética disponible continues at Museo Tamayo (Paseo de la Reforma 51, Bosque de Chapultepec, Miguel Hidalgo, Mexico City, Mexico) through March 5. The exhibition was curated by Taiyana Pimentel, director of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO).

For three straight nights in January, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum turned itself inside out, using its front façade as a gallery wall for a projected exhibition in solidarity with the women of Iran. Titled after the originally Kurdish slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the public display was centered on the women-led revolution against the draconian gender-based discrimination exacted by Iran’s Islamic Republic. According to Human Rights Activists in Iran, over 19,000 protesters have been detained, over 500 have been killed, and 111 are currently facing the death penalty following the state-sanctioned murder of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa (Zhina) Amini.

From January 26 through 28, images of 30 artworks by mostly Iranian artists were projected on the Asian Art Museum from 6pm to 10pm thanks to a joint effort between MOZAIK Philanthropy and ArtRise Collective. After the sun had set, the projected rotation of images cycled above the entrance of the museum, illuminating and activating the scene for dozens of participants and passersby. The works spanned a variety of media, from film segments and animations to photography, illustration, and collage work, showcasing the diversity of artmaking and image production that supplements a revolution.

MOZAIK Philanthropy, a nonprofit organization, has spent over a decade securing financial support for grassroots organizations across California and the country for provocative, art-aligned initiatives addressing a myriad of social and environmental issues. Having premiered at the Asian Art Museum, ArtRise Collective was developed to amplify the intersectional nature of the artwork and revolution tactics utilized by the civilians of Iran during this revolution through curated public art projects.

The works were presented anonymously out of interest in protecting the involved artists within and beyond Iran’s borders. The public projection came to fruition in conjunction with a virtual exhibition through MOZAIK’s fifth annual Future Art Awards. MOZAIK issued an emergency open call for artist submissions pertaining to the revolution’s message of “Woman, Life, Freedom,” prompting over 500 contemporary artists to apply. A jury selected 50 artists for the exhibition, 30 of which were included in the projection series.

According to MOZAIK’s executive director, Keely Badger, 60% of the participating artists are from Iran, and over 80% of them identified as women.

“It’s powerful when we can bring these kinds of artworks outside of our museum to share with the wider public — especially timely, relevant, and deeply moving ones like ‘Women Life Freedom,'” Asian Art Museum Director Jay Xu said in a statement. “My hope is that these kinds of community-based projects provide the solace, the strength, and the sense of solidarity we all need right now.”

SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival and Parade, the largest of its kind outside Asia, was first held in 1851. This Saturday, February 4, a contemporary art project was included in the annual event when 16 immigrant women from San Francisco’s Chinatown and the Mission District powered through the wind and rain carrying hand-made flags representing their stories. 

After the parade celebrating the Year of the Rabbit, the women followed a mariachi band into the banquet room of the Chinese Culture Center (CCC), a collaborator on the project How I Keep Looking Up/Como Sigo Mirando Hacia Arriba/仰望. Donning rain ponchos and proudly holding up their flags, they were greeted with cheers and applause. Artist Christine Wong Yap, slightly damp in the pink sequin top she had worn to march in, stood with them. Yap conceived of How I Keep Looking Up a year ago, holding workshops in Spanish, English, and Chinese as well as one-on-one meetings with the women for the last six months. 

In spite of the weather, crowds of thousands lined the streets to see the lion dancers, marching bands, rabbit floats, and fireworks, which lasted about two and a half hours. It was crucial that the 16 women, all of them Chinese or Latina and many of them community activists, be present in the parade as well, Yap told Hyperallergic. 

“Women of color are so underrepresented in so many high visibility platforms,” Yap said. “It’s important for their flags to be seen, but it’s also important for them — their faces and their bodies — to be visible in the parade.”

Now that the flags have been displayed in the parade, they will be on view at the CCC until April 1. Hoi Leung, deputy director of the center, told Hyperallergic the parade was the ideal venue for the women to first show them.  

“The parade was one of the few opportunities for immigrants of any background to display their culture very joyfully and proudly in a public space,” Leung said. “That’s what the parade is about, and it’s a venue to extend an invitation from Chinatown to other communities of color to come and share these values.”

Yap, who was previously an artist in residence at the University of California, Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, often focuses on mental health in her work. She believes making art with other immigrant women from different cultures and telling stories of resilience gave participants an opportunity to feel that they belong.

That was true for Manuela Esteva. In an interview, Esteva, speaking in Spanish, said the stairs in her flag represent people moving on and healing after trauma, and interlocking circles show their interdependence and reliance on each other. She had never sewn or made art before, but by the second workshop, she loved designing her flag. 

“My flag represents growth,” Esteva said. “I never thought I could do this, but making it helped me get rid of my pain.”

Yap wanted participants to realize that talent does not need to be innate — it can be learned and cultivated. “That was one of the first things we established in the workshops,” Yap said. “We embraced imperfection and failure as markers of growth and valued trying more than accomplishment.”

Yap says the people in the workshop became a community, cheering one another on, offering support, and learning about each other’s cultures. 

Cammi Huang, speaking in English and through a translator, said she liked that the workshop was attended by all immigrant women, and she thought getting to learn some Spanish was fun. 

Huang designed a flag showing two dandelions, one with its seeds blowing away and a larger, colorful bloom. The respective flowers are symbolic portraits of Huang before and after immigrating to the United States, finding a job and friends, and growing roots. Huang enjoyed the experience of telling her story through art.  

“It’s more about what’s inside, not about what we look like, and during this workshop, we got more understanding about what we’re feeling,” she said. “With artwork, it’s more freeing to show what we want to show to the world.”

As the popular children’s book by Taro Gomi and Amanda Mayer Stinchecum teaches us, Everyone Poops. In divisive times, we can at least fall back upon this basic commonality, and a new art initiative in Tokyo is bringing culture to the place where everyone can encounter it: the public restroom. Through the Tokyo Toilet project, the Nippon Foundation is renovating and artistically reimagining public toilets in 17 locations across Shibuya, Tokyo. One of the most recently unveiled restrooms uses video art to emphasize the universality of the structure as well as the uniqueness of anyone who might use it.

The 13th bathroom in the planned series of 17, unveiled last year in Hiroo East Park, was designed by Tomohito Ushiro. For the unconventional structure, Ushiro decorated the concrete cube form of the public toilet with a digital lighting grid that represents humanity through a shifting pattern of 7.9 billion different light formations.

“I wanted this toilet to express the project’s underlying theme of ‘All people are the same, in the sense that they are all different,’” Ushiro said in a statement about his design. “In addition to safety, peace of mind, and cleanliness, I wanted a public toilet that all people would find agreeable. The location in a park, surrounded by greenery in an area where many people live, means that it is also like a piece of public art that is part of people’s daily lives, and is always posing questions.”

These may seem like grand aspirations for a toilet, but despite Japan’s reputation for cleanliness in public spaces, common-use restrooms are not held in favor and are rarely used, according to the Nippon Foundation.

“The use of public toilets in Japan is limited because of stereotypes that they are dark, dirty, smelly, and scary,” reads a brief on the Tokyo Toilet project.

The Tokyo Toilet project restrooms are gender-neutral, accessible, and open to all. The initiative seeks to showcase creative design as a mechanism for an inclusive society, and contributors to the project have included the architects Kengo Kuma and Toyo Ito and creative designer Kashiwa Sato.

The 7.9 billion light patterns in Ushiro’s design correspond to the current global population.

“… They change continuously, from sunlight filtering through the trees during the day to wafting in moonlight or a firefly flying about at night,” Ushiro said. “People will never see the same pattern twice.”

The most recent toilet, number 14, opened in January and was created by industrial designer Marc Newson. The structure, tucked under a rail overpass, features an under-lit pitched copper roof, the shape of which mirrors a traditional design for shrines, temples, and tearooms, lending the structure a feeling of familiarity and trust.

In the early hours of Monday, February 6, a deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Turkey, devastating the nation’s Southeast and the adjacent northern region of Syria. At least 3,700 people have been killed with more than 10,000 injured, and the catastrophe’s effects were felt as far away as Lebanon, Israel, and Cyprus. The initial quake shook the earth for over two minutes, and 12 hours later, another earthquake of nearly equal magnitude struck again, followed by at least 120 aftershocks.

The Turkish government said the earthquake has destroyed over 3,000 buildings across the country, including historic sites and cultural landmarks. Among the hardest hit was the 2nd-century CE Gaziantep Castle, which stands on a hill in the middle of the eponymous city near the disaster’s first epicenter. The city’s fortress was used by ancient Romans and Byzantines and had been serving as a museum, but now, portions of the castle’s fortifying wall have cracked and the iron railings that surrounded the court were reportedly scattered onto the sidewalk following the building’s partial collapse.

Next to the castle, the 17th-century Şirvani Mosque was also partially destroyed, and around 140 miles north, the 19th-century Yeni mosque in Malatya was severely damaged.

Across the border in Syria, the ancient citadel of Aleppo, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was also badly hit and sustained damage to its iconic Mamluk tower gate and the minaret of its Ayyubid mosque. The fortress was built in the 13th century, but the city itself had served as a vital trade hub for over a thousand years, since the 2nd century BCE. In the years-long battle for Aleppo during the ongoing Syrian Civil War, at least 60% of the Old City was destroyed.

The earthquake has killed at least 237 people and injured 639 in Aleppo, but Syria’s rebel-held Northwest also suffered severe damage. The area houses 1.8 million displaced people in temporary camps, and 4.1 million people there require humanitarian assistance. Now, freezing temperatures threaten to worsen the earthquake’s devastation.

Turkey has experienced multiple deadly earthquakes over the past century, but the Turkish government called today’s disaster the worst since 1939, when a massive quake killed over 30,000 people.

Since the early morning, countries across the world have pledged humanitarian aid to both Turkey and Syria.

Tulsa Artist Fellowship (TAF), a place-based, durational award focused on supporting visionary arts practitioners, is accepting applications for its 2024–2026 cohort. The fellowship is intended for national and local artists and/or arts workers of any medium or discipline with five or more years of relevant experience. During the three-year term, awardees will live and work in Tulsa, Oklahoma. With the recognition that groundbreaking artistic practices thrive within an intention-setting framework, recipients will commit to actualizing a proposed project. Over 1,200 applicants engaged with the 2022–2023 submission process.

Located in the heart of Oklahoma’s Green Country, TAF is an initiative of the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF). With GKFF’s strong belief that the arts are essential to a diverse and engaged city, Tulsa Artist Fellowship was established in 2015 as a program dedicated to addressing the most pressing challenges in artistic communities and serving as a globally recognized model for mobilizing them with the transformative power of art.

TAF annually appoints 30 arts experts working across the United States who represent a wide spectrum of disciplines to join the review process while leveraging their network of experienced creatives. Implementing this structure will deepen the fellowship’s connection to diverse communities and practices that constitute the field of art.

The 10 awardees for the 2024–2026 cycle will each receive a total of $150,000 over three award years in addition to a $12,000 yearly housing stipend, $1,200 yearly health stipend, $1,200 yearly studio assistant stipend, $1,500 relocation stipend, fully subsidized studio spaces, and access to shared art-making facilities. The application closes on March 9, 2023.

For more information or to apply, visit tulsaartistfellowship.org.

Editor’s Note: This is part of the 2022/23 Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators, and the second of three posts by the author, the third of which will be an email-only exhibition sent to all Hyperallergic subscribers.

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Long live Cyclona!

In this interview with Robert Legorreta, also known as “Cyclona,” we discuss the origins of his performance art, collaborations with the artist Gronk, and ongoing political activism. Legorreta (b. 1952, El Paso) was raised in East Los Angeles and began his first public performances in 1966. Noted performances include the debut of “Cyclona” in the 1969 play, “Caca-Roaches Have No Friends” and a 1971 wedding performance at California State University, Los Angeles. He collaborated with the art collective Asco and his longtime friend Mundo Meza. Legorreta was also involved with the non-profit, VIVA, Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists.

Legorreta discusses the power of rock and roll music on his generation and parallel scenes that pushed the boundaries of gender, drag, and performance, such as John Waters, Divine, and Andy Warhol. As a Los Angeles artist, Legorreta pre-figured the “terrorist drag” of Vaginal Davis. 

Legorreta considers himself a teacher and activist through the mediums of art and music. His work is currently in the collections of The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Legorreta has most recently shown in the touring “Axis Mundo” exhibit, dedicated to his friend and frequent collaborator, Mundo Meza; in addition to “Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas.” He is currently working on a podcast and book. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Dakota Noot: You’re a living legend! So I guess just to start off: Where does the name “Cyclona” come from?

Cyclona: It was a “Pachuco” name. During the zoot suit time, they would call the wild women at that time “Cyclonas.” […] It also comes from the cyclone of “The Wizard of Oz.”

DN: You’re a friend of Dorothy!

For me, it represents an attack on society, because a cyclone will come in and cleanse the earth. It’s not a bad thing. People want to freak, but then they rebuild. They’re still living there. I see it as a cleanser of Earth and a cleanser of society, and a cleanser of ignorance, and something to confront it. That’s in your face and says: You’re not going to get away with that because I’m going to tell it like it is. I still carry the spirit of the 1960s because I was never on drugs. I was a young kid. I was in my young teens when the ’60s happened. So the hippies, to me, were a bunch of idiots.

DN: Speaking of reactions, and being a cyclone coming in, how did the Chicano community react to your work? 

C: Crazy. Crazy. I was able to use it as a tool to confront first: the cruisers on Whittier Boulevard. Every Halloween for at least three or four years. And they would freak, they just loved it really. Guys wanted to take me home. Guys would open their car door. People would chase us. I would go into the bars even though I was like 13 or 14 years old. They didn’t know because I was all done up. And then in the psychedelic outfit. So I used to go in there and dance, and the drunks and everybody would have a crazy time. 

During that time, Gronk used to follow us between the stores, and hide in the clothes on the walkways. He was a very weird character. And me and Mundo [Mundo Meza] were like two glitter queens, going up and down Whittier challenging everybody’s mind and I loved it because I was being chased. I used to put two water balloons and tie with water on each one to look like I had breasts and I would wear those psychedelic outfits. 

DN: You’re a trip!

C: Yeah, definitely. That’s when Gronk asked us to join “Caca-Roaches” [Caca-Roaches Have No Friends].

The guy [Larry Domasin] from “Fun in Acapulco” was with us. The little guy, that little Mexican guy that takes Elvis: he was the first “Cyclona” because he was supposed to be in the play. But then he was thrown out and I was chosen as “Cyclona.” Gronk said, “Oh, there’s something about you.” But he didn’t say what it was. Because he didn’t want to admit that he was following us. Well, we knew he was. He was a leftover beatnik from that time. But he was also an artist. So it looked a little bit trampy because the artists at that time always looked a little bit trampy.

DN: I think they still do!

C: Yeah, like the beats. They would carry their art and little pad. And that’s the way he looked: He had wingtips and was wearing that shiny material from the ’60s. And we were just totally in outer space. Crazy. Wearing women’s clothing and jewelry, being all glittered out and dragged out and everything. He just couldn’t believe us, and we knew nothing of Andy Warhol. We knew nothing of the Factory. We were secluded from that. All we knew was rock’n’roll!

DN: I’m curious, what made you want to continue “Cyclona,” past Caca-Roaches? How did you decide to take it on and make it your own? 

C: Because it was so powerful. That night, I did the first performance of “Caca-Roaches Have No Friends.” It was put in the Belvedere Citizen. “Caca-Roaches Have No Friends: a play for all audiences.” We were smack dab on in Belvedere Park. Next to Maravilla Projects, which is nothing but gang members. They all came to the opening night. We didn’t have a regular society and they fucking freaked out. They threw eggs. They started burning the place down. They called the police and we literally had to run for our lives! That was just opening night.

DN: I mean, that’s a great reaction. 

C: We only did it twice! […] on the lake was the first night, and the second night was in the indoor gym. at the Belvedere apart gym. Yeah, I’m a real wild character.

DN: I’m also glad you’re just being so honest and candid. Because I feel like a lot of younger artists, when they work in groups, want to be very ‘fake-nice” and get along with everyone. The reality is that personalities are going to clash. 

C: If you don’t take a fucking chance in life, you’re never gonna get anywhere. I’m not who I am because I just stood there and hoped somebody would recognize me.

DN: Discover me!

C:  Discover me or see me. Like the shows on the stage and PBS. I don’t need to go on that stage. You just have to go to the people and give them a reason. And that’s what I did. So it blows me away to know that I’m teaching the children to be activists through art, through performance, and through music, because that’s what I was about. I’m not an artist: I’m a politician first, then I’m an artist because I do my politics through art and music. So I might tell you what I’m doing but you might recognize it a month later, and call me and say, “oh Cyclona, I got what you were saying.” Because it happens. That’s just the way I am. So if it’s not political, and if it’s not to teach society something, I don’t do it.

DN: What did you think of the whole Warhol superstars? 

C:  I think it was great. It was meant to happen. Because we were all coming through that. The children that were from the war, were very free and open. And so there was nothing tying us down. Yet until the ’60s happened, then when they realized all these children are starting to go nuts and have free sex and free art and all this shit. So they started to close down and stop trying to stop everything, but they never could, because art and everything is freedom, that’s what we were living on the freedom from our parents who have fought in the war.

DN: What got you into singing, performing, and doing the blues?

C: I think spirituals did because I was a little kid. I went down the block. And I bought some 78s for like a penny, which at that time were two cents. I got the spiritual song going home. I put it on. Very slow record. So it was spiritual. And then we had a Holy Roller church down the block, and they would scream, and jump and go crazy and everything with the music. And so I would look at that as an outside insider. And then, Elvis hit when I was four years old. So I saw him on TV for the first time. I was a big fan of his as a child. Then of course, the surfer movement came in, and we all became surfers, and everything on the radio was nothing but surf music, to Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, all that crap, all the original stuff, “Wipe Out,” and everything. So that was a part of our life for about five years till about 1963. And then people started to listen to the Beatles. And it just changed the whole fucking world. Completely. Everything changed. The next day, everybody in school was English, talking English, dressing English, listening to rock and roll, and everything. Everybody was freaked out. Because it was no longer what they want, what the school wants. It was what WE want.

DN: How did drag queens react to what you were doing? Like, were they too formal compared to you?

C: A lot of them liked me. 

DN: Okay, that’s good!

C: Yeah, for what I did politically. They liked me, and knew that I’m not a drag queen. So they just admire me and just see that I’m there. I’ve been around a lot of drag queens and stuff, but they just respect me, and there’s no animosity, there’s no hatred.

God gives you whatever you’re going to be, and I believe that God gave me Cyclona. I really do.

It could be argued that the German-French painter Hans Hartung (1904–1989) had overall a bigger influence on art than the Abstract Expressionists. By the 1930s, he was a painterly nonobjective artist. Reproductions of his work had reached the US, and his paintings were also seen in the A. E. Gallatin Collection here in New York. He was the bridge between pre-war German Expressionism and post-war German abstraction. Hartung’s odd technique, derived from his auxiliary practices of photography and printmaking, of using a wide variety of tools and plants as paint applicators, married the optical to the haptic. Gerhard Richter’s paintings made from gradations, dry brushing, and squeegees, compounding the photograph in paint, are heavily indebted to Hartung, who anticipates the imprint-as-painterly-mark aesthetic of Christopher Wool, Wade Guyton, and Rudolf Stingel. In addition, Andy Warhol’s first abstractions, the Shadows series (1978–79), were directly influenced by Hartung’s 1975-76 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition. 

Hans Hartung: Revenge, currently at Perrotin New York, refers to this show 47 years later, seeking to redress the damning New York Times review by Hilton Kramer that resulted in “the American market turning away from him,” as a documentary film accompanying the exhibition attests. Beyond Kramer’s blinkered assessment, Hartung’s work most likely didn’t go over well in the heyday of conceptualism, earth art, and the literal use of materials. The illusionism present in his paintings by way of atmospheric spray paint, with contrasting roller marks highlighting mechanically applied textures and dramatic lights and darks, might have appeared not only false but gratuitous. The dark, corrupt soul of Europe. Anyway, painting, most artists agreed, was dead. In addition, American artists and critics were in their third decade of blocking any acknowledgment that the École de Paris had anything worthwhile to contribute.

From that perspective, Kramer’s opening line, “Why? Why Hartung?” does not sound so strange. If you are content with the market-driven painterly figuration incessantly placed in your path, you could ask the same question today. 

Thankfully, for the second time since their opening in New York, Perrotin has ignored the zeitgeist and devoted all three floors to this eccentric and deserving artist, whose work came from childhood drawings executed to ward off fear during lightning storms, the music of Bach, and the paintings of Rembrandt. The third-floor hanging that reprises the installation and sequential hanging of works in The Met exhibition is particularly revelatory. The filmic element is present in Hartung’s utilization of the rectangle to radically crop the abstract images. In the deceptively simple “T1974-R26” (1974) for example, a membranous white band made with a wide brayer diagonally bisects the blue background. Bending to its right is a slightly wider, thickly brushed yellow stripe. The ground reveals that it has black underpainting, and its blue overpainting is striated horizontally to the right of the two bands and vertically on the left of them. In all, an intensely knit together pictorial paint structure. One can detect underpainting and revision throughout the exhibition. Amid these seemingly sadistic, moody, and rumbling works that are at once calculated and free, Hartung preferred a clarified edge, even in his gatherings of rapid scratches into the surface, the visual equivalent of the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, but who else has done that? 

The gallery film compares him, correctly, to Turner. He painted nature but foregrounded a manufactured machine-like disarray. Hartung practiced a kind of distanciation, of making the viewer look again and think as much as be enthralled. 

Hans Hartung: Revenge continues at Perrotin (130 Orchard Street, Lower East Side) through February 18. The exhibition was curated by Perrotin and the Hartung-Bergman Foundation.

In their exhibition statement, the curators of the multimedia exhibition Ecstatic Land describe having been inspired by the etymology of the word ecstatic — the Greek ekstasis means “to stand outside oneself.” According to curators Daisy Nam and Dean Daderko, “In nature, and particularly in the vast expanses of the desert, one can experience physical contact with the earth while being emotionally and psychologically transported elsewhere.” This sort of elsewhere, however, is not necessarily another physical location. For each of the artists included in the exhibition, deep immersion in their environments has caused inner and outer landscapes to merge. “Nature” comes clearly into view as a state of entanglement between the experiencer and the experienced. 

The works included in Ecstatic Land invite us to suspend any perceived sense of individual boundary, and to become part of the landscape. This purview contrasts starkly with US and European art historical movements of the 19th and 20th centuries that objectified the surface of the earth, either by literally sculpting it or by portraying it as a scene to be gazed upon by a removed observer. 

But land-inspired art in an age when huge swaths of our shared world are being clear cut, mined, drilled, and desertified is something else altogether. The luxury of detached observation does not exist at a time in which art becomes most meaningful when defaced in acts of despair and defiance against the meaningless of art on a dead planet, while multi-billionaires, desperate to save only themselves, build rockets to Mars. 

Several of the works assembled for Ecstatic Land are posthuman odes to an era in which (some) humans have altered the very ecology and geology of an entire planet. Perhaps each of the pieces could be construed as responses, or antidotes, to the absurdity of life in such times.

In the black-and-white self-portraits of late queer Chicana photographer Laura Aguilar, the artist’s nude body becomes a sculptural feature of the landscape, akin to an outgrowth or outcropping. In Christie Blizard’s digital animation “Cactus” (2020), the viewer experiences a dizzying endoscopic ride through a prickly human-plant hybrid. In photographic documentation, Benny Merris’s forearm painted with colorful patterns reaches out with playfulness and reverence into trees, rivers, fields, and plains. 

Two works in the exhibition feature raw earthly elements as their primary materials. In its first presentation since her 2014 death, Nancy Holt’s “Starfire” (1986), consisting of eight small fire pits configured in the shape of the Big Dipper and the North Star, is set ablaze after dark in the Ballroom’s enclosed courtyard. In the words of the artist, “Far away suns [are] brought down to Earth in flames…”

The installation in the main gallery is anchored by a low sculptural wall, a rounded ring-shaped structure made of Marfa mud, sand, and straw by South African artist Dinco Seshee Bopape, constructed with help from local artisans. Visitors can experience the piece from the exterior or enter into the nest-like central space. Its evocative title “Lerato le le golo (…la go hloka bo kantle)” (2022) means “a great love…that has no outside” in the Sepedi language. 

Most other works in Ballroom’s North Gallery are photo-based. Exceptions include Teresa Baker’s “Good Weather” (2021) and “Standing” (2019), map-like mixed media hangings on shaped Astroturf, and the elaborate “Electrical Lighting for Reading Room” (1985), a 20-bulb light fixture made of exposed conduit by Nancy Holt. An assortment of books on contemporary landscape art sit on a low table beneath Holt’s illumination device, along with twelve accompanying simple, short wooden stools by Katherine Hubbard, whose black-and-white self-portraits taken in the Utah desert hang nearby. Among the reading materials available for perusal in the Reading Room is Nancy Holt: Sound As Sculpture, published as part of the Winter/Spring 2022 Sound as Sculpture exhibition at The Warehouse in Dallas.

While Holt’s sonic works are not part of Ecstatic Land, there is one audio element in the exhibition that serves to shift the experience of the space. White Mountain Apache musician, singer, and composer Laura Ortman’s set of textural, atmospheric pieces for amplified violin and other electrified acoustic instruments — “Someday We’ll Be Together” (2011), “THE DISREMEMBER DANCER//DIG YOUR EYES” (2018), “SLIP SIP” (2020) and “RIVERS PIERCING” (2020) — intermittently activate the gallery, revealing in those moments an otherwise hidden dimension and conjuring a wider expanse.

Among the several video works included in Ecstatic Land, “Nubes (Clouds)” (2019) by Genesis Báez is strikingly profound in its simplicity and impact. The camera is aimed at a cloud-filled sky infused with the sounds of a day in a rural setting: dogs, roosters, doves, owls, crickets. A Spanish-speaking voice (subtitled in English) describes the scenes playing out in the ever-morphing cloud shapes, then a fellow onlooker counters or contributes to the narrative. The viewer knows this game. The imagination is instantly activated, and it becomes impossible to resist silently playing along. Can we too see Cleveland, or a liar, in the clouds? The beauty of the game is that, given a moment to play it, each of us can catch a glimpse of ourselves projected onto the clouds. Maybe with a bit of prodding we can even see a little part of each other. The final cloud observer in the under 7-minute series of vignettes asks if we can see a woman with her hair sticking up. “But maybe you don’t see like me,” the voice says.

If there is any chance to temper socio-environmental catastrophe, it will only be through collective perception of ourselves as nothing other than one another and the landscape itself. Perhaps this is the true meaning of “ecstatic land.”

Ecstatic Land continues at Ballroom Marfa (108 E. San Antonio Street, Marfa, Texas) through May 7, 2023. The exhibition was co-organized by Dean Daderko and Daisy Nam, with assistance from Alexann Susholtz.

Global conflict, racial injustice, threats to democracy, a pandemic, and a refugee crisis — the 1960s have many lessons for today, including what was then an emergent interest in mindfulness. While many people helped raise the profile of this practice on a global stage, an important nexus of teachings is the venerable Thien (Vietnamese Zen) Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who died at the age of 95 just about a year ago, on January 22, 2022. He left a tremendous legacy as one of the major figures to bring mindfulness to the West and to expound the principles of engaged Buddhism as part of his own peace efforts during the Vietnam War.

Last April, filmmakers Max Pugh and Marc J. Francis worked with Plum Village, Nhat Hanh’s spiritual community, to produce A Cloud Never Dies, the first film about his life. Two weeks ago, Pugh released I Have Arrived, I Am Home, about Nhat Hanh’s final years. Together with 2017’s Walk With Me, the filmmakers’ documentary about life at Plum Village, these three films offer a multifaceted view into the Thien teacher’s life, work, and passing. If I can suggest an order for viewing the films, it would be Walk With Me, followed by A Cloud Never Dies, and closing with I Have Arrived, I Am Home.

Today, Nhat Hanh is most known for his writings on mindfulness, a practice that has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry. The monk’s groundbreaking book Miracle of Mindfulness helped introduce the practice to the Western world, and he went on to publish more than 100 books up until his dying days. In Walk With Me, we visit the modern Plum Village community and get an inside view of its practices. Through beautiful footage of daily affairs at the monastery, which also hosts lay practitioners, we can see the simple power of a quiet meditation practice grounded in walking slowly and gently.

But more than mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh helped popularize the idea of engaged Buddhism, the word he coined to describe efforts in Buddhist circles to move out of monasteries and engage directly with the world’s injustices. It’s with this concept that A Cloud Never Dies shines, grounding viewers in the reality of the monk’s peace efforts during the Vietnam War, which first brought him to prominence on the world stage.

Images of the war contrast with the peaceful life he began at the monastery. The documentary helps illustrate the relationship between individual peace and social peace, and why the two must be connected. Nhat Hanh’s efforts eventually led to exile in France, where he founded the Plum Village community as a spiritual home for Vietnamese refugees decades before the events depicted in Walk With Me.

“I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle monk from Vietnam,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 when he nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for a Nobel Peace Prize (no award was given that year.). “His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.” 

King, like Nhat Hanh, spoke of both peace and resistance and suffered dearly for his efforts, and I wish the documentary attended to this relationship more deeply. That said, the connection between these two spiritual figures is an important foundation for understanding why and how mindfulness as a movement grew in the 1960s: It’s one of the vital tools necessary for engaging with the world’s tumult and violence.

“Suppose you are meditating in the meditation hall,” Nhat Hanh says in A Cloud Never Dies as he lays out his case for social engagement, “and if you hear the bombs falling around. The meditation hall has not been hit by a bomb yet, you are safe. But since you are meditating, you are aware that the bombs are falling and destroying houses and people around the meditation hall. And you know that you just cannot continue to sit in the meditation hall.” 

The action that comes afterward to help others during a time of conflict is what he calls “meditation in action.” So often, contemporary secular mindfulness discourse focuses on the importance of emotional regulation, but the ethical and engaged dimensions of meditation are also critical to understand.

More than the other two films, A Cloud Never Dies helps illuminate the monk’s legacy as a spiritual leader rooted in the global turbulence and social upheavals of the 1960s, which propelled him forward to establish institutions like the Order of Interbeing and the School of Youth for Social Service. We also get a glimpse of the early days of Plum Village, and his attempts to start a school in Vietnam decades after his exile, only to see the school shut down.

To close out this biographical series, I Have Arrived, I Am Home offers a view into Nhat Hanh’s final days. Unable to speak due to a stroke, he lives quietly back at Tu Hieu Temple, the temple where he began the monastic life, and he takes his mindfulness walks in a wheelchair. Here, the monastic community both honors their teacher and prepares for life after his passing. Touching footage of monks and nuns in prayer and chanting while wearing N95 masks intermixes with dialogue from those close to him.

Still, I wish the filmmakers dove deeper into the monk’s prolific writing career and the media production efforts of the Plum Village community, which uses podcasts, apps, YouTube videos, and other forms of digital media to reach an ever wider community. The films reference Nhat Hanh’s talks at places like Google and the United Nations, but we don’t quite gain a sense of their impact. We learn a little about Sister Chan Khong, the monk’s longtime collaborator, but get only glimpses of the many women who practice and teach in engaged Buddhism.

I hope future documentaries touch on these issues, especially in light of the growing role of mindfulness in Western discourse. For now, these three films help us better understand Thich Nhat Hanh’s work and legacy with a long view. Through the lens of a 95-year-old’s long life, we can piece together the role of spiritual practice and spiritual communities as we navigate a new age of social upheaval and global conflict. Plum Village offers readings and discussion guides for viewers that point to exactly this.

“Right now,” the guide notes, “there is a perfect storm of intersecting social crises brewing: war, assaults on democracy, a continuing pandemic, a vastly unfair global economy, deeply damaging systemic racism, the erosion of trust in governments, the persistence of life-stunting unhealed worldwide trauma, and the ecological devastation that threatens so much of life as we know it.” Much of the training that Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings and schools provide, the guide argues, is important preparation for people to navigate these times.

Indeed, there’s a moment in Walk With Me when a little girl talks to Nhat Hanh about the death of her dog, and she asks how to not be sad. He asks her to consider a beautiful cloud that she loves and that ultimately disappears. “Where is my beloved cloud now? So if you have time to reflect, to look, you see that the cloud has not died, has not passed away. The cloud has become the rain. And when you look at the rain, you see your cloud.” 

The little girl begins to smile as she takes in the lesson, and he says: “And when you drink your tea mindfully, you can see your rain in your tea, your cloud in your tea.” It’s a lesson that’s clearly inspired the title for A Cloud Never Dies, and it encapsulates the reality of interconnectedness that is one of the foundational frameworks for a life spent in social engagement and social action.

Many films about spiritual leaders focus on the importance of the leader, and there’s always a danger that biographical documentaries will place disproportionate responsibility on a single charismatic figure and not the many people working with that person. 

But in the spirit of Nhat Hanh’s teaching, the three films by Pugh and Francis collectively end with the sense that the responsibility for building peace in the 21st century lies with all of us — the communities and individuals practicing in the Plum Village tradition, those viewing these films, and anyone who’s been shaped by his writings and teachings. One man’s passing is just one part of a large story of social change that spans decades and generations.

A Cloud Never Dies, I Have Arrived, I Am Home, and Walk With Me, by Max Pugh and Marc J. Francis, are available to stream online.

LOS ANGELES — In 1993, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles offered Jorge Pardo an exhibition as part of its Focus series. The young Cuban-born artist had begun making a name for himself with objects that blurred the lines between art and design, but this would be his first solo museum show in LA, where he had settled after receiving his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1988. Instead of creating pieces to display inside a museum, he conceived of an artwork that would exist entirely outside of it. “I have a sloped lot and an idea for a house,” he told Hunter Drohojowska-Philp in the Los Angeles Times in 1998. “How can I take those ingredients and make them do something you wouldn’t expect?”

Five years later, Pardo’s exhibition opened on Sea View Lane, a house conceived as both an artwork and residence perched on a hill in the neighborhood of Mount Washington. Every weekend for the run of the show, shuttle buses would ferry visitors from MOCA’s downtown location to the site in Northeast Los Angeles. “It was an exhibition that could measure what the museum could handle in terms of exercising its domain,” Pardo told Hyperallergic earlier this week. “Where is the object? Is it the house? The artist’s life? The neighborhood?”

Twenty-five years after the exhibition closed, parts of the house are once again opening their doors to the public — this time as a contemporary art gallery. Last weekend, Sea View opened its inaugural exhibition, River Styx, in a section of the building that formerly housed Pardo’s studio. The project is the brainchild of Sara Lee Hantman, a former senior director at the LA gallery Various Small Fires who also co-founded a furniture company, Prisma, in 2020. Hantman made minimal interventions, adding a few walls for expanded exhibition space but keeping in mind the artist’s original vision.

The gallery’s debut show, curated by Hantman and Brandy Carstens, is named for the path to the underworld in Greek mythology. “It’s about landscape as a ripe place to talk about the psychological environment,” explained Hantman. “The works depict liminal spaces. It’s the antithesis to the pastoral.” These include Kelly Akashi’s ephemeral glass and bronze sculptures; Theodora Allen’s haunting symbolism; Salvo’s spare, abstracted Venetian landscapes; Elsa Munoz’s unnatural, moody seascapes; and Dan Herschlein’s relief paintings whose gnarled surfaces are built up from construction materials.

Pardo’s dissolution of the borders between disciplines made Sea View a compelling gallery location for Hantman. “I’ve always been interested in that grey area between art, design, and architecture,” she said, adding that she views the project as part of the history of LA galleries in homes and domestic spaces that can provide for a more welcoming, leisurely viewing experience than the traditional white cube.

“We have domestic architecture, but we don’t have the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Pardo told the LA Times in 1998. “For me, what formed my understanding of space was experiencing rooms, places, houses.”

Although it was ostensibly a house, Pardo approached the project from an artistic framework as opposed to an architectural one. “He talked about it as a sculpture. He talked about lamps as paintings. Jorge was constantly trying to redefine certain things,” Brian Butler, founder of Pardo’s longtime LA gallery 1301PE, told Hyperallergic.

“I was abusing architecture to some degree, using it like you would a costume for an artwork,” Pardo explained. Pardo has no formal architectural training, and enlisted architect Mark McManus to aid with the technical work on Sea View.

Still, the project does engage with architectural elements and tropes, sliding between continuation and rupture with precedent. Its clean, open aesthetic reflects parallels with the residential modernism of Rudolph Schindler and Frank Lloyd Wright, while its plain, redwood facade links it to other homes nearby. Sea View consists of several linked structures around a central courtyard, responding to the features of the site so that oddly shaped rooms unfold on multiple levels. A staircase doubles as a library and large windows provide light and a connection to the landscape, but disregard the element that gives the street its name.

“What does it mean to not prioritize the sea view on Sea View Lane?” Pardo asks. “Most houses, they build these great rooms with windows to see that little sliver of ocean. I didn’t want to have that money shot.”

When Sea View opened, the exhibition’s curator Ann Goldstein hung Pardo’s lamps in the main space, recalls Butler. “Jorge responded by putting in a circular saw. He wanted to make sure people didn’t think about it as interior space, but as a sculpture.”

When the MOCA exhibition closed in November of 1998, Pardo moved into the house, where he lived with his family for the next 10 years, further complicating the barriers between art, architecture, and domestic space. (The museum reportedly funded $30,000 of the project, while Pardo estimates it cost him $350,000 to finish it.) He would incorporate tiles left over from other projects at Dia Chelsea and the Mountain Bar, a legendary gathering place for artists in Chinatown that Pardo opened in 2003, introducing additional autobiographical layers.

In hindsight, Sea View the gallery could be viewed as the latest chapter of a project that began 30 years ago, undergoing multiple iterations as people collaborate, intervene, and experience the space. “The problems I was interested in were sculptural, spatial issues,” Pardo explained. “How does an installation unfold? When does it fall apart?”

Sea View is open by appointment, Wednesdays through Saturdays.

Editor’s note 2/6/23 5:30pm EST: A previous version of this article incorrectly cited the Museum of Contemporary Art’s contributions to Jorge Pardo’s house as $10,000. The museum provided $30,000; the article has been corrected.