ISTANBUL — More than three decades after the last tenants moved out of Istanbul’s first Art Nouveau building, the doors of the long-neglected Botter Apartment were flung wide open again last month after a lengthy restoration. Crowds lined up outside its newly gleaming façade to enter what was once the atelier of Jean Botter, official tailor to the court of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, and to see the contemporary art exhibition Reveries, Truths that had been installed there for the grand reopening.

The revival of Casa Botter is part of a larger initiative by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality to convert pieces of Istanbul’s history — ranging from a former fez hat factory to a late-19th-century gasworks — into new cultural hubs for the city of 16 million people. It is also symbolic of a broader struggle over political influence in the world of art and culture as Turkey heads toward critical national elections on May 14.

“It is a clear fact that today, the most powerful weapons of those who manage the global system are the tools of culture,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared in a speech in late 2021. Better known for banning, pressuring, and even arresting artists and other cultural figures, his government has also sought to supplant what the autocratic leader has lamented as the “monopoly” over culture long held by his political opponents. 

In recent years, Erdoğan has presided over the rebuilding of the landmark Atatürk Cultural Center, personally commissioning the first opera performed there; the conversion of an Ottoman army barracks into the massive Rami Library; and the inauguration of the Yeditepe Biennial, a would-be competitor to the Istanbul Biennial that aimed to highlight classical Turkish arts.

The president’s political adversaries have decried such projects as attempts “not to support culture, but to direct it and dominate it,” as Mahir Polat, the deputy secretary general of the opposition-run Istanbul Municipality, put it at a press briefing in November. A former museum director, Polat said the municipality has “a duty to create new cultural spaces that serve free expression.” In the last six months alone, he has spearheaded the opening of contemporary art venues in an old pumping station, a trio of historic houses, a water cistern, and an office building, in addition to Casa Botter.

The municipality’s projects have generally drawn a warmer response from Istanbul’s arts community than those promoted by the central government. “But at heart, I feel their understanding of the role of culture is not very different from one another,” artist Zeyno Pekünlü told Hyperallergic. “They are all seeing culture largely as part of the touristification and promotion of the city.”

Since taking power in 2002, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party has accelerated neoliberal policies that have led to increased privatization across all sectors, including the arts. One result has been the “exclusion of politically engaged women and queer artists,” as well as Kurdish artists, from both private and state institutions, said Esra Yıldız, a member of the cultural management faculty at Istanbul Bilgi University.

Funding for major art institutions and events in Turkey is dominated by large holding companies, and Istanbul art venues are increasingly migrating to quasi-public spaces these corporations control, including the Bomontiada entertainment complex, the Piyalepaşa İstanbul luxury housing development, and the Galataport shopping complex, where the flagship Istanbul Modern museum reopened this week.

Private funders of the arts often do not share the government’s ideological leanings, but rely on its approval for their business interests in other spheres. “They have been playing the waiting game, hoping it will change,” artist and urban activist Nazım Dikbaş told Hyperallergic. He criticized institutions backed by these companies for not speaking out on issues like the jailing of arts philanthropist Osman Kavala.

Institutional silence also led many artists to unwittingly become part of government-led “artwashing” of controversial urban transformation projects in the central Beyoğlu district, Dikbaş said. After a largely unsuccessful attempt to put its own stamp on the cultural scene with the Yeditepe Biennial, the government changed tack, declaring existing arts venues part of its Beyoğlu Cultural Route Festival in 2021 and 2022.

“They just turned up and said, OK, you’re part of the Beyoğlu Cultural Route now; as far as I know, only one gallery said no,” Dikbaş said. “This kind of approach is a way of neutralizing and pacifying institutions by making them complicit.” Many of the other venues on the route were sites whose construction or redevelopment had been fiercely contested and opposed, including by art world figures and entities such as Galataport, the Taksim Mosque, Narmanlı Han, and the former Emek Cinema.

A similar cultural-rebranding initiative in the majority-Kurdish city of Diyarbakır drew protests, “but here in Istanbul we were frozen like rabbits in a flashlight beam,” said Pekünlü, who had a piece in a show that was retroactively declared part of the Beyoğlu Cultural Route. Government antagonism has “pushed artists into the same corner as institutions that don’t always show them the same solidarity,” she said.

Municipal initiatives hold out the hope of creating a middle ground between the heavy-handed cultural politics of the state and the conflict-averse private institutions. But the Istanbul Municipality’s approach, including the rapid-fire openings of new exhibition venues and what some perceive as the lack of a transparent vision and strategy for the spaces, gives some pause.

“So far, the Istanbul municipality’s programming has mirrored the mainstream art world, it hasn’t really given space to anyone who wasn’t already an actor on the scene,” artist Marina Papazyan told Hyperallergic. They and others also questioned whether more exhibition spaces are really what Istanbul’s arts community needs most amid skyrocketing rents and general economic turmoil.

“The forums showed the main problems of artists are about poverty and representation,” Papazyan said, referring to a series of discussions they recently helped coordinate in their role as a project coordinator at Depo, an Istanbul arts and culture center founded by Osman Kavala. What forum participants identified as top needs, they said, were things like studio spaces, support for independent initiatives, and policies on social security and rent control that could help working artists make a more secure living.

“All of these recently opened exhibition venues are prestige spaces you go to as a consumer: You may not have to spend money, but you are still there as a passive recipient of culture,” Begüm Özden Fırat, a professor of sociology at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, told Hyperallergic. “But culture is something that is produced daily; it requires spaces of encounter, places where people can create something together.”

As fighting between rival military factions intensifies in Sudan, a report published at the end of last month by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) raises alarm that the country’s cultural institutions and their extensive collections are at risk of irreparable damage. 

In the report, Sudan Natural History Museum Director Sara A. K. Saeed warns that some of the country’s most treasured museums, located in the capital city of Khartoum, are “caught in the crossfire of battles between the two conflicting parties” with nothing to “protect them from looting and vandalism.”

Specifically, Saeed points to the Sudan National Museum, the Museum of Ethnography, the Republican Palace Museum, and the Sudan Natural History Museum as primary targets for damage. These institutions all run along the Blue Nile River in the center of the city, where the fighting has been concentrated since mid-April. She also mentioned the Military Museum, which is located slightly north.

The war in Sudan broke out last month between the de-facto military ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, after the alliance between the two men broke down last year. 

The fighting — which has been centered in Khartoum, Omdurman, and other cities around the country — has had devastating consequences for civilians. Before the conflict, Sudan already had 3.7 million displaced people in the country. Now, an additional 334,000 people are estimated to have been internally displaced, and another 120,000 have fled to nearby countries, according to reports from the World Health Organization. As of May 1, officials say that at least 550 people have been killed and over 4,900 injured, though tolls are likely higher.

Due to the heavy fighting in the area, there have been no confirmed reports so far detailing the extent of the damage.

“The problem with the museums and the main museum, the National Museum, is that they are located in the heart of the capital, which is exactly at the center of where the fighting is happening between the two groups,” Sudanese journalist and political cartoonist Khalid Al Baih told Hyperallergic. 

The Sudan National Museum is the largest museum in Sudan. Constructed in 1955 and established in 1971, the two-story building and its surrounding gardens are home to the most extensive Nubian archaeological collection in the world, with objects spanning the Paleolithic through the Islamic period from all across the country.

“No one knows how bad it is, inside or outside, and what’s happened to the artifacts,” Al Baih said. 

He explained that one artist who had gotten stuck inside the museum for two weeks after the fighting began, communicated over the phone that there was “a lot of damage done” inside the National Museum, but details regarding the extent were unclear.

“People have been in that area trying to get out since the beginning of the conflict, 23 days ago,” he continued.

The museum’s collections, Al Baih told Hyperallergic, tell a larger story about Sudan as a whole, as a country that struggles to unite over one national identity.

“One of the main issues in Sudan is the identity crisis,” he said. “Because of colonialism and neglect from people in power, we have a lot of stolen history; we have a lot of history that we don’t know of; and we have a lot of artifacts that are not being taken care of in the right way. And now it’s going to be even worse when 6,000 years of the country’s history will be literally erased.”

A fiery tree has emerged on Manhattan’s High Line Plinth at the intersection of Tenth Avenue and 30th Street. Created by Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz, the pink and red sculpture is surely going to become an Instagram hit — the blazing colors of the steel and polymer tree sculpture against a blue sky are particularly delightful.

But for the bigger news, in my opinion — New Yorkers can rejoice that Sam Durant’s terrible drone sculpture is finally gone from the High Line. Durant never seems to take responsibility for material that anyone finds offensive; I’ve interviewed him twice about projects that were “problematic,” as they say, and both times he’s shirked responsibility — frankly, as a journalist, I’m going to assume he just doesn’t care. In this case, he hoisted a drone at this spot in what was a masterclass in insensitivity toward a multicultural city, in which many of us have family members living in places where the fear of drones is a daily occurrence. But moving on … 

In Rosenkranz’s new 25-foot-tall work the metaphors may be leaden and cliche, but at least it looks attractive from many directions — you can even clearly see the tree ablaze with color (the artist specifically characterizes it as “pink and red”) from the viewing platform on the High Line at 17th Street. 

So let’s just ignore that the work is light on “content,” because it’s warm and beautiful outside and photos are going to look great.

Pamela Rosenkranz’s Old Tree continues at the High Line Plinth (30th Street and Tenth Avenue, Hudson Yards, Manhattan) through September 2024.

LOS ANGELES — “I feel like I’m a child for the first time,” says one interviewee in I Will Keep My Soul, a 90-minute film by British artist Helen Cammock. The film is set up as a diptych. In one half, her subject, a Black person in light jeans sitting on a park bench, reflects on their experience climbing trees, while in the other half, the person does exactly that. Due to “Blackness and Queerness,” they elaborate, “there’s a concealment of just desires and pleasures that I feel like I didn’t have access to.” 

The dance between concealment and resistance is at the heart of I Will Keep My Soul, which sits at the center of Cammock’s solo exhibition of the same name. On view through August 5 at Art and Practice in Leimert Park, it expresses the research the artist recently conducted at Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and the Amistad Research Center. Surrounding the gallery space are visual poems, ceramics, and even the sound of her trumpet, which she began practicing in New Orleans.

“if you take everything you like just because you like it,” one poem goes, “just because you want it the ghosts will have no place to play and the children no place to rest.” Her poems read like missives from her research: “Blue n0tes / swing / in a / humid / breeze” and “To learn to / dance / with fireflies / first / accept the / dark.” Books from thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, and bell hooks are arrayed on a working table, as if providing a glimpse into the artist’s work space.

The film is nominally centered on the story of the late artist Elizabeth Catlett’s struggles to establish the Louis Armstrong sculpture in Armstrong Park in New Orleans in 1976. That said, Cammock achieves this depiction through interviews with unnamed subjects, who wax poetic on different aspects of life in New Orleans. Without context, viewers see the city through the lens of the speakers’ stories rather than their specific titles, accomplishments, and histories.

One interviewee, a music teacher, confesses that he didn’t think women could play the trumpet, “because I didn’t see them playing and then it wasn’t until I went to Loyola’s jazz camp, is where I saw the first girl actually play the trumpet …. And I was like, okay, girls can actually play trumpet too.” Alongside the teacher in the diptych are his students — three school-age girls playing the trumpet as he guides them through the lessons.

Between the interviews, Cammock brings us into the landscape of New Orleans, with a few long, lingering takes on the Mississippi River, on the details of homes, on the trees and parks along the water. These create the backdrop for a film that feels like a meditation on the eponymous soul of creative life in the city. “The artist has less say,” one interviewee notes about the struggles of developing her creative career while maintaining a livelihood. “You know they could have all the determination but they don’t have equal determination.”

Catlett’s words appear alongside artists talking about their contemporary struggles, as if offering advice from the past. “Advance is difficult,” reads one quote, “and departure from the accepted path is dangerous but difficulty and danger are old acquaintances.”

Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul continues at Art + Practice (3401 West 43rd Place, Leimert Park, Los Angeles) through August 5. The exhibition was organized by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (Rivers) and the California African American Museum (CAAM). It was curated by Jordan Amirkhani and Andrea Andersson, Rivers, in partnership with Essence Harden, CAAM, as part of a multiyear collaboration between Rivers and CAAM. 

On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the nearly 150-year-old Grolier Club stands in a grand 1917 building. It’s an invite-only society for bibliophiles. The club’s membership comprises almost 800 people and its exhibition spaces are open to the public, but the interior still feels frozen in time. Now on view in its downstairs library, hundreds of antique menus rest in lit-up display cases.

Grolier Club member Henry Voigt curated A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus 1841-1941, on view through July 29, from his personal collection of over 10,000 historical menus. The exhibition tells a succinct story of the White American upper classes in a textbook-style narration of history divided into themes such as “Railroads, Resorts, and the Old West,” “Prosperity in the Gilded Age,” and “The Great Depression and Recovery.” The meticulously curated show, which illuminates how restaurants speak to larger societal and political forces, also includes a smattering of bizarre gems.

Menus came into widespread use in the United States in the 1840s, when hotels popped up along the new network of rail lines. Before that, inns offered patrons a limited selection of homestyle dishes. The birth of menus, Voigt explained, marked the first time diners had a choice of what to eat, and they also changed the way people thought about food — diners could anticipate and look forward to a specific meal. As evidenced in the show, those meals included such delicacies as turtle, “mock turtle” (a concoction of brain and organ meat which Voigt described as “gelatinous”), and game birds including geese.

“Those dishes defined class,” Voigt told Hyperallergic. “They were revered not only for their taste, but also for what they represented.”

“This is not sustenance, this is entertainment,” Voigt continued, explaining a theory that the menu is merely a “prop” in the performance of dining out. That experience — one in which strangers perform hospitality — would have been novel to these 19th-century customers.

One of Voigt’s favorite objects is propped up in the next display case. It’s an 1861 menu from Taylor’s Saloon, one of the first restaurants to allow women without a male companion. (Voigt said this restaurant “astonished Europeans” who visited.) The menu is 28 pages long and includes advertisements for Barnum’s Circus and Tiffany’s, and its bound exterior is inlaid with mother of pearl.

“They had great ice cream,” Voigt said in a dig at the quality of the food. “You’re there, you’re being seen.” He called it an “aspirational restaurant.” (It was even included in one of Horatio Alger’s capitalism pornography “rags to riches” books.)

The “aspirational” quality of this restaurant emerges as a startling theme throughout the Grolier Club’s show. The menus represent far more exorbitantly priced restaurants than affordable ones.

“The material gets scarcer as you descend the economic ladder,” Voigt replied to this observation. He said people saved menus to remember special occasions or sentimental events such as first dates, but for the next generation, they don’t have the same meaning. Some of the menus are for personal small special events, including one of the show’s best works: A celebration of “J.B. Corn” (a nickname for whisky) on the eve of Prohibition.

Prohibition brings the show into sharp focus — there is a clear “before” and “after.” After the 1920s, gone are the upscale menus offering obscure delicacies, and instead, ephemera from diners and barbecue restaurants begin to make their way into the display cases.

The effect appears as a vast democratization of eating out, amplified when drive-ins began selling burgers for a few cents. A few decades earlier, Chinese immigrants began opening restaurants, and Greek immigrants started building what turned into the classic Americana diner. Both businesses were affordable for many Americans, and by mid-century, diners and Chinese restaurants were popping up in small towns across America.

However, the show pays more homage to novelty items or beautifully decorated works. The Great Depression display case includes many menus with eye-catching artworks that appear to have been designed to be saved.

“Who’s going to save a penny menu when you’re down and out in the Great Depression?” asked Voigt. (There are some utilitarian objects, however, including a penny menu and a cafeteria card.)

As for “fine dining,” Voigt thought the form bounced back from Prohibition in the early 1980s. Americans were traveling more, but they were also being introduced to new cuisines at home. Approachable cooks like Julia Child began promoting “fancy” French food as a realistic possibility for home chefs.

“These are improbable survivors,” Voigt said of the menus. As anyone in New York City could say, especially after the onset of the pandemic, restaurants close all the time, shuttering spaces where people lived their daily lives and also experienced important moments.

“Restaurants, they disappear without a trace,” said Voigt. “They just evaporate.”

SANTA FE — Mokha Laget: Perceptualism, organized by the Katzen Arts Center at American University, is devoted to the last 10 years of Laget’s wide-ranging practice. The survey of over 40 works includes paintings, drawings, lithographs, bronze sculpture, and — surprisingly — elegant kites, installed overhead, which provide an airy counterpoint to the grounded, earthier works affixed to the gallery walls. Laget, who hails from North Africa and lives and works in Santa Fe, studied at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington DC, where she aligned herself with members of the Washington Color School, eventually becoming an assistant to painter Gene Davis.

Like Davis and his WCS contemporaries (Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring, and Paul Reed) Laget excels at creating an exhilarating unity of paint and substrate, particularly in her geometric shaped paintings, for which she is best known. The absorption of color into the surface is optically irresistible, even as the compositions themselves defy conventional spatial logic. Though they recall architecture and, in some cases, complex origami folds, the arrangements of forms do not necessarily make sense. Possible reference points, such as imagined light sources, doorways, earth, and sky, lead viewers down a rabbit hole of topsy-turvy spatial relationships. This effect is compounded by Laget’s deeply satisfying color sense, which subtly conveys the light and atmosphere of Northern New Mexico. The epic “Watershed #2 (Remains of the Day),” comprising four shaped canvases, is a chockablock rhapsody of angled planes. Blue trapezoids emphatically punctuate a rhythmic span of savvy golden yellows and saturated reds. Though loosely resembling a row of buildings, viewers can almost imagine Laget placing these forms in a gigantic vise, gradually tightening until the shapes compress into a collision of energetic forces.

Perceptualism encompasses a broad range of interconnected approaches, with varying emphasis on line, as in the series Visual Scores, and form, as in the shaped paintings. In the intimate Capriccio series, Laget employs acrylic gouache on primed linen to suggest exploded-view diagrams of parts that don’t fit together, as if the shapes are derived from a pleasantly illogical Jenga puzzle. But the shaped paintings reign supreme in this strong exhibition. Standouts — including “Windjammer,” with its gentle nod to the late compositions of the great Al Held, and “Double Pylon,” with its fluid yet monolithic sense of gravity — attest to the artist’s paradoxical coalescence of form and illusion. 

Mokha Laget: Perceptualism continues at Container (1226 Flagman Way, Santa Fe, New Mexico) through May 15. The exhibition was organized by the Katzen Arts Center at American University and curated by Kristen Hileman.

When the Queens Museum launched its Year of Uncertainty (YoU) program in March 2021, many saw a glimmer of hope and possibility in the new initiative. The New York City museum, nestled within the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, was emerging from the first year of a pandemic that devastated the borough and engendered a parallel movement for racial justice that forced cultural institutions to look inward. Centered around five themes — “care, repair, play, justice, and the future” — the YoU program was meant to bring the museum and its communities together around issues ranging from racial justice to climate change.

Two years later, a report published last week by an anonymous coalition of artists and cultural workers, called the Arts Union, painted a different picture of the YoU initiative. Titled “Struggle at the Queens Museum,” it details some participants’ disillusionment with the program and tight production deadlines imposed after the residency began that made it difficult to “meaningfully engage with the community.”

The report also revealed one participating artist’s alleged experience of harassment during the program, and how a lack of clarity regarding the museum’s procedures for anonymously reporting such incidents kept her caught in a perpetual cycle of distress.

Documents reviewed by Hyperallergic confirm that the artist first raised concerns about a since-dismissed nighttime security guard — who worked in the building that housed the YoU residents’ studios — in mid-July of 2021. The artist, who spoke for this story on the condition of anonymity, alerted a staff member of inappropriate behavior by the guard, who allegedly followed her and made unwelcome attempts to talk to her on several occasions, often “lurking” outside her studio space and asking for her phone number under the pretext that exchanging information would be useful for her to get in and out of the building. (A male artist in the program confirmed to Hyperallergic that he was never asked for his phone number.) 

The staffer to whom the incident was reported immediately escalated the issue to the museum’s Human Resources department, which provided its policy on submitting a sexual harassment complaint. When the artist repeatedly asked for more information on how to submit such a complaint anonymously — without her name or identifying information attached — she says she was met with vague responses that encouraged her to report the incident, but did not provide clarity or an official policy on what such a process entailed. Specifically, she wanted to know whether she would be protected from the potential fallout of disclosing her experience with the guard.

Implementing such “policies and procedures for preventing retaliation” was one of the recommendations made by the New York City Commission on Human Rights (NYCCHR), which became involved in early September 2021. The museum dismissed the guard later that month. As a result of the NYCCHR’s investigation, the museum agreed to revise its anti-discrimination policies to include, among other things, “a comprehensive description of [its] internal sexual harassment complaint process, including multiple people to whom individuals can make an internal complaint,” according to a Stipulation and Order agreement made available by the Arts Union.

In response to Hyperallergic’s request for comment, a Queens Museum spokesperson said, “The safety of Museum staff and artists is always of chief concern. The Museum had systems in place for filing anonymous complaints, which were enhanced and strengthened following the security guard incident.” 

The artist who experienced the alleged harassment was particularly concerned about having to spend time in the studio after hours to comply with the museum’s deadline for YoU’s exhibition. That’s another focal point of the Arts Union’s report, which claims that many of the program’s aims were compromised by a tight timeline sprung on artists only after they agreed to participate. YoU was conceived as an 18-month initiative, but when the program began, they were asked to produce artwork within four months for an official opening in early fall.

On July 26, they sent a letter to leadership expressing concerns over the program’s structure. That letter, reviewed by Hyperallergic, was signed by all participating artists.

“We feel a tremendous amount of pressure and unease with the planned opening date of September 26,” the letter said. “It makes it difficult to work with the community organizations within the space of 4-5 months amidst a pandemic. We envisioned a longer and more organic process that would unfold over 18 months when we applied. It seems impossible to do justice to the concepts of the YoU program — openness, fluidity, and collaboration — and the program’s aim of bringing community organizations into the museum space to reimagine the museum and the role of the community in it, in such a short space of time.”

The YoU Artist-in-Residency (AiR) cohort consisted of six artists and one duo known for their socially engaged practices (Gabo Camnitzer, Tecumseh Ceaser, Utsa Hazarika, Tali Keren, Mo Kong, and collaborators Julian Louis Phillips and Alex Strada) and 12 “co-thinkers,” artists and other individuals in creative fields brought on to provide mentorship (among them Nora N. Khan, Suzanne Lacy, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Xaviera Simmons; a complete list of participants can be found here). Nine “community partners” from across the borough were selected to collaborate with the artists, including Guardians of Flushing Bay, which advocates for cleaner water in the Queens neighborhood, and Sakhi for South Asian Women, an anti-gender-based violence organization. A description of the program on the Queens Museum’s website closed with a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin’s science-fiction classic The Left Hand of Darkness (1969): “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”

But “the Year of Uncertainty was a bit too uncertain for everyone involved,” in the words of one participant who did not want their name disclosed in this story. They echoed the Arts Union report’s claims that the program was mismanaged, that there was confusion over resources available, and that more ambitious proposals were downsized. 

Those grievances might seem familiar to anyone who has worked at a nonprofit arts organization, and not all members of the YoU cohort agreed with the Arts Union’s characterizations. Co-thinker Suzanne Lacy told Hyperallergic she thought the program was “innovative” and expressed her disappointment with the views expressed in the report. “It is highly discouraging to those of us who work in the field,” said Lacy. “In retrospect, would the museum do this program again? I don’t know.” Others spoke positively of their experience of YoU. Naeem Mohaiemen, a “co-thinker,” worked with the Queens Museum’s archives to focus on the building’s history as the first home of the United Nations General Assembly. “We held mentoring sessions with a South Asian community organization that was interested in archive practices for their own records,” Mohaiemen said. “I found it to be a generative approach to building community archives.”

Asked about the allegations of YoU’s mismanagement, a spokesperson for the Queens Museum said it was “disheartening for artists and staff to see aspersions cast about this shared work from valued members of the arts community.” 

“The Museum is proud of and deeply committed to fostering our inclusive, equitable, and safe culture for our artists and staff, and we embrace feedback from our staff, community partners, and artists on ways to improve,” the spokesperson added.

In interviews with Hyperallergic, and regardless of their personal opinion of the Arts Union’s report, artists and collaborators applauded the work of Queens Museum workers, whose genuine efforts they see as harmonious with the museum’s stated mission of being a hyperlocal, community-oriented institution. That same praise did not always extend to its current leadership. Sally Tallant joined as president and executive director of the museum in 2019, after a long tenure as artistic director of the UK’s Liverpool Biennial. She previously worked as head of programs at London’s Serpentine Galleries. And she was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2018, a distinction she “proudly shares” on the museum’s website, the Arts Union says.

“Although numerous people have refused this ‘honor,’ the Director not only accepted the OBE award from the British monarchy, she emphasizes it,” the report states. “QM is located in one of the most diverse districts in the world, representing nearly every post-colonial population from across the globe, on the unceded land of the Matinecock, Canarsie, Lekawe (Rockaway), Munsee Lenape, and the Matouwac.”

Under Tallant, and with a $26M capital infusion from the city, the museum has undertaken a vast renovation project that involves an extension of the building for the creation of a new “Children’s Museum” as well as structural updates. The multiphase campaign, which totaled $69M, is expected to be finalized later this year or in 2024. One artist Hyperallergic interviewed fears the project will make the institution “like the other mega museums in New York, soaking up both city and philanthropic resources and forcing community orgs to compete with each other for its favor.”

As further evidence of what they perceive as Tallant’s disconnect from the museum’s stated mission, the Arts Union cites her decision to post photographs of individuals in line for the Queens Museum’s food pantry on her social media. (The Instagram posts were since deleted, but Hyperallergic viewed screenshots; individuals in the line were masked.) The weekly food pantry program, which began in the summer of 2020, is one of the institution’s most visible community initiatives, serving hundreds of families through the local volunteer organization La Jornada. The Queens Museum lends its space for the program and supports a $50,000 annual budget for related programming as well as two employees to oversee them. In a list of recommendations to the museum at the end of the report, the Arts Union suggests paying La Jornada volunteers. (It is unclear whether the volunteers themselves have requested compensation; La Jornada has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.) In a list of recommendations to the museum at the end of the report, the Arts Union suggests paying La Jornada volunteers. (La Jornada has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.)

Under Tallant’s leadership, the Arts Union’s report says, workers experience “a culture of fear and silence” — a claim that proved difficult for Hyperallergic to verify within the scope of the present article. Most current and former workers reached for comment did not respond to our inquiries. Some YoU program participants suggested that staffers feared losing their jobs or compromising the larger mission of the museum if they spoke out. In an all-staff email sent just three days after the Arts Union report was released, a screenshot of which was reviewed by Hyperallergic, leadership reminded employees that any press inquiries they received must be forwarded to the museum’s communications department. 

A former employee who worked in a front-facing role at the museum during the time of the YoU residency also offered a nuanced take on their experience. They eventually left their job, citing concerns over safety at the museum — they were the first line of defense before the institution hired daytime security guards, which they did not always have — and insufficient pay (around $18.50 an hour, below the living wage for a single adult in Queens as estimated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). But they saw many of the issues plaguing the Queens Museum as impacting public cultural institutions at large.

“There are certainly flaws, it’s kind of the nature of nonprofit arts work, especially when you are trying to be community-based and community-engaged,” the former worker told Hyperallergic. “If you’re not a grassroots org and you’re beholden to different stakeholders, there are always going to be issues. The workers there are trying their best. They’ve had a ton of really late nights, and I wish everyone could be paid more and supported in what they’re trying to do.” 

Another YoU participant, who asked to remain anonymous, echoed that sentiment. “I have a sadness in my heart regarding the Queens Museum,” they said. “Because it has the ability to be a wonderful institution but it seems to be refusing the real life-giving requests of participants, artists, staff, and the very community organizers who make Queens the stunning place that it is.” 

The Arts Union’s report notes that the challenges faced by YoU participants can be traced to a larger core issue: “the donor-controlled museum board model.” The group encourages people to seek out independent advocacy groups instead, such as FWD:Truth and Dismantle NOMA, and to support museum unions. Their report, the Arts Union told Hyperallergic, was “an experiment in organizing.”

“Museums have boards, boards have associations, galleries have NADA and ADAA, and we are trying to create something like that for artists, something that can support and advocate for artists’ best interests,” the group said. “Everyone else is organized, so we should be, too.”

Elaine Velie contributed reporting.

It has been historically difficult to break into the art world. Christie’s Education continues its dedication to making the space open and accessible to all through their variety of virtual and in-person programs. Ranging from gallery crawls and tours of the auction house to in-depth sessions focused on topics such as exhibition curation, art legal practice, and more, Christie’s Education is pushing the boundaries on how people experience the art world.

This September marks the beginning of their annual year-long programs. Running in both London and New York, these programs are specially curated by program directors to provide a complete overview of the art world, and give you the tools and confidence needed to build your own career.

Each year-long program can either be taken virtually or as a hybrid model combining both virtual and in-person learning, offering maximum flexibility to students.

Based in New York, the Contemporary Art Business Program focuses on the world of contemporary art. The program covers major themes in contemporary art, helping you to develop a thorough understanding of how the art world works. You will learn about art investment, advisory, appraisals, collections management, emerging technology, and more, giving you a well-rounded skill set to navigate the dynamic art market. The program provides networking opportunities, exposure to real-world scenarios, and a chance to learn from leading experts in the field. CV workshops and interview preparation are also included, enabling you to enhance your professional development so you can have a competitive edge in the art industry job market.

In London, the Art World Career Project is built to provide you with the skills and essential knowledge needed in order to find professional success in the art world. The course combines the very best of virtual and in-person learning. As a highlight of the program, students are given the opportunity to shadow a department at Christie’s, as well as chances to network with other members of the team.

The second London-based program, Exploring Art: From Renaissance to Contemporary, is aimed at students that want to build an in-depth knowledge base for the history of European Art. Viewing through the lenses of art history, business, collecting, techniques, and methodology, this program is the perfect foundation for any future art studies or as a step toward a career in the art world. It includes drawing, handling, and cataloguing sessions at Christie’s King Street, as well as the choice of one field trip.

Alumni from the year-long programs have enjoyed success, finding positions at major auction houses and art institutions around the world. Become a part of something bigger by joining the Christie’s Education community.

Hyperallergic readers can use the code HYPER15 to receive a 15% discount.

To learn more, visit education.christies.com.

This Sunday, May 14, Mother’s Day is celebrated in the United States and other parts of the world, and New York City is brimming with activities to mark the date. Motherhood doesn’t exist in a box, so we decided to think outside of one and pull together a list of events and workshops that are perfect for showing appreciation for and spending quality time with our moms and mom-figures this coming weekend. Whether you’re looking for a drag brunch, a fun workshop, or a unique museum scavenger hunt, check out our handy list below!

Art Workshops

For any art-loving or open-minded maternal figure, an art workshop is a wonderful way to explore new modes of making together without the pressure of committing to a weekly class or investing in materials. The best part is having a beautiful, handmade keepsake to take home with you that same day and archive a new memory with. This weekend will bring some exciting workshops across different mediums with almost all materials and supplies included.

Starting off with something classic, the Happy Medium art café in Lower Manhattan (Two Bridges to be specific) is hosting a watercolor workshop for early risers. Painter and teacher Claire Williams will be leading a still life painting session on Mother’s Day, May 14, from 9am to 11am. Beginners and hobbyists are most encouraged to partake and Williams will be demonstrating different techniques and providing her assistance throughout. The best part about this is that there’s plenty of time for brunch right afterwards! Tickets are going for $80 per person and include all materials, a live demonstration, and 90 minutes of instruction.

For our more experimental groups, the All-Day Monotype Party at Salmagundi Club in Greenwich Village will take you on a printmaking adventure. Monotypes are unique prints made by applying ink in a painterly fashion on a panel or “plate,” laying a sheet of printmaking paper over the design, and running it through the printing press for a singular image transfer that can’t be replicated exactly. The All-Day Monotype Party is this Saturday, May 13, from 10am to 4pm. Tickets are $60 for non-members and $40 for members, and include all printmaking supplies and instruction, but guests are encouraged to bring tools like Q-tips, cardboard scraps, and cheesecloth for more versatile mark-making.

For the most adventurous parties who want to dive in headfirst, the Sculpture Without Sight workshops will provide equal amounts of challenge, comedy, and sensitivity through a blindfolded clay portrait expedition. Running throughout this weekend until the end of June at Unarthodox in Hudson Yards, Sculpture Without Sight makes patrons unplug from the world and create a portrait bust from memory alone, tapping into the spiritual essence of touch and memory while relying only on the mind’s eye in lieu of actual vision. The one caveat is that the sculpture can’t be brought home since the clay crumbles as it dries, but it’s all about the experience and there will be dozens of photos to enjoy. Tickets are $65 per person for a 90-minute experience.

Maternal Art Scavenger Hunt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Did you know there are almost 1,000 works of art pertaining to the word “mother” currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? A lovely, cost-effective option for museum lovers is to try and spot as many maternal-themed artworks on view at The Met as you can!

As a sweet little challenge, we’ve selected three related artworks for your party to track down in celebration of Mother’s Day: Vincent van Gogh’s “Madame Roulin and Her Baby” (1888); Mary Cassatt’s “Young Mother Sewing” (1900); and the Middle Kingdom-era limestone sculpture “Group of Two Women and a Child” (c. 1981–1500 BCE).

Drag Brunches

What could be better than celebrating motherhood in all forms through a drag performance? You ought to respect your mom and the mothers who will perform this coming Sunday across NYC. The Haus of Exquisite Corpse will be hosting a Mother’s Day drag extravaganza at Cantina in Brooklyn on Sunday, May 14, at 2pm with performances by queens Nebula Nova, Anne J Tifah, Vampy Von Thickums Galore, and Tragedy Ann. Tickets are $10 per person but come ready with cash for tips!

The Manhattan-based Indian restaurant Sona also has a special Mother’s Day family-friendly drag brunch hosted by queen Malai on Sunday from 11am to 2pm as well for those of you who want to enjoy some butter chicken with your death drops!

Flower Power

I know we talked about thinking outside of the box, but there’s a reason flowers are the go-to gift for most moms and maternal figures — they’re gorgeous. So if you want to go with Ol’ Reliable here, you’re valid for that and there are plenty of options. For a more personal touch, we’d recommend the Mother’s Day Flower Design Workshop on Saturday, May 13, at the Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing. Designing a handmade bouquet is the perfect thing to do with and for moms if you want to work together or keep it a surprise for the next day! Tickets are $55 for non-members and $45 for members and the workshop is from 11am to 1pm.

Otherwise, we’d recommend taking advantage of the last chance to attend the Weekend in Bloom at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, free with standard garden admission. The Spring Flowers Walk at Snug Harbor in Staten Island (~$10 per person) is also this Saturday, May 13, from 1pm to 2:30pm, as well as the daily Garden Tour at the Met Cloisters (free with museum admission) from 1pm to 2pm. The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx is celebrating Mother’s Day all weekend from 11am to 5pm Saturday and Sunday. That covers every borough! :~)

When a close relative came of marriageable age, his parents enrolled him on a matrimonial phone application to arrange a suitable match (read: same caste), using technology to follow an ancient Indian tradition of arranged marriages to maintain endogamy. Indian society has experienced a plethora of different kinds of matchmakers — from marriage bureaus set up by certain castes, to neighborhood aunties who match families before matching the partners. 

In India, matrimonial mobile applications are tailored to appeal to certain communities, regions, religions, educational qualifications, incomes, and castes. In many instances, the bride and groom would often see each other on the wedding day. Family compatibility can become more important than partner compatibility.

In the past few years, these arrangement apps have borrowed the “swipe right” and chat features from dating apps like Tinder and Bumble. 

For all intents and purposes, matrimonial apps are evolving to encourage more open communication between potential partners by reducing “familial” barriers. Despite this, the apps prompt one to upload their “kundali” — a birth chart in Hindu astrology that deterministically predicts the individual’s behavior and future based on a variety of elements, including caste. Interestingly, a common feature across all applications is a caste filter that allows your profile to be visible to some castes and invisible to others, ensuring endogamy in the digital age.

So how do we make sense of this intriguing paradox? Matrimonial apps have evolved to accommodate the “modern” culture, wherein the partner’s interests and compatibility assume central importance in marriages. Thomas Misa, a historian who studies the intersections between technology and society, suggests that we must consider the “progress and development” of technology within society by examining it as a “co-construction.” Similarly, these mobile apps are not isolated entities but rather represent a particular tendency already existing in social reality. The persistence of caste in these “manifestations of modernity” challenges declarations about the death of caste. It demonstrates the mechanism of exclusion in the caste system practiced through endogamy, as pointed out by Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar in his 1936 book The Annihilation of Caste. Ambedkar was an accomplished scholar-turned-politician, whose thoughts and books provided a foundation for the anti-caste movement. The Annihilation of Caste was initially prepared for a speech at the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (an anti-caste reformist group whose name translates to “The Break-Up of the Caste System” in Hindi/Urdu). However, the members of the group believed that the speech was too controversial and incendiary and could lead to a violent retaliation by the conservative Hindu community, as Ambedkar had attributed inequalities and the inferior status of women to Hinduism and called for the destruction of religious scriptures. The lecture was eventually canceled because Ambedkar refused to edit parts of the speech, per the demand of the members. He published the speech in the form of this book; this seminal work has acquired a life of its own and informed many critical debates and scholarship on caste and has directed the anti-caste movement.  

In India, caste is a dominant social institution, premised on the ideologies of purity and pollution, which has influenced the economic and material domains. It is a rigid system of social classification that divides the population into “upper-castes” — Brahmins (priests and intellectuals), Kshatriyas (warriors), and Vaishyas (merchants) — and “lower-castes” — Shudras and Avarnas, who practice manual labor considered to be polluted. This link between occupation, status, and pollution excluded the lower castes from accessing public spaces like wells, transport, education, temples, etc. Notwithstanding regional variations, caste was and continues to be a reality in the subcontinent. Historically there were moments when caste boundaries showed fluidity. However, the situation for the caste oppressed never really changed. This ritualized, historical system of inclusion and exclusion has led to the continuation of disadvantages for the “lower castes” because they were unable to access avenues for their development. 

Many scholars believed that industrialization and modernization would ultimately lead to the destruction of the caste system, but evidence proves otherwise. Caste has modernized itself in many ways. The recent developments of science, technology, and especially the internet, have enabled the technological manifestation of caste in even matchmaking business.

Ambedkar’s scholarship unearthed the insidious nature of the caste system. The presence of caste filters in matrimonial apps points towards its modernized avatar. Thus, as Dr. Murali Shanmugavelan proposes, it is useful to think of caste in “non-essentialist” terms to observe how it influences various domains. While the matrimonial apps illustrate a replication of reality without really challenging the status quo, social media websites like Twitter and Instagram have been pulled up by journalists, scholars, and activists for their obvious caste biases. For instance, Hansraj Meena, the founder of Tribal Army, has raised an online petition admonishing Twitter for providing blue tick-marks to those subscribed to Twitter Blue while withholding the same for accounts of activists from the Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), and Other Backward Castes (OBC), recognized to be marginalized due to caste by the Constitution of India. Meena and other activists alleged that Twitter’s biases towards the verification of accounts imply casteist biases because anti-caste activists, belonging to marginalized communities, either take a long time to receive Blue Ticks or do not receive them at all. Since Blue-Tick Accounts are “adequately” verified, they have greater visibility and a wider reach compared to other accounts that may have a substantial following, but no official marker. This system impedes diversity of perspectives and turns these platforms into echo chambers. 

Digital India has also experienced several instances of caste biases. For instance, Instagram user Big Fat Bao reported that a self-styled poster reading “Annihilation of Caste” was taken down by Instagram for “violating community standards.” 

The Annihilation of Caste is one of the most famous tracts in which Ambedkar lays down the connection between caste and Hinduism, highlighting how women’s agency is curtailed to maintain the system. The anti-caste and Dalit movements have used this tract as a foundational ideology to resist the caste system. The book has been published in several languages by state governments, independent publishers, and international publishers. Thus, legally, there is nothing offensive about the title or slogan (as it is often used). 

In an article discussing the newsroom representation of the DBA (Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi) Community in newsrooms, Dilip Mandal laments the death of the optimistic belief that the internet could provide democratized access to diversified discourses by amplifying the marginalized perspectives and experiences. Dominant-caste journalists who occupy major positions in legacy media organizations have simply replicated the ideologies associated with the caste system on the platform. While the cheap rate of internet, free video editing services, and public WiFi have enabled the proliferation of Dalit-Bahujan-centric media outlets, Mandal adds the caveat that “freedom of speech does not necessarily mean that there will be equality of speech.” 

Technologies do not sprout in a social vacuum, but often adapt from and mirror society. Robert Young, a stalwart in the field of history of science, proposes a framework that helps explain this interaction between ideology, science, and society. In an article published in 1977, Young noted that the direction of “scientific” progress and facts reflect the ideology of the moment: Think about the large-scale institutionalization of environmental educational degrees in the wake of climate change. In the article, “Science is Social Relations” (1977), he succinctly states: 

“An anthropology of knowledge invites us to see our educational and research institutions as social systems. The three elements — social system, socialization, and belief system — are congruent with, mediate and reinforce (both directly and indirectly) the existing framework of order, power, and ideology … The social relations of such institutions are the social relations of society.”

Young’s conceptualization helps us understand how existing caste inequalities embed themselves in technologies in the form of creation and implementation. Ambedkar had pointed out that, “Caste is a state of mind,” an abstract, arbitrary thought that manifests in behaviors, social structures, and systems. In India, the “upper castes” model modernity based on their ideas and beliefs, by virtue of their elevated social positions. Research studies on the histories of engineering and science education in India reveal the Brahmanization of these disciplines: the emphasis on rote learning, the gradual reduction of practical or technical skills, and the intense efforts to craft the pursuit of knowledge as a Brahminical calling.  

However, it is not all doom and gloom. Many Dalits and anti-caste activists have open dialogues about the intersection of caste and technology, kickstarting sustained pressure on Multinational Corporations and Big Tech Companies to reckon with the consequences of discriminatory design and practices. These incidents reveal the insidious nature of caste and its tangible impact in different areas in different ways. Ambedkar said that caste will become an issue wherever Hindus travel. It has now cyber-traveled! 

There subsists an idealized conception of suburban middle America that is utterly familiar: a blanched-white picket fence circumscribes a neatly manicured lawn. Children, usually three, play house. The father, donned in his weekend Gingham, customizes his sports car (it is often cherry-red and surely American — a Chevy or Ford). The mother watches her husband and children from a kitchen window, toiling at baked goods with a smile from lips as red as the hood of her husband’s car. These are the perennial images made popular by films, television shows, and politicians who harken back to a bygone America. These pastoral images are anchored in the time period before and after the Great Depression (1929-1939), fitted with narratives including first kisses, first drives, and picnics. This is precisely the American ideal that Carriage Trade’s excellent group show, Model Home (New York), After Wisconsin Death Trip disputes.

The exhibition is an evolving archive of American calamity over the last 150 years. It surveys images and narratives of localized crises in various locations, from suburban Wisconsin to metropolitan Manhattan. The issues include gun violence, racial violence, and the exploitation of immigrant workers. In total, the show not only shatters clichés, but also presents America as a country long-marred by natural disasters, class antagonism, and racialized violence. The exhibition is anchored in the book Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), in which American photo-anthropologist Michael Lesy arranged prosaic photographs by Charles Van Schaik documenting the myriad crises of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, during the 19th century.

John Schabel’s “November 22, 1963” (1963–2023), a blown-up childhood penmanship exercise penned by the artist on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, introduces the exhibition. The pigmented ink is fitted with stick-figure drawings of the infamous Dealey Plaza motorcade. This event prompted many Americans to begin questioning both the abstractions of the American dream and the putative narratives unspooled by media outlets to make sense of calamity. 

The photograph and video artworks by Sihan Cui consider Chinese immigrant stories local to New York. “After 365 Days 1” (2019) shows the family of Yang Song, a Chinese sex worker who died following a 2019 police raid of a massage parlor in Flushing, New York, protesting the police narrative. The video recounts recent Chinese immigrants’ stories of harrowing isolation and grueling labor conditions, supplemented by a reprint of activist photojournalist Corky Lee’s documentation of a 1975 Chinatown protest.

In subsequent rooms, we see panels of photographs and snippets of text that juxtapose fragmented stories from Wisconsin Death Trip with Van Schaick’s photographs of anonymous sitters. Scott’s curation queries the inveterate 24-hour news cycle’s means of distilling tragedy into mere parcels of fleeting information. The perennial nature of our media ecosystem’s dehumanization is evinced by Paul Auster/Spencer Ostrander and Mona Leau’s works, which archive present-day bloodshed and the “red state versus blue state” reductive apparatus. 

Far too often, Chinatown galleries are divorced from the issues of their neighborhood’s working-class community. The galleries and the people who live in Chinatown occupy two separate worlds. Carriage Trade has deftly challenged this by veering from sweeping abstractions through the likes of the aforementioned, idealized American idiom. The gallery also avoids privileging the urban or rural, a testament to its comprehensiveness. This is an impressive and poignant exhibition that sensitively deals with issues that myriad galleries are disinterested in. 

Model Home (New York), After Wisconsin Death Trip will be on view at Carriage Trade (277 Grand Street, Chinatown, Manhattan) through May 21. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

With brooding blues and radiant reds, Alfredo Arreguín fused the tools of classical oil painting with Mexican folk traditions, compressing fine art and ancient craft into stretched canvases that often stood taller than he did. For those of us who knew him, the news of his death on April 24 came as a jolt, as something that didn’t quite register, even though Arreguín was 88 and had cancer. A flame we thought was inextinguishable had gone out. 

For 60 years he painted with few pauses, channeling explosive energy into methodically composed canvases that sampled motifs from the jungles of his Mexican childhood and the lush landscapes of his adult life in the Pacific Northwest. His signature glow-in-the-dark aesthetic is thanks to the buildup of thousands of small brush strokes in dazzling, painstaking patterns.

As his health worsened, he suffered a fall that seemed to break his spirit. “All of a sudden I lost my inspiration to paint,” he wrote in a message to friends on Facebook. Three weeks later, he was gone. 

Arreguín was born in Michoacán, Mexico, in 1935. He learned to paint as a child and moved to Mexico City as a teenager to attend the National Preparatory School, where Frida Kahlo had studied in the 1920s and Diego Rivera had taught. At 24, Arreguín immigrated to Seattle.

After serving two years in the Korean War, he studied art at the University of Washington with classmates including Chuck Close, Dale Chihuly, and Roger Shimomura. One of his favorite professors was Elmer Bischoff, the Bay Area Figurative artist who, like Arreguín, blended and buried his subjects into the ground of the painting. 

Bischoff, along with painter Michael C. Spafford, encouraged Arreguín to explore the visual culture of his Mexican heritage, pulling from myth as much as memory. He was inspired by  symbols, shapes, and colors from masks, ceramics, and tapestries.

In Seattle, he took daily walks to study the water, forests, and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, often bringing a camera to photograph plants and animals. Like so many painters, the camera was an important tool for him. When I photographed him for a magazine story in 2021, he showed great respect for the medium. He was eager to take direction and generous with his time, and he talked about the great photographers he knew, like Bob Adelman.

Arreguín and I bonded over having our work in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s (NPG) collection. The NPG, one of his favorite museums, acquired his 2006 portrait of Cesar Chavez, which is representative of his style —cool, dark colors nestle up against rich reds, and words and symbols are stitched inside the pattern. A closer look at the grid of squares reveals tiny faces inspired by Mesoamerican masks, more than 700 in total. It has an all-over quality that shares some relation to abstraction — he came of age as the movement took over America’s art scene — but the artist’s interpretation features prominent, proud figures inside geometric landscapes. 

In the NPG’s 2007 show Portraiture Now: Framing Memory, Arreguín showed pictures alongside Brett Cook, Tina Mion, Kerry James Marshall, and Faith Ringgold. He included a portrait of Frida Kahlo, a foremother of Mexican art and his favorite muse whom he painted more than a hundred times. “I use her as a symbol of beauty,” he said in 2009, “as a spiritual element that I can disguise.” 

Although his work defied labels and dodged formal schools, he was often called a pattern painter, a magic realist, and a founder of the Pattern and Decoration Movement. Last year, the Museum of Northwest Art put on a sprawling show, Arreguín: Painter from the New World, his fourth retrospective in recent years. 

Whatever the subject, there is always math or geometry behind the work’s construction — some sort of arithmetical order that allows his shapes to rhyme and repeat. With the wisdom of old age, Arreguín claimed he could lay down these labyrinths quickly and move through them mostly on instinct. 

For Latinx artists and art lovers, Arreguín was both a mentor and a bridge to the culture of “back home,” wherever that was.

“As a young Latin American artist, arriving in Seattle in 1982, the first artist I looked up to was Alfredo Arreguín,” recalled the Cuban-American visual artist Juan Alonso-Rodríguez. Deb Ramirez Rock remembered seeing Arreguín’s work for the first time: “I stood in front of it for many hours, lost in his paintings … I now know, it brought out the Mexican in me.”

Arreguín took part in the landmark show Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, which traveled to 10 cities between 1990 and 1993. In 1995, the Mexican government honored him with the Ohtli Award, given to those who champion Mexican culture abroad.

Yet, Arreguín also became a distinctly American painter, one who earned highbrow praise and took popular commissions. He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1980 and painted the official poster for Washington state’s centennial in 1987.

In recent years, he took on the staid genre of political portraiture, painting the official portraits of three justices on Washington state’s Supreme Court. With zigzagging shapes, thick contour lines, and cameos from ancestors, his work starkly departs from the judicial portraits that hang nearby. “Mine is not going to look like that,” Arreguín said upon accepting the commission. “Those are like classical music, and mine is more like jazz.”

There was also a jazz-like quality to the way Arreguín spoke. When I called the poet Lawrence Matusda this week, he marveled at the way his friend could tell stories, how he could hold court over dinner with the same gusto and flourish that he painted with.

“When you heard him speak, it almost sounded like melodies,” said Matsuda, who collaborates often with painter Roger Shimomura. “It was like a song: You could feel rhythms as he told you about his bad behavior, his good behavior, his redemption. In a room of people, he was the star, and he was the black hole. Everything went over to Alfredo.”

Arreguín would tell stories of himself as a rowdy young artist who drank, smoked, and never met a stranger. As a college student at his favorite bar, he jumped and swung from the overhead light fixtures and danced on the tables. When police arrested another man for being naked in the bar, Arreguín announced that he would join the naked man in jail. He went outside and urinated on the police car, and together to jail they went.

Arreguín credited the author Raymond Carver for helping him rein in his drinking. Carver’s wife, the poet and prolific writer Tess Gallagher, also visited Arreguín’s studio, as did the elusive Haruki Murakami. Carver wrote a 1987 short story, “Menudo,” that takes place at the Arreguín house. In the midst of a breakdown, the narrator looks up at the jungle animals on the wall and a painter named Alfredo cooks a Mexican soup (menudo) on the stove. “He put his big painter’s hand on my shoulder,” the narrator says, capturing Arreguín’s warmth with his words.

Arreguín shared his basement studio with his wife, the painter Susan R. Lytle, known for her close-up paintings of flowers. “From the moment we met in 1974, we were together,” Lytle told me in a phone call this week. “For one of our first dates, he invited me to come to his studio. I brought my canvas and paint, and we listened to music and painted together. It felt so good that we did it for the rest of our lives.” A towering pile of empty paint tubes, stacked up over decades, divides their studio in half. Flower canvases line the walls on her side and Frida’s faces adorn his.

When I think back on my photoshoot with Arreguín, I feel the same warmth so many speak of. I feel his force and his friendliness, his bullish charm. I see his square jaw smile and his blue eyes squint.

My brother was at the shoot with me. “I remember that day so vividly,” he texted me this week. It seems like I could step back into that kitchen if I closed my eyes and thought about it long enough. Maybe this was Arreguín’s greatest gift: he gave you more imagination. Lawrence Matsuda reinforced that idea when I spoke to him, “Recently I saw something that said, ‘We don’t remember days, we remember moments.’ But with Alfredo, you remember the day. The whole day.”

Arreguín pioneered a process that was rigorous and meticulous but had no underlying equation. And yet, on that afternoon, I wanted there to be one. I had been struggling to improve my drawing and painting, so I asked the master for advice. Arreguín, then 86, smiled and shook his head. How often he must have heard that question over the decades. I was just another student looking for a shortcut, a map to art’s treasures. Arreguín tapped his chest with his big painter’s hand. “Your heart,” he said. “That is what you paint with.”

BUENOS AIRES — Argentina is one of the most liberal countries in Latin America and the world, where abortion and same-sex marriage are legal and nonbinary identities recognized. These battles have been won thanks to years of activism from different militant groups. Yet, despite these progressive policies, structural racism and colorism persist. 

Wari Alfaro, an artist and photographer, has been a member of Identidad Marrón Collective, a group of artists, educators, and activists who identify as marrones or marronxs since it began in 2006. The word marrón does not translate exactly to the color “brown” in this context, but is used as an umbrella term to talk about people with brown skin who have Indigenous features and are the subject of discrimination and racism in South America. Alfaro knew that the social violence, micro-aggressions, racial slurs, and negative stereotypes of which they were the target were not just isolated events. “Racism in Argentina, but also parts of Mexico, Perú, and Bolivia, operates over people of Indigenous descent or with Indigenous features, and it intersects with social class,” Alfaro explained to Hyperallergic. “Visually and conceptually, our color is already constructed by perceptions of danger and poverty which are linked to our unequal treatment, the negation of rights or use of violence against our bodies.” 

Argentina continues to sustain a myth of being a “White” country in South America. A general argument I heard growing up in Buenos Aires, whenever I mentioned racism, was that Argentina didn’t have communities of Afro-Latinos. Because of that, racism was not an issue, as it was in the United States. But if that was true, why, I wondered as a child, was the word negro in Spanish used constantly as a racial slur toward people of African and Indigenous descent? 

Images of White people have dominated the media, educational narratives have erased the massacre of Black and Indigenous people, and immigration policies have favored Europeans since the country’s foundation, all of which have contributed to this myth. “A lot of us had already started questioning the lack of Indigenous and marrón identities in progressive spaces and realized most people there did not look like us,” says Alfaro, who also coordinates the project Retratos Marrónes (“Brown” Portraits). A graduate of the Gender Studies, Politics, and Participation program at Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Alfaro is in charge of communications for the women’s secretariat at the Municipality of Pilar in Buenos Aires. “The spaces we are occupying today have been dreamt about for years, and we’ve had to work double and triple to get into them.”

When the school year started this March in Argentina, artist and photographer Javier Corbalán, a member of Identidad Marrón from Salta-Argentina, went out to take pictures of students. Corbalán works for Salta’s newspaper, El Tribuno, and has won various awards for photographing this region for 15 years. With his images, he aims to document the everyday uniqueness of the Andes territory and his community. This time, he decided to tell the story of a six-year-old boy starting first grade at the local public school with 1,400 students in one of Salta’s most populated neighborhoods. The boy’s parents, who work at the city’s waste disposal site, proudly walked him to school.  

“This is our people, who have been invisibilized for a long time,” says Corbalán, “and today, to be able to show a marrón person walking their son to the first day of public school, the boy smiling, wearing his new shoes and his modern haircut, it is very exciting to me.” Corbalán explained how Salta, a province in northwest Argentina, is rooted in both its own traditions and coloniality: “The images on the media here are predominately White and very far away from what a salteño looks like.” Corbalán has also documented climate change events such as wildfires, droughts, deforestation, and floods, along with carnival and religious celebrations, always revealing a human side of strength and beauty. 

The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires is one of Argentina’s first national museums. To this day, it holds a painting from 1892 that is considered the first artwork to inaugurate the history of Argentine art and justify Indigenous extermination. Painted by a White artist, Angel Della Valle, La Vuelta del Malón (The Return of the Indian Raid) shows a group of Indigenous “savages” robbing a church and taking a White woman with them. Since then, images of Black, Indigenous, and marrón people have been othered by the White gaze. Alfaro works to reclaim visual history by using their own gaze to make portraits of other marrones, as well as self-portraits.  

“What would have happened if iconic artworks had our color? If we could have seen more images with our bodies, photographed with our cameras, with our hands, our gaze, our own decisions. Would our lives have been configured differently? And what do we want to say to the incoming generations of marrones?” Alfaro asks in their work. 

When Argentina won the soccer World Cup last December, and people took to the streets to celebrate, Alfaro went out to capture images around the city of Buenos Aires. Camera in hand, they snapped pictures and felt overjoyed “to see people who looked like me smiling. It is something you just don’t see much,” they explained. “Usually, our faces are associated with images that represent poverty, ignorance, delinquency, thousands of things except smiling faces that celebrate.” 

As more artists, activists, and educators have found each other, the collective has grown to more than 100 people. In 2021 the book Marrones Escriben was published, compiled and edited by Florencia Alvarado, América Canela, and Alejandro Mamani, with editorial support from Pablo Cossio and Ana Vivaldi. Created in collaboration between Identidad Marrón, the University of Manchester project “Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America,” the University of San Martin (UNSAM), and the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), the book is the product of years of workshops, conversations, and interventions in public spaces. Its critical essays, art, and photography ask about the presence or absence of marrones in different spaces.

How many are we? What is a mirror? What color is the Buenos Aires conurbation? And the prisons? And the shantytowns? Where are we? Where do you see your color? Who are your mirrors? Where are we in the art books? Where are we? In what kind of images? (translation by Ana Vivaldi)

“Slowly, Argentina is starting to give more voice to issues of racism,” says Alfaro, who explained how the term was not discussed in school, the media, or academic settings until recent years. Today, the question is at least installed in public discourse. The work of collective members is hugely diverse and tells stories of their experiences from different parts of Argentina and Latin America. 

Alfaro and Corbalán agree that, in a country whose systemic racism has all but erased Indigenous and mixed-race narratives, the work it takes to create, re-appropriate, archive, and preserve is vast. Corbalán is planning to donate all of his images to a Memory Project in Salta, and wants to incorporate AI practices into his work. Both artists want to continue creating new cultural productions from a marrón perspective. Alfaro is eager to capture more images of desire, embodiment, and marrones existing in the world. They add, “There is just so much work to do around creating those representations that we don’t see yet because so much isn’t there.”

All interviews were conducted in Spanish and translated into English by the author.

Editor’s Note, 5/8/2023, 6:39 pm EDT: Javier Corbalán’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this article. This has since been corrected.

CHICAGO — What could a US Army veteran, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, an African-American Chicagoan, and an Iraqi refugee possibly have in common?

Each has been marked by the legacies of the longest military conflicts in US history: the American Indian Wars and the Global War on Terror. And from that experience each has made art, examples of which are currently on view in the Second Veteran Art Triennial, exhibited alongside the work of dozens more artists — some veterans, some from communities impacted by war, some both.

Like any truly great and ambitious exhibition of contemporary art — which this most assuredly is — Surviving the Long Wars: 2023 Veteran Art Triennial & Summit is chock-full of fantastic sculptures, videos, paintings, photographs, and installations, sensitively displayed in evocative configurations and storied locations. Among the hundreds of biennials, etc., that have proliferated worldwide, however, it is unique in being dedicated not to art generally, or even as thematized by a star curator, but to art made about war by those implicated. In its commitment to the most critical and advanced forms of art practice, and to affected populations that extend beyond service members, the Triennial distinguishes itself from veteran art programs such as those run by the US Department of Veteran Affairs. And it is right at home in Chicago, alongside the National Veterans Art Museum and the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, as well as a roster of recurring break-the-mold events like the MdW Fair, a convening of artist-run projects from across the Midwest; the Barely Fair, a 1:12 scale international art fair; and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, which becomes ever more local and experimental with each iteration. 

Across the Veteran Art Triennial’s three venues — Residues and Rebellions at the Newberry Library, Reckon and Reimagine at the Chicago Cultural Center, and Unlikely Entanglements at the Hyde Park Art Center — the sheer variety of cultural traditions represented is unmistakable. Mahwish Chishty, trained in miniature painting, depicts a series of MQ-9 Reapers, the armed drones that have terrorized civilians living along the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands, making them riotously visible with decorations in the flamboyant style of Pakistani truck art. Ledger art, a practice of many Plains Native communities in which events are pictorially chronicled on used pages of settlers’ account books, abounds: Terran Last Gun (Piikani) traces the hard-edge geometries of Blackfoot tipi designs and Air Force vet Dwayne Wilcox (Oglala Lakota) illustrates comedic scenes of scathing political commentary. A handful of artists update time-honored textile crafts: Miridith Campbell (Kiowa), a veteran of the Army, Navy, and Marines, ornaments a US cavalry coat with buckskin fringes and beaded shoulder patches; Melissa Doud (Ojibwe) adds spent bullet casings to her old Army uniform, turning it into a jingle dress; Dorothy I. Burge quilts a portrait of US Army Colonel Charles Young, who in 1889 became the third African American graduate of West Point; Sabba Elahi embroiders fisheye-lens tondos of her young son as a target of the domestic surveillance of brown and Muslim bodies. There is even classical oil paintings by Bassim Al Shaker, whose canvases are as lush and moody as a Turner seascape, and even more nightmarish in their depiction of the sky seen overhead during bombings the artist survived when he was a student in Baghdad.

Explicitly contemporary practices like assemblage and conceptualism are represented, too. Marine Corps vet Jose deVere fashions limbs, weapons, and a full-size horse out of scraps of furniture, discarded parachutes, old tarps, and other detritus, holding it all just barely together with screws and string and his own creative willpower. Ali Eyal refuses to tell the story of exactly what happened to him and his family when war came to their Iraqi village, instead presenting two walls, fragmented drawings, and a set of clues to the horrors they lived through and the imaginative tactics of survival. 

This cultural heterogeneity ought not come as a surprise, given the extent of the US military’s incursions abroad and at home, as well as the diversity of its own ranks, where Native Americans served long before they received citizenship; African Americans fought, despite slavery, discrimination, and segregation; and foreigners have always been able to enlist, often as a pathway to American citizenship. Far more salient is how the tools of the colonizer, the occupier, and the oppressor can be used to resist and persist, and the ways in which that reclamation accommodates hybrid identities. Ledger art has always done this, but ledgers aren’t the only bureaucratic form open to appropriation. Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh build an archive room of declassified records and media clippings related to the Global War on Terror, partly searchable and partly impenetrable, with simultaneous translation broadcast in Arabic and Dari. Four metal traffic signs by Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation) offer deadpan commemoration of the US government’s forced removal of 100,000 people from their ancestral lands during the Trail of Tears. There are other memorials here, too, like the makeshift ones Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) has been documenting since 1999, honoring tribal veterans at the Memorial Day Powwow in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Most feature a triangle-fold American flag, some form of tobacco, and a photograph of the dead.

The portraits are crucial: to have a face is to be known and remembered, however imperfectly, and artists oblige, particularly when confronted with government destruction. Ganesh paints gentle watercolors of people detained and disappeared in the months following 9/11. Hanaa Malallah painstakingly recreates, out of scraps of burned canvas, the missing images of Iraqi civilians killed in the predawn bombing of their neighborhood shelter by an American smart bomb. Chris Pappan (Kaw/Osage, Lakota) draws a grid of Indigenous warriors in Ghost Dance regalia, posed boldly atop a collage of US cavalry recruitment forms, traditional graphics, and maps and warplanes bearing appropriated tribal names. The flip side is true, too: monotypes of unnamed Native Americans by Marine Corps veteran Monty Little (Diné) are smeared, layered, and sliced up beyond legibility, acknowledging the brutality and complexity of their history while refusing to spectacularize it. A pair of life-sized self-portraits by Army vet Gina Herrera (Tesuque Pueblo), with their mismatched mannequin and metalwork legs, exploded upper halves, and colorfully wrapped appendages bespeak war-damaged bodies held together by fierce personal spirit, can-do, and culture.

Whatever side of whichever conflict they have found themselves on, and however they have managed to come through it, every artist in this show understands that art remains unparalleled in helping us all grapple with that most horrendous and enduring of human activities: war.

Surviving the Long Wars: 2023 Veteran Art Triennial & Summit continues with Residues and Rebellions at the Newberry Library (60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois) through May 26; Reckon and Reimagine at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 East Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois) through June 4; and Unlikely Entanglements at the Hyde Park Art Center (5020 South Cornell Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through July 9. The exhibition was organized by a team including Aaron Hughes, Ronak K. Kapadia, Therese Quinn, Joseph Lefthand, Amber Zora, and Meranda Roberts. 

Full disclosure: The writer’s husband, artist Michael Rakowitz, has work included in the exhibition and is not discussed herein.

When asked why humans should care about light pollution, Stephen Loring, co-curator of the new exhibition Lights Out: Recovering Our Night Sky at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, quoted Dune author Frank Herbert. “He wrote ‘ecology is an awareness of consequences,’” Loring told Hyperallergic.

“Technological advances in lighting and the worldwide expansion of the electrical grid have made artificial lighting ever more available,” Loring continued. “But as we light up our world, it is becoming apparent that it also creates serious impediments to the life cycles of diverse fauna including birds, insects, and sea life.”

Undeniably, Lights Out, which opened this March and is up through December 2025, is an exhibition with its head in the clouds but feet planted on the terra firma of jarring statistics. For example, more than 80% of people worldwide live under some degree of light-polluted skies, and in North America, 80% of the continent’s population cannot see the Milky Way galaxy in the night sky due to light pollution, according to research presented, analyzed, and dramatically visualized by the 4,340-square-foot exhibition. In addition to infographics, photographs capture both the wonders of the cosmos and the deleterious effects of human civilization on Earth, and an immersive installation takes visitors through a dusk-to-dawn light cycle that highlights the value of the nighttime experience. The exhibition is a call to action for visitors to help mitigate their own contributions to light pollution.

“The issue of light pollution is unknown to many, but it is incredibly important and connected to other issues of how we care for our planet,” Kim Arcand, guest co-curator of the exhibition and data visualizer for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, told Hyperallergic. “Light pollution is something we can address, in big and small ways. Turn off excess lights at night, shield or point lights down, use warmer lighting colors, and less intense lighting when you can. And support lawmakers and legislation that address issues around wasted lighting at community levels.”

Lights Out balances the warring emotions between the innate, primal awe of relating to an undiminished view of the night sky and the quotidian horror that widespread electric lighting inflicts on innumerable species of birds, insects, marine life, and mammals — including, philosophically, ourselves. While a need to conquer the darkness might be a natural impulse in one way, Arcand argues that a need to commune with the night sky is even more fundamental.

“Access to artificial light whenever we want it is relatively new on a species scale,” she said. “Humans may have a primal instinct to thrive in whatever natural light is available at night. Think of all the stories, art, music, and other important pieces of culture that have been created because of our access to the stars and the night sky.”

Loring, who is an archaeologist with the museum’s Arctic Studies Center, similarly disputes the notion of nighttime as “dark” to begin with and echoes a belief that a galactic view is important to our humanity.

“Growing up in New Hampshire and for much of my adult life working in the Arctic, there is nearly no such thing as a dark night,” said Loring, between quotes on the sanctity of the heavens from Dante’s Inferno (1321) and Paul Bowles’s album Baptism of Solitude (1995). “And never before — well, not since certain cataclysmic meteorites wreaked havoc some 65 million years ago — has life, as we know it, on our planet been so threatened.”

This week, international human rights watchdog Amnesty International faced backlash from photojournalists and other online critics for using AI-generated images depicting photorealistic scenes of Colombia’s 2021 protests. Although there is no shortage of photographs from the demonstrations, the advocacy group told the Guardian that it opted to use artificially edited imagery to protect the identities of protesters who may be vulnerable to state retribution.

The 2021 strike — which was incited by an unpopular tax raise and then fueled by police brutality and other forms of state violence — left at least 40 people dead and many more missing, according to official figures.

Amnesty International shared the AI images as part of a since-deleted social media campaign marking the two years since the Colombian protests, paired with disclaimers that acknowledged the use of AI. Commentators online were quick to notice errors in the fake images. For instance, one of them showed a woman wearing the tri-colored Colombian flag and being dragged off by police, a familiar still from the 2021 protests. But on social media, people pointed out that the colors in the national flag were in the wrong order, and the faces of the protesters and police officers were eerily smoothed over. Additionally, the uniforms of the officers were out-of-date.

In response to the public outcry, Amnesty International has since deleted the images from its social media channels.

The organization has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment. In an interview with the Guardian, Director for Americas Erika Guevara Rosas said Amnesty International did not want the AI controversy to “distract from the core message in support of the victims and their calls for justice in Colombia.” 

“But we do take the criticism seriously and want to continue the engagement to ensure we understand better the implications and our role to address the ethical dilemmas posed by the use of such technology,” Rosas added.

Amnesty also directly responded to the backlash online, apologizing for the misrepresentative photos and reiterating their initial intentions.

“Our main goal was to highlight the grotesque violence by the police against people in Colombia. It is important to state that the purpose was to protect people who could be exposed. But we could choose drawings or other things,” Amnesty International tweeted. 

Some members of the photojournalism and larger arts community have also shared their frustration with the mock photos since the popularization of AI over the past year has raised questions about plagiarism and job displacement.

Molly Crabapple, a New York-based writer and artist who recently authored an open letter against the use of AI-generated art, condemned Amnesty International’s use of the tool in its campaign.  

“By using AI-generated photos of police brutality in Colombia, Amnesty International is practically begging atrocity-deniers to call them liars,” Crabapple tweeted. “Either use the work of brave photojournalists, or use actual illustrations. AI-generated photos just undermine trust in your findings.”

It’s a small but mighty detail that might answer some longstanding questions about Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” (c. 1503–1517): Just above Lisa del Giocondo’s left shoulder is a small bridge of four arches that’s rather easy for the untrained eye to miss, but has stood as the subject of debate for centuries. An Italian art historian and researcher named Silvano Vinceti, working in partnership with the Le Rocca Cultural Association, now believes he has identified the bridge in question based on onsite analysis coupled with records indicating Leonardo’s presence in the area during the time he started the painting.

In a press conference this week, Vinceti said he discovered that the bridge in question is the Ponte Romito in Laterina, a small village in the province of Arezzo, Italy. Earlier theories identified the painting’s bridge as the 11-arched Ponte Gobbo in the northern village of Bobbio, or the seven-arched Ponte Buriano, which is quite close to Ponte Romito. However, Vincenti disputes the other theories by referencing that Leonardo’s rendering of the bridge only has four arches in view. The historian has not yet responded to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment.

Today, there is only one remaining arch standing at what was once the Romito di Laterina bridge. Using drone footage and photography, Vinceti measured the dimensions of the arch and determined that exactly four arches would fit between the two riverbanks at this particular stretch of the Arno River. Vinceti also analyzed documents from the Medici family in a Florence state archive indicating that the bridge, used as a shortcut between the cities of Arezzo, Fiesole, and Florence, was “very busy” and “functioning” between 1501 and 1503. Additional documents report that Leonardo resided in the city of Fiesole on occasion with an uncle who was a priest.

Leonardo was reportedly in and around the Val d’Arno area (the Arno River valley) in the early 1500s while serving cardinal and mercenary leader Cesare Borgia, who commissioned him to work as a military architect and engineer. Leonardo’s time under Borgia was brief, expiring in 1503 and prompting him to find work under the Florentine statesman Piero Soderini.

Evidence aside, not everyone is convinced that da Vinci’s bridge is a cameo of any of the aforementioned historical landmarks. Francesca Fiorani, an author and art history professor at University of Virginia whose research focuses on da Vinci’s translations of the natural world into his work, argues that Vinceti did not take into account “how Leonardo observed nature and painted it.”

“Leonardo was an acute observer of nature, but he did not ‘copy’ nature in his works,” Fiorani told Hyperallergic. “In fact, no matter how hard scholars have tried to pinpoint the precise real place Leonardo painted in his works, to identify a specific mountain chain with the mountains in the “Virgin and Child with Saint Anne” (c. 1501 to 1519) or a specific rock formation with the rocks in the “Virgin of the Rocks” (c. 1483 to 1486; 1495 to 1508), or a distinctive turn of the Arno river in the countryside, or an individual bridge, such proposals were never convincing.”

“The bridge in the landscape behind the Mona Lisa is no exception,” Fiorani stated. “It is inspired by the many rivers that crossed the Arno in the Tuscan countryside, but it does not represent any of them specifically.”

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• AI newscasters have been unveiled in Kuwait, China, and India. The German public broadcaster DW has the story about India Today’s new AI news anchor (has anyone else noticed how light-skinned they all are?) — though it’s worth mentioning that China’s AI news anchor debuted last year:

• For the scholarly fans of actor Pedro Pascal out there (the whole thread is *chef’s kiss*):

• Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Soleil Ho says the popular Netflix show Beef has “poisoned the well” during what is proving to be Asian America’s peak media moment:

Ever since Asian American activists rallied the community to sell out screenings of “Better Luck Tomorrow” in 2003, this feeling has morphed into a moral imperative to show up for everything Asian American. If we don’t make these movies profitable, the logic goes, Hollywood will stop caring about us. But last week, this familiar pattern took a disastrous turn with the release of “Beef,” a new Asian American-led Netflix series that has dumped cold water on the collective goodwill that has driven Asian American media activism until now.

Released on April 6 and currently headlining the Netflix library, “Beef” is a comedy, but also an informal ethnography of Asian Americans in Southern California, tracing its characters’ faulty attempts to chase self-fulfillment and success. It’s a nuanced and well-produced take that speaks directly to an Asian American audience, and Netflix has heavily targeted it to that audience in its promotion. But its release was met by a viral tweet from writer Aura Bogado that resurfaced a 2014 podcast in which one of the key actors, celebrity graffiti artist and professional dirtbag David Choe, recounted raping a Black female masseuse. He later walked it back as an attempt at shock humor. In the best case, it was a disgusting joke about a fictional situation; at worst, it was a potential felony.

• Another pretendian is unmasked, and Amber X. Chen of the Daily Californian in Berkeley, California, has the story of Elizabeth Hoover:

Hoover, who is currently the chair for the Division of Society & Environment and an associate professor in the department of environmental science, policy and management, had previously claimed Mohawk and Mi’kmaq descent.

“I have always introduced myself as the person my parents had raised me to be—someone of mixed Mohawk, Mi’kmaq, French, English, Irish, and German descent and identity,” Hoover said in the statement. “My identity within the Native community, rooted in the histories of my family, is something that shaped my entire life, even though I was not eligible for tribal enrollment due to blood quantum requirements.”

In her statement, Hoover also noted that she came to the conclusion that she cannot claim Indigenous descent after conducting genealogical research in response to recent questions about her identity, which she said she was first alerted to when a draft of a “pretendian” list circulated about a year ago.

Hoover said the news left her and her family “shocked and confused.”

• The Central Valley ingredient that fueled Los Angeles’s sushi revolution is the topic of this article by Daniel Miller of the LA Times:

Launched in 1962, Kokuho Rose was developed by Koda Farms in conjunction with rice breeder Arthur Hughes Williams. The heirloom variety, Koda said, crossed a California medium-grain rice with a Middle Eastern long-grain to create a new, higher-quality medium-grain offering.

Koda said Kokuho Rose was envisioned by her grandfather, Keisaburo Koda, who founded the San Joaquin Valley farm in 1928, as a table rice. The variety, she said, “was not developed specifically to be a sushi rice — that’s just the application that [Mutual Trading] saw was useful to them.”

The rice was a revelation: Until the invention of this medium-grain strain, what had been available to make sushi in California was “tasteless, couldn’t retain moisture, and would get brittle as it cooled down,” said Anthony Al-Jamie, editor in chief of the Japanese culture magazine Tokyo Journal.

• On Monday, a White subway rider choked Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man, to death on a train and was released by the police without arrest. Community members mounted a protest at a nearby Manhattan station yesterday, and for Intercept, Akela Lacy breaks down the violent racism, ableism, and classism at work in the police’s response:

“Of course you’re gonna have individuals deputizing themselves, thinking that this is the response,” said Adolfo Abreu, housing campaigns director for Voices of Community Activists and Leaders New York, or VOCAL-NY, a grassroots member-led organization that advocates for justice in housing, policing, and public health for poor and low-income people. “Because our leaders are saying, ‘Hey, there’s so much rampant violence, and homeless folks are a nuisance’ — and having armed police be the first interaction is the appropriate response.”

The New York Police Department’s response to Neely’s killing sends a dangerous message that anyone can take vigilante justice into their own hands without consequences, Abreu said.

For others, the treatment of the 24-year-old man showed how police identified with the intervention against an unhoused person. Neely’s entire medical and criminal history were released to the public, but police won’t give out any information about the alleged assailant. “They’re acting as if this Marine was a member of the force,” said Beth Haroules, director of disability justice litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union, who testified in February before the New York City Council against Adams’s plan to forcibly hospitalize mentally ill people and remove them from subways.

• Excited to tune into Charles’s coronation this Saturday? Neither is Hāmiora Bailey, a Māori artist who devised a brilliant plug-in to interrupt the soon-to-be king’s crowning moment and repace it with Indigenous news, Tess McClure writes for the Guardian:

The service, called Pikari Mai!, is a free plugin to download, and promises users an opportunity to “switch off the toff”. Made with agency Colenso BBDO, it uses data scraping to scan webpages for words and images related to the royals, then replaces those with articles linking to Indigenous news produced by Indigenous Māori outlets.

While King Charles III remains New Zealand’s ceremonial head of state, Māori never ceded sovereignty to the crown. New Zealand continues to reckon with a violent colonial legacy – for which the crown has made a number of formal apologies – including land confiscation, atrocities, aggressive warfare and unlawful arrests.

• Immigrant moms of the world unite (to discipline your sons!):

• Eggcelent:

• Heidi Blake writes in the New Yorker about Sheikha Latifa and her attempt to escape from Dubai, where her father is the ruler:

Latifa caught a taxi to an area near the border, where she stopped a passing cyclist and persuaded him to sell her his bicycle. She rode on as the sun rose over the desert, until she reached a fence and cut the wire to squeeze through. When an Army car pulled up beside her, she kept moving, but before she got far men in camouflage gear jumped out and bundled her into the back.

Latifa was taken to a police station, where she was met by a “toadish” man who worked for her father. He took her home, where, she recalled, she was beaten until blood poured from her nose. Her mother watched, she wrote: “She was dressed up with a face full of makeup and frosty lilac lipstick as if she was expecting my father to visit.”

When the beating was over, Latifa was put back in the car and driven to a desert prison. Inside, she was taken to a cell and told to remove her shoes. Then one guard held her down while another battered the soles of her feet with a heavy wooden cane. “He could not have beaten me harder than he did,” she wrote in a detailed account of her imprisonment. The next torture session lasted five hours and left her unable to walk; she had to drag herself along the floor to drink from a tap next to the toilet. She squeezed her broken feet back into her Skechers, hoping they would act as a cast, and slept with them on. She was awakened by guards dragging her out of bed for more beatings. (The Sheikh’s attorneys deny that he mistreated or imprisoned Latifa.)

• The Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike this week, and the protest signs are truly works of art:

• Another good WGA protest sign:

• Straight cis man talks about being assaulted in the bathroom just for wearing a pro-trans t-shirt:

• Ever wonder why we’re all seeing more moving objects in the night skies? This might give you a little idea why:

And this:

• Sometimes you see a video and you have no idea what’s going on, this might be one of those times:

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.

A former product manager at OpenSea, the largest marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has been found guilty of one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering. Each count carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, according to a press release from the Justice Department. Federal prosecutors say the conviction marks the first insider trading case involving NFTs, Reuters reports.

“Nathaniel Chastain exploited his advanced knowledge of which NFTs would be featured on OpenSea’s website to make profitable trades for himself,” US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said in a statement. “Although this case involved trades in novel crypto assets, there was nothing particularly innovative about his conduct — it was fraud.”

In June of last year, the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan charged Chastain after the former employee’s suspicious transactions were leaked on Twitter. The post revealed that Chastain had used anonymous OpenSea accounts to acquire NFTs that he knew were going to be featured on the marketplace’s homepage and subsequently increase in value.

After buying the digital tokens and waiting for their value to rise, Chastain then sold the NFTs, accumulating over $50,000 in illegal profits, Reuters reported. Chastain pleaded not guilty.

Throughout the trial, his lawyers argued that Chastain had done nothing wrong since OpenSea had never stipulated that prior knowledge of which assets would be featured on the platform’s homepage was considered confidential. OpenSea — which was valued at $13.3 billion last year —says it has since introduced new policies to prevent team members from engaging in unlawful trading going forward.

Prosecutors pointed out that Chastain’s use of secret accounts to hide his questionable trades proves that he knew he was committing a crime.

“He abused his status at OpenSea to line his own pockets and he lied to cover his tracks,” federal prosecutor Thomas Burnett said in his closing statement earlier this week, according to reporting by Reuters.

David I. Miller, the attorney who represented Chastain, responded to Hyperallergic‘s inquiry with the following statement: “We respect the jury process and appreciate the jury’s time and effort. We disagree, however, with the jury’s verdict and we are evaluating our options.”

OpenSea has not yet responded to a request for comment.

On April 27, France issued a long-awaited report on repatriation. French President Emmanuel Macron commissioned ex-Director of the Louvre Museum Jean-Luc Martinez to create the document in 2021, the same year Martinez stepped down from his post at the Paris institution. Since then, it has come to light that the Louvre’s Abu Dhabi outpost was embroiled in the infamous looting ring that smuggled objects into major collectors and institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Martinez has been charged with complicity in fraud and concealing the artworks’ origins, and the Paris Court of Appeal upheld the charges as recently as February 2023.

While the 85-page document posits a host of seemingly common-sense suggestions, it marks an important step because France does not have a legal framework that allows its national collections to deaccession objects. Hyper-specific laws must be passed in order for artworks to be repatriated. The United Kingdom has similar rules — for example, a law would need to be passed to allow the hotly debated Parthenon Marbles to go back to Greece.

In 2017, Macron made a groundbreaking promise to create a framework for the permanent or temporary restitution of African patrimony within five years. Macron commissioned Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy to create a 2018 report on the subject. Two years later, France passed a law that allowed 27 objects to be returned to Benin and Senegal. Now in 2023, those artworks and a 19th-century Senegalese saber are the only ones to have been repatriated since Macron made his grand promise.

Martinez’s new report recommends the creation of wide-reaching doctrines to allow for the repatriation of three types of artworks: cultural heritage, human remains, and objects looted in the Nazi era. It notes that repatriation has historically been used as a diplomatic tool and instead calls for an objective framework. It also suggests the notion of a “cultural partnership” that does not necessarily establish legal ownership, but rather, the movement of objects between their countries of origin and France.

The report recommends a three-year time limit from the date of request to the ultimate return and outlines eligibility requirements. For example, a request must pinpoint a specific work; the object must not be claimed by another nation and the request cannot be accompanied by a request for monetary reparations.

The document also mandates the repatriation of objects obtained under duress — either during wartime or during the Nazi occupation — and urges museums to examine their collections to identify these works.

Notably, the report explicitly outlines what constitutes a valid request for the return of human remains. The identity of the person must be known and that person must have died after the year 1500, the document states, arguing that beyond that year “we all have the same ancestors,” a citation by the President of France’s National Museum of Natural History, Bruno David.

The document calls for the creation of an Africa-Europe fund to focus specifically on the subject of African cultural heritage but suggests that the new legal framework extends beyond the scope of France and its former colonies in Africa. However, the report makes specific mention of these nations, and includes a section detailing how countries may differ in their repatriation requests and how ongoing wars in those nations could delay repatriation.

Around 90% of African cultural heritage objects are estimated to be in Europe. The Quai Branly Museum in Paris holds at least 70,000 works from sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Sugary sweet in color and spiky in its forms, Mie Yim’s art is rife with contradictions. One of her sources is suggested by her artist’s statement:

When making work, I start from an emotional space of the past, my childhood years. Abrupt migration from Korea to Hawaii when I was a young girl left an indelible impression of disconnectedness and longing. Making art is a way to reconstruct some kind of meaning and purpose of fragmented identity […].

After encountering her work on Instagram, I first saw it in person in her solo show Psychtropic Dance: Mie Yim at Olympia in January 2021, six months after the pandemic started and Governor Cuomo shut down New York State. Working in pastel on sheets of colored handmade paper, Yim’s collectively titled Quarantine Drawings and oil paintings were not like anything else I had seen. It was like discovering an unknown country that had been there all along. 

This is how I described that country in my review of the show:

Imagine a constantly changing amalgamation of floral forms, fuzzy stuffed animal shapes, spiky viruses, beady eyes, teeth, volumetric forms, and patterns, and you’ll begin to get a sense of what I see as Yim’s daily drawing practice. In each pastel … drawing she seems to start over, never attempting to make a variation on a theme. She works on different-colored grounds and changes her palette for each drawing. The feeling is one of improvisation and impulse guided by years of devotion to drawing. 

I was curious about how the drawings became paintings, as the two paintings in the show did not indicate what she was up to. Rather than satisfying me — as did the Quarantine Drawings — the painting left me wanting to see more, which is a good thing. 

This led me to see Mie Yim: Nightshade, her debut exhibition at Simone Subal Gallery (April 14–May 20, 2023), which consists of 10 oil paintings of various sizes in the front gallery (all dated 2023) and a selection of works on paper in the back, dating from 2004 to 2022. This terrific pairing showed different paths that Yim had explored in her drawings and paintings, spanning representation and abstraction. 

An untitled linear ink drawing from 2005 depicts an angled view of children’s stuffed bears crowded under a mushroom cap, which brought to mind Mayan mushroom sculptures and that civilization’s use of psychotropic drugs. By bringing together a hallucinogenic mushroom and childhood toy, often understood as both companion and alter ego, Yim suggests we might see her work as an altered state in which all kinds of memories and sights mix together to become something unexpected, unnamable, and not necessarily benign. 

Among the many qualities that Yim has honed by working in pastel — which successfully transfers to her oil paintings — are the blending of color and softening of forms. She can achieve a rich dusty color or juxtapose hard-edged forms with others that appear blurred and slightly out of focus. Her earned ability to capture several different effects within a single painting distinguishes her work from that of many other artists who use oil paint. Another strength is her ability to suggest that a form is living. Once this animism comes across, as in the eye in the upper left corner of “Family Jewels” (2023), it becomes apparent throughout her work. What are the interplays between the organic and inorganic? What can we make of the forms that look like blown-up versions of microscopic things? The work derives some of its power from the instability of not knowing exactly what ground you’re standing on when looking at it. By using oil painting as if it were both dust and liquid, and softening forms to suggest a receding space, Yim pulls the viewer into all kinds of inexplicable situations, where danger may or may not lurk. I wonder if this feeling of precarity is what she experienced when her family moved from Korea to Hawaii and she began to live in a world where few shared her languge.  

This uncertainty is at the heart of Yim’s art. With its long, red, yarn-like tresses, the one-eyed creature in “Howl” (2023) is essentially unreadable. Is it friendly or treacherous? Yet the artist counteracts the terror through her colors and the evocation of soft forms. Her use of color, which is only hinted at in the Quarantine Drawings, is on full display in this exhibition. Purple dominates in “Sheep Wolf” (2023), which I see as her re-envisioning of Jackson Pollock’s “The She-Wolf” (1943). According to Roman mythology, a wolf suckled the twins Romulus and Remus. Later, in a dispute, Romulus killed Remus and founded Rome. In ancient Rome, purple designated someone’s status as royalty, suggesting that the wolf is royalty in the painting, not the twins. At the same time, it is unclear whether the creature is friendly or ferocious. This is what makes the paintings so strong. Just as they hold our attention with their merging of color and form, we are left questioning their meaning. 

Mie Yim: Nightshade continues at Simone Subal Gallery (131 Bowery, 2nd floor, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 20. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

TURIN, Italy — Every so often I yearn to flee the art world, as did Lee Lozano in the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of a series of conceptual pieces. Beginning with “General Strike Piece” (1969), in which she decided to “GRADUALLY BUT DETERMINEDLY AVOID BEING PRESENT AT OFFICIAL OR PUBLIC ‘UPTOWN’ FUNCTIONS OR GATHERINGS RELATED TO THE ‘ART WORLD’ IN ORDER TO PURSUE INVESTIGATIONS OF TOTAL PERSONAL AND PUBLIC REVOLUTION” (she wrote in notebooks, in all capital letters) and ending with her “Dropout Piece” in 1972, she incrementally exited the art milieu, making withdrawal the art.

These and other pieces, such as “Boycott Women” (1970) — in which she stopped speaking to her own gender — have been analyzed and admired with Lozano’s posthumous rise, which accelerated in the 2010s as new generations discovered her work. But there’s more to the artist’s oeuvre than the “Life-Art” pieces, some of which flip a fat middle finger to the New York art scene she feverishly worked within for only a dozen years. Strike, a retrospective exhibition running at Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin from March 8 to July 23, outlines the other chapters of her short-lived career, which included a fury of drawings and paintings that embody fierce feminism and capitalist critique, and incorporate raunchy humor, blunt metaphor, and, later, esoterism, all produced before her farewell from the art world.

The seven-room show opens with a visit to “General Strike” at the entrance before launching into Lozano’s early self-portraiture and a dense hang of drawings produced in the early ’60s. A row of graphite self-portraits on paper show the artist’s cheeky defiance; elsewhere in the room are color drawings; many of them, depicting images of genitals paired with naughty text, are as darkly humorous as they are provocative: A line of penis heads, drawn in colored pencil, is labeled with the line “finally cut them off”; “eat cunt for mental health” captions a rough sketch of a tube of toothpaste and a mustachioed face. Here and in a room entirely dedicated to the artist’s puns, phallic symbolism with a Surrealist bent abounds — crayons are penises, businessmen’s heads are bums, a flat penis wraps around the cylindrical carriage of a typewriter, whose keys display not letters but words one normally can’t print in American publications. But not everything is male: in “No Title” (1962), a hand holding an American quarter that displays the word “liberty” moves toward a reclining woman whose genitals have been replaced with a coin slot (the composition is a nod to Gustave Courbet’s “The Origin of Life,” 1866).

The following spaces show Lozano’s move away from the literal: her Tools series consists of large-scale paintings in which broad fields of color frame renderings of outsize screws, hammers, and clamps, all of which can both destroy and build (these seem especially apt in the Pinacoteca, which is situated in the decommissioned Fiat factory). And paintings of aircraft in motion manifest the artist’s fascination with the intersections of art and science. Lozano seemed preoccupied with revolution, but she also set herself up to fade into the ether: a group of minimalist Rothko-esque color-field paintings, mathematically calculated in terms of scale and proportion, borders on the esoteric — maybe a foreshadowing of what was to come next. 

Ultimately, she did disappear. (She faded in other ways, too — born Lenore Knaster in 1930, she asked to be called Lee at age 14, but later reduced this further, to “E”; she also ate increasingly less as she aged, wasting away.) In the show’s last space, a tiny lined spiral notebook is opened to a page dated April 5, 1970. Lozano writes: “DROPOUT PIECE IS THE HARDEST WORK I’VE EVER DONE.”

Strike is surprisingly compact, but embodies both the emotional punch and resignation of Lozano’s work and life (hence the exhibition’s title: a strike is both a violent hit and a refusal to work). The artist’s shifts from the crude to the enlightened, from the shackles of the body to an ethereal spirituality, from the wickedly humorous to an increasingly serious mission of personal and public transformation provide a curatorial clarity. After “Dropout Piece,” she moved to Texas and lived with her parents, dying of cervical cancer in 1999. 

Lozano fascinates now more than ever, but I wonder what she would think of how today’s art world functions; friends apparently came to save her pieces when she was evicted from a New York apartment; now Hauser & Wirth manages her estate and her works fetch up to a million dollars each. Mental health has become part of our everyday vocabulary — in Turin, someone whispered to me that Lozano may have suffered from schizophrenia. Her politically incorrect puns wouldn’t fly in today’s culture, nor would boycotting an entire gender. But her critique of power structures and feminism are still spot on — the exhibition opened on International Women’s Day, when demonstrations for women’s rights and against femicide took place in most major Italian cities. And in this age of self-promotion and careerism, there’s something stunning, and inspiring, about the integrity of someone who had the courage just to leave. 

Lee Lozano: Strike continues at the Pinacoteca Agnelli (Via Nizza, 230/103, Turin, Italy) through July 23. The exhibition was curated by Sarah Cosulich and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti.

Truth is a largely subjective and challenging aspect of human existence, especially in these politically divisive times. Physical objects present a shared reality and an external point of reference, to which we can relate (though not always agree). Consider the artist Sophie Eisner, who creates an armature for the kinds of connections that are usually intangible.

Sometimes Eisner’s work looks like dramatic sculptures comprised entirely of coil-welded steel. These vessels might become instruments, activated through performance. She also enjoys casting common objects — tubs, sinks, funnels, and blocks — into some of her favorite materials, like silicon and concrete, manipulating them into abstract echoes of their former functions. Other times, she draws other people interacting with these forms, playing silicon tubs like a row of drums or hanging silicon sheets over their heads.

A recent photo series captures images of artist Beatrize Escobar in a performance in the Hundred Mile Wilderness region in Maine’s Piscataquis County, throwing nets made by Eisner with a set of self-made tools into the air. Literally and figuratively, Eisner casts a wide net.

A fair number of the objects produced by Eisner could be taken for readymades, but with the rare exception, the artist laboriously fabricates the majority of her works from components such as silicon, concrete, or steel solder. “The material comes in through how function and intimacy connect to bodies, memory, place, and relationships,” she told Hyperallergic.

As a post-graduation evolution of her MFA work at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Eisner developed “Sound is Touch at a Distance” (2016), a work that began as a practical attempt to build a giant coil pot entirely out of steel solder. She held the welding torch head in one hand and a piece of fine rod with the other hand and melted the wire into itself. This process continues to be prominent in her practice today. The piece soon evolved from an exploration of function to one of metaphor.

“At that time, I was thinking a lot about scars,” she said. “And how welding is like a scar; it’s a place where there’s a rupture and coming together, stitched back together. What if I make something that’s all scar tissue?”

The artist transformed the sculpture into a performance when she discovered that the fine metal strands in the work’s interior, a byproduct of the welding process, could be strummed to create a musical effect amplified by the wide-mouthed bowl shape of the piece, producing an instrument somewhere between harp, steel drum, and kalimba.

These welded forms also appear in her 2015 Cranbrook thesis, “This Definitely Happened,” (2015) which employs them as scar-riddled proxies in an abstract composition with the impression of a charred door and an undefined, sooty sheet of foldable silicon. The variable tableau seeks, in part, to unpack the emotional reality of a series of two house fires in the Berkshires that Eisner and her family experienced when she was three and five years old.

“I really felt most me when I was there,” she said. “My sense of family and love is very much connected to that house and that small bit of land.” Eisner grew up holding the trauma of that incident, laying clothing out every night so she could grab them in case of another emergency. The first fire was declared an electrical accident, but further inquiry revealed that both incidents were part of a pattern of anti-Semitic arson in the area. The piece grapples with the nature of memory and the evolving understanding of the event as an intentional, menacing, and direct attack on her family.

“There isn’t an absolute truth,” she said. “This definitely happened, but also this other thing happened, or I experienced it this way … this other person experienced it that way.”

This statement applies broadly to many of Eisner’s subsequent works, including the ironically named “Absolute Truth” (2019) at Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit, which further explores silicon poured to create a series of interconnected tubs that at once emulate the newborn ward of a hospital, a row of sinks, or troughs of food at a soup kitchen. Eisner also pours concrete into shapes that roughly emulate the torso of stand-mounted phone booths, a shape that Eisner affectionately calls “roundy rectangles.”

“It’s sort of ubiquitous, it’s the shape of an iPhone, it’s the shape of road signs, of a computer ,” she said. “I’m curious about how in different orientations and at different scales it means it is different things. And it’s also like a sink or a bathtub, which for me is the quintessential object of intimacy and utility.”

Most recently, Eisner employed an electric guitar readymade as the centerpiece of a new work encompassing ideas about the shared experience in isolation that is related, but not limited to, the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than porting into a speaker to amplify the sound, music played on the guitar can only be heard in a circle of “listening stations,” created by stethoscope-like headphones that jack directly into the instrument.

“I like that the direct connection between musician and listener, how intense the communication is,” said Eisner. “You’re hearing those physical vibrations of their fingers on the strings funneled right to your eardrums. You’re all sharing an experience and hearing the same music, but because of the way acoustics work, each person is hearing something different.”

The piece contemplates the years of pandemic isolation that have impeded global society and opportunities to gather. As we exercise the scar tissue of the past and reckon with the lasting impact of COVID-19 on our perceptions of time, space, and memory, it’s the best time for an artist like Eisner to highlight the connective force between people.

LOS ANGELES — Ishi Glinsky’s practice is delightfully diverse. He moves fluidly from painting to sculpture, abstraction to representation, integrating elements of so-called craft and fine art, adapting whichever medium fits his purpose. Despite this fluid approach, one constant thread woven through his work is scale: Glinsky works big, often scaling up smaller objects to epic proportions. He does this not out of hubris or bravado, but in an attempt to honor the traditional art forms of the Tohono O’odham Nation, of which he is a member.

“By taking something and enlarging it, I’m hoping to create a monument,” Glinsky told Hyperallergic. “And to start a conversation on many fronts, to inform and educate people if they don’t know, and if they do know, it’s done in a new way.”

For his upcoming solo show at Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles, Lifetimes That Broke The Earth, Glinsky will present works that reference the Tohono O’odham techniques of basket making. Using a combination of ink washes, oil sticks, and thickly impastoed marks made with a palette knife, Glinsky turns the intricate patterns into brightly colored abstractions, zooming in on the elemental construction. He juxtaposes two different basket types on his canvases: one made using Yucca, bear grass, and Devil’s claw, and another in which artisans loop together lengths of baling wire to construct metal baskets.

In his paintings, the enlarged wire loops resemble the spiral forms of galaxies, suggesting another jump in scale. “It’s a fluid collaboration of the past and present, tangible and intangible,” he explains. 

Glinsky will also be showing his own wire baskets, which he makes by weaving spools of baling wire into a chain-link fence on a wall loom in his studio. He then folds and twists them into baskets whose familiar forms contain a wiggling mass of wire, calling back to, but quite distinct from, the traditional technique he is referencing. “One thing that makes him so extraordinary is that he’ll invent a technique adequate for each medium, which is somehow totally unprecedented,” gallerist Chris Sharp told Hyperallergic.

His first exhibition with the gallery, Monuments to Survival, in 2021, featured works that reference other Native American traditions, such as Zuni jewelry, or ledger drawings made by the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and other Plains Indians. He collaborated with Zuni artist Veronica Poblano, one of the originators of “Zuni Toons,” traditional jewelry made from silver and inlaid turquoise that references Looney Tunes and other cartoon characters.

Glinsky uses steel, aluminum, and resin to make his versions, whose enlarged size and placement in the gallery suggest a reappraisal of the original objects. “Folks could come across [these works] in a trading post, in a display case besieged by other Southwestern ephemera,” he said. “I felt that the original should take the space of my necklace.” Significantly, Glinsky shares a portion of the sales price with the artists he collaborates with or whose work he is referencing.

Then there is the jacket, which occupied the entire front room of Sharp’s gallery. “Coral vs. King Snake Jacket” (2019) is a meticulous facsimile of the punk leather staple, decorated with metal studs and patches and blown up to colossal size. In keeping with his resourcefulness, Glinsky made the studs from fence post caps and replicated the texture of asphalt to provide the jacket’s weathered patina. The patches resemble those of bands such as the Dead Kennedys and Public Enemy but have been adapted into Tohono O’odham symbols or icons that support the American Indian Movement (AIM).

Despite the jacket’s punk aesthetics, Glinsky said he chose the form for its connection to the regalia he made and wore when he participated in Pow Wows. “You’re wearing this armor in a sense when you’re out in the world,” the artist explained. “Regalia is also representative of who you are, where you’re from.”

“Coral vs. King Snake Jacket” (2019) was acquired by the Hammer Museum, which recently announced that Glinsky will be included in the next iteration of its LA Biennial, Made in LA. The work also caught the attention of Gabriel Ritter, who organized Glinsky’s first solo museum show Upon a Jagged Maze, which opened last fall at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara. The exhibition was a decade-long survey, showcasing a cross-section of his multifaceted practice. Ritter described Glinsky’s works as “not just art forms but art movements unto themselves.”

“Just because art history hasn’t included them in the canon, that’s beside the point,” Ritter added.

In light of these exhibitions — and a planned solo show with PPOW Gallery in New York in 2024 — it could be said that Glinsky is having a moment. All of this attention is especially notable given the unorthodox path he has taken through the art world. He grew up in Tucson, Arizona, in an artistic family (“Coral vs. King Snake Jacket” features a version of a drawing his late father made as a teen), and studied graphic design at a community college before exploring fine art on his own.

“I just started painting and finding my way through all different types of mediums,” he recalled. “Some of those, I sought out, some I hid from for a really long time. I was almost intimidated by painting. I didn’t know what I would contribute.”

He moved to LA in 2006, steadily continuing his material explorations, participating in some exhibitions, but largely staying out of the limelight. “He didn’t matriculate into the LA art world how most people usually do,” Sharp noted. This is not to say he wasn’t savvy about his career — he was tapped by Ralph Lauren in 2019 to create limited edition moccasins, an attempt by the brand to address how they have not always acknowledged the sources of their designs. However, his practice has been driven by his desire to share the traditions and artwork of the Tohono O’odham and other Native peoples, not with nostalgia in mind, but as a representative of contemporary art forms rooted in history.

“These stories that I’m holding, I’m doing my best to care for and tell them as respectfully as I can,” he said, “but also to crack them open and think about the future.”

This weekend, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) brings the Native New York Film Festival to Lower Manhattan. As part of the ​​Native Cinema Showcase, this one-of-a-kind free event will feature works from emerging and established filmmakers and include an array of short films, features, and discussions. In association with Native New York, an ongoing exhibition by the NMAI, the festival focuses on films exploring the histories and communities that “make New York a Native place.“ All screenings will take place in the Auditorium at the NMAI, located at 1 Bowling Green.

“We have a very large population of Indigenous people here in the city, but everybody’s so spread out,” Cynthia Benitez, film programming manager at the NMAI, told Hyperallergic. “So when you have something like a film festival, we can bring people together.”

For the festival, Benitez explained how she and the NMAI worked with local Indigenous filmmakers, like Terry Jones (Seneca), to compile the list of films from both established and emerging artists.

“Whether it’s documentary, drama, or comedy — there’s something for everybody,” Benitez said. “We’re fortunate that a lot of filmmakers who are local are coming, so people will be able to ask questions and converse with them.”

The Native New York Film Festival begins tomorrow Friday, May 5 at 6:30 pm with a screening of Little Caughnawaga: To Brooklyn and Back (2008). The 57-minute film follows Mohawk filmmaker Reaghan Tarbell as she retraces her familial roots back to the vibrant community of Mohawk ironworkers that once occupied north Gowanus in an area that came to be known as Little Caughnawaga. Audience members who may be interested in learning more about the film can stick around afterwards for a discussion with Tarbell. The film will also be preceded by “Rotinonhsión:ni Ironworkers” (2020), a six-minute short that explores the social and industrial influence of Mohawk ironworkers who built the New York City skyline. 

The festival continues on Saturday, May 6, at 1pm with the Made In New York: Retrospective Shorts Program, a two-hour block featuring a collection of eight classic shorts that celebrate New York from Indigenous points of view. Some of the films include “First Voices” (2010), a documentary about a Cheyenne River Lakota radio broadcaster; “I Lost My Shadow” (2011), a music video from White Mountain Apache artist Laura Ortman’s second solo album; and “Kinnaq Nigaqtuqtuaq (The Snarling Madman)” (2005), a short that follows an Inuit cannibal through Manhattan while he hunts a young woman who is simultaneously stalking her former lover. The program will close with a discussion with Seneca filmmaker Terry Jones.

Later on, audiences can catch Keepers of the Game (2016), a feature-length film that follows an all-Native girls lacrosse team in upstate New York as they set out to become the first Native women’s team to bring home a championship for their community. The screening will run from 3pm to 5pm.

The final day of the festival, Sunday, May 7, brings another shorts program with a lineup of both contemporary and classic films from filmmakers of various nations. Showing at 1pm, the films range in length, with the shortest, “A Heart Free” (2022), clocking in at two minutes, and the longest, Tsi Tiotonhontsatáhsawe: Tsi Nihotirihò:ten Ne Ratironhia Kehró:non (When the Earth Began: The Way of the Skydwellers) (2022), running at 33 minutes. Audiences can stay after the screening for another discussion with Terry Jones and Shinnecock filmmaker Jeremy Dennis, a former Hyperallergic fellow.

Finally, the festival closes out at 3pm with a screening of Conscience Point (2019). Directed by Treva Wurmfeld, this film follows Shinnecock activist Rebecca Hill-Genia as she works with other tribal members and allies to protect their Nation from the threat of wealthy Hamptons landowners who threaten to displace them.

A thickly embroidered garment known as the manto, or “annunciation garment,” stands in the middle of the first room in the Americas Society’s exhibition Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth. The manto, which the artist wore, is stitched with intricate patterns, images, and women’s names. With the manto and other wearable textiles, documentary photographs of the artist, and his hospital record cards, the exhibition places Arthur Bispo do Rosario (1909–1989) at the center of a world the viewer is about to enter.

This solo presentation is the artist’s first in the United States and the third exhibition by an artist of African descent at the Americas Society in New York City. Arthur Bispo do Rosario was born in the early 1900s in Japaratuba, Brazil. He was an apprentice sailor in the Brazilian Navy, where he became a signalman, and later was also a boxer and an attendant to a wealthy family. In 1938, he had a vision that he was Jesus Christ. He believed he received a mandate from God to replicate the entire world in preparation for the Last Judgment. Subsequently, Bispo was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and committed to the Colonia Juliano Moreira in Rio de Janeiro, an institution for mentally ill people where he spent the rest of his life. From the facility, he created over 1,000 artworks including embroidered textiles and sculptures, 71 of which are featured in this exhibition alongside a plethora of found objects.

“Thrice marginalized as a poor African descendant diagnosed with mental illness, Bispo do Rosario, like many other visionary artists, felt the need to reorganize the world and create an artistic language of his own after experiencing a life-changing epiphany,” the exhibition’s co-curator Javier Téllez told Hyperallergic in an interview. “The obsessive creation of textile works and the accumulation of objects drove him from chaos to order, and helped him survive the harsh conditions of the mental institution.”

Epitomizing this mandate are the estandartes, or embroidered hanging banners. Their surfaces are filled with images related to Bispo’s life, including battleships, a detailed map of the country of Brazil, hospital buildings, and various national flags. To create these objects, Bispo used the materials available to him, including bedsheets and thread he obtained by unraveling the hospital’s uniforms. An avid consumer of newspapers, he combined this knowledge with his personal recollections, such as the names of other people he encountered in the institution. The density of names on the banner’s surface approximates the cold anonymity of the institutional ledger, a system that would have been familiar to him from the Navy as well as the hospital. While the estandartes have a pseudo-encyclopedic function, they also document Bispo’s particular time and place, and insist on the specificity of his personal history, marking his presence in the world that was erased by institutionalization.

Other small sculptures wrapped in faded blue thread reproduce everyday objects including scissors, a hammer, and chess pieces. He also created miniatures and vitrines, tableau-like groupings of quotidian objects such as spoons, combs, and Brazilian Havaianas. The exhibition’s close arrangement of these works and half-painted walls, similar to those of a mental institution, simulates the way that Bispo arranged these objects in his cell.

Bispo’s incredibly intricate and painstakingly crafted works both encode the oppressive languages of the institution in which he was held, while also insisting on his personal history. While they speak to the idea of a universal, all-encompassing taxonomy, they also cannot be considered separately from Bispo’s spiritual mission. This exhibition is a rare opportunity, not only to see Bispo’s works outside of Brazil but also to gain access to his varied forms of expression and to better understand the vision that motivated him throughout most of his life.

Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth continues at the Americas Society (680 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through May 20. The exhibition was co-curated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Ricardo Resende, and Javier Téllez, with Tie Jojima.

Earlier this week, all eyes were on the Metropolitan Museum of Art as some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities flocked to New York for the annual Met Gala benefit. While the theme and accompanying exhibition at the Costume Institute — a tribute to the late designer Karl Lagerfield — was a source of controversy in itself, it was not the only point of contention at the prestigious event.

In the midst of all the social media chatter on the head-turning outfits grazing the red carpet, several members of the art community were quick to point out a resemblance between the plastic water bottle chandeliers hanging above the celebrities and the sculptural works of contemporary artist Willie Cole.

On Instagram, curator Ellen Hawley called the Met Gala light fixtures a “blatant copy” of chandeliers created by Cole, whose own large-scale water bottle sculptures are currently on display at Express Newark, where he is an artist-in-residence. She also pointed out that Cole’s work is on display at The Met and that his prints and design are sold in the museum’s gift shop.

“Interestingly, Willie wasn’t asked to be involved to collaborate on this installation, nor asked for his permission to use the likeness of his art,” Hawley wrote. “As a curator who has worked with Willie’s bottle works, I instinctively feel protective of his work.”

Cole expressed his agreement with Hawley’s remarks in his own Instagram post. “I’ve been receiving message[s] since last night about the blatant rip off of my water bottle works,” he wrote. “Is this flattery or thievery?”

Via a representative of Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, Cole declined to comment.

The chandeliers on display at the recent Met Gala were designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Winner of the 1995 Pritzker Prize, Ando is a self-taught architect, widely known for his emphasis on simplicity and empty space in his work. Event planner Raul Àvila, who has been overseeing the Met Gala’s design decor since 2007, explained in an interview with Vogue that the design was meant to “highlight the importance of giving our everyday items more than one life cycle.”

Recycled water bottles also lined the staircase at the gala entrance, and were used in conjunction with florals for an enormous circular centerpiece in the Great Hall. A spokesperson for The Met told Hyperallergic that the event’s designers “carried the décor theme through to the decorative lighting in the red carpet tent.”

“The Met is a great admirer of Willie Cole, and has reached out to the artist directly on the matter,” the museum’s spokesperson added.

On social media, many jumped to Cole’s defense. On one of the artist’s Instagram posts, Pamela Council agreed with a comment that the Met Gala’s fixtures were a “rip-off,” adding that they lacked Cole’s “formal swagger.” Some users pointed to the long history of found-object sculptures and upcycling in art, but many conceded that the designs were uncannily similar.

Cole is a New Jersey-based artist whose multimedia practice includes printmaking, sculpture, drawing, and photography. He is best known for combining everyday objects in works that deal with sociopolitical issues at the crossover of race, history, and traditional African artisanship. In February, Cole unveiled “Spirit Catcher” and “Lumen-less Lantern,” two chandelier-like sculptures constructed of over 3,000 plastic water bottles fastened together using basket weaving techniques and metal wire. The bottles that make up the chandeliers were gathered in and around Newark, and are a commentary on the city’s water crisis, as well as the planet’s toxic reliance on single-use plastic. The two works are currently on view as part of Express Newark’s Aliveness series.

Editor’s note 5/3/23 5:59pm EDT: This article has been updated with a quote from a Met Museum spokesperson.

LONDON — The British sculptor Anthony Caro is 10 years dead. How to keep him in the public eye? How to arrest the possibility of reputational fade?  

Two men have been doing some heavy lifting on his behalf. One of them is his dealer, David Juda, custodian of the estate. The other is Paul Moorhouse, the director of the Antony Caro Centre in Camden, where Caro had his studio. 

Due in part to their efforts, two Caro shows have opened this year. One of them is in Ealing, northwest London, where a great architect called Sir John Soane built a country retreat for himself called Pitzhanger Manor at the beginning of the 19th century. That exhibition takes for its theme architecture as an inspiration to Caro. The other, Caro and Music, is at Annely Juda Fine Art, near Oxford Circus in central London, and it is all about Caro and the influence of music. 

Though a polite, tweed-jacketed man of relatively light frame, Caro was a bruiser of a maker. He knocked sculptures off their pedestals and bolted, say, a gobbet of steel to whatever else came to hand with improvisatory glee, from first to last. He never knew what he was doing until he’d done it. That’s what he enjoyed most: the thrill of discovering what his hand and his eye had been up to. 

The first challenge he set for himself had been to re-invent sculpture itself, to get away from the faking of the human presence that his disappointing efforts at figuration represented. That was in the 1950s. Architecture as a discipline could help in this. There was something pure and abstract about it, even though it was also undeniably useful — in keeping the rain off, for example.

The largest of the sculptures is in the central gallery, which faces you as you enter. “Child’s Tower Room” (1983–84) — with its high gleam of varnished Japanese oak — is a kind of crazed stir-fry of three quite distinct ingredients: Tatlin’s tower, that unrealized monument to the Third International; a wheeling fairground helter-skelter; and an off-kilter pepper pot. In short, it’s wild — and children are loving it to bits this morning because it contains a spiraling staircase, which you can ascend as high as the viewpoint of your dreams. 

In fact, throughout almost the whole of Paul Moorhouse’s serious talk about the architectural significance of “Child’s Tower Room,” various small children are up inside that tower, shouting him down for the sheer joy of it. 

The other works in the show demonstrate exactly how Caro pressed ideas about the architectonic into service. His sculptures, though abstract enough, utilize what you can easily read as room-like spaces, doors, recesses, a roof-like lean. Sculpture is a built thing, with an inside and an outside, through which you are often invited to journey, and whose inner spaces are bounded by walls.

But what of music? Didn’t Friedrich Schiller once ask: “What is architecture but frozen music?” The second show takes us on a different journey, and it does not quite convince to the same degree. 

Doesn’t almost every artist (and every poet) tell us that they are influenced by music? The difference with Caro, Paul Moorhouse explains to me, is that most artists do not actually make to music — they turn it off before snatching up brush or chisel. Caro, on the other hand, would ramp up the volume on Brahms or Mozart when making a large piece, to give his creative juices an extra shot.

So when I walk into the gallery, it is to the light tripping of piano notes, at a relatively low volume. How exactly has music influenced Caro?

Well, here are some pieces from the Concerto Series, all created in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Caro has cannibalized various wind instruments, and from those bits he’s fashioned musical sculptures. One, called “Castanets” (2000), looks like a wilting double horn; another shows a trombone sliding away from itself. Unfortunately, these sculptures do little other than show off the expressive shapes of the pieces from which they are assembled, sometimes ingeniously, often amusingly. They also feel imaginatively under-powered — more muzak or Easy Listening than great music. 

Architectural forms enabled him to see and develop his creative potential. Music, on the other hand, finds him treading water. In fact, the best works in this second show have been brought in from quite different periods of his making, and are not pretending to have been raised into being by the power of Beethoven at all. 

Take “Horizon” (Park Avenue Series) of 2012, for example. The ways in which these plates and girders of steel have been clustered and bonded have a precarious and dangerous urban excitement about them. We feel the roar and the teem of the city, forever on the making and the unmaking, on our very pulses.

In comparison with the heft of “Horizon,” the musical sculptures feel like dibs and dabs of prettification.  

Anthony Caro: The Inspiration of Architecture continues at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery (Ealing Green, London, England) through September 10. Caro and Music continues at Annely Juda Fine Art (23 During Street, London, England) through May 6. both exhibitions were curated by Paul Moorhouse.      

Over 11,500 unionized writers left their offices to join picket lines yesterday, May 2, after weeks of contract negotiations between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Hollywood’s major studios fell through. The walkout marks the first major strike in the entertainment industry in 15 years. But this time, better pay and structural changes are not the only concerns on the table.

Since the introduction of generative AI bots, such as ChatGPT, creatives in every industry from advertising to journalism have voiced concerns about potential job displacement. Now, alongside other demands, the WGA strikers are calling for regulations on the use of this new technology in creative projects. 

In addition to pay increases and protections for writers working on streaming versus broadcast series, the guild is specifically requesting that “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI,” per a document released by the group on Monday.

In response, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) — the trade association representing top studios including Fox, Netflix, NBC, Amazon, Apple, and Disney — rejected the WGA’s proposal. Rather than agree to stay away from AI, the AMPTP offered “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology,” an unclear counter that left many strikers dissatisfied.

Today, May 3, dozens of protesters crowded outside Netflix’s Manhattan headquarters in one in a series of pickets scheduled over the coming weeks in New York and Los Angeles. Among them was Lowell Peterson, executive director of the WGA East. 

“The concern is not that AI will create scripts that are really good, but that it will take away a lot of work. Not just creative control, but actual employment from writers,” Peterson told Hyperallergic. Writers on streaming series typically make less than their colleagues on broadcast TV and work in smaller groups under tight deadlines. 

Outside Netflix offices, WGA strikers and SAG-AFTRA allies marched up and down Broadway, disrupting the usual downtown traffic. On the sidewalk, they chanted in unison, rang cowbells, and carried picket signs with catchy phrases like “Miss Your Show? Let Them Know!” and “Do the Write Thing!” to express their frustration. Drivers passing by showed their support with loud car honks, while other passersby cheered and applauded the protesters.

“The [AMPTP’s] response was to not talk about AI repeatedly when we brought it up. And then at the very end, when we pressed that AI was something to talk about, they told us that they didn’t want to talk right now because they don’t want to cut off something they might take advantage of in the future,” said Greg Iwinski, a comedy writer and WGA-East council member. The AMPTP has not responded to Hyperallergic‘s immediate request for comment.

Peterson explained that the WGA had attempted to work with the AMPTP, proposing regulations that were not “anti-technology” but rather protective of writers’ credits and compensation. “It’s deeply disappointing that the AMPTP has refused to engage with us in any meaningful way,” Peterson said.

“The wording didn’t mean anything,” Peterson continued, in response to the AMPTP’s counterproposal. “Maybe AI generated that.”

The first New York protest took place yesterday, when around 200 demonstrators crowded around Peacock’s headquarters during a NewFronts advertiser presentation on Fifth Avenue, Variety reported. A message written on one picket sign at that protest stuck and began circulating online. It read: “Pay your writers or we’ll spoil Succession.”

On Friday, April 14, dozens of artists were gearing up for the opening of their group exhibition in Lower Manhattan, a show that had been in the works for weeks. But when they arrived at the location, they found their artwork still boxed up on the floor of the locked and empty gallery. The curator who charged each of them a $500 fee to participate was nowhere to be found.

The artists were contacted via social media with an invitation to apply for a spot in an “immersive experience” at the East Village Art Collection (EVAC). Though the exact number of participants remains unclear, around 25 artists were selected to display their work at an onsite exhibition on April 14 at the gallery’s First Avenue space, and an additional cohort opted to participate in a rotating billboard display of their work in Times Square. But as the East Village blog EV Grieve reported, neither of the two elements came to fruition. Head Curator Steven Hirsch and other affiliates of EVAC have yet to provide details regarding the unforeseen cancellation, leaving the artists, some of whom traveled from out of state and even internationally, allegedly out thousands of dollars and convinced that the whole thing was “a scam.”

Hirsch told participants that he had a “medical emergency,” but over two weeks later, artists say they’re still in the dark. Hirsch did not respond to Hyperallergic’s multiple requests for comment for this story.

At face value, EVAC appears to be a vanity gallery that charges each artist $500 to exhibit their work. The events are also ticketed with general admission and VIP tiers, and all artwork sale proceeds are said to be directed to the artists. Florida-based artist GinaBella Presser told Hyperallergic that she received an Instagram message from an unrelated account asking her to reach out to EVAC’s official account on March 8.

“It seemed legit,” Presser said. “I was asked to attend as a guest first, and then I was invited to apply for one of their shows.”

After paying the $25 application fee, she was one of the dozens accepted for EVAC’s Matter and Energy event slated for April 14. As an emerging artist, Presser was excited to exhibit in New York City and had her work insured and sent up independently before booking accommodations and flight tickets for herself and a couple of family members, setting her back over $3,000. Thankfully, Presser was able to recover her work from the gallery with the help of UPS and worked with her bank to be reimbursed for the $500 exhibition fee — she says the gallery automatically charged her the remaining balance of $475 upon her acceptance into the show — but her accommodations and flight tickets were non-refundable.

Michigan-based painter Charlotte Shinabarger was onsite on April 14 in anticipation of the reception before receiving a notification from the ticket vending company, Eventbrite, that the event was canceled. She and the other participating artists who gathered outside the locked gallery were astounded that the organizers hadn’t communicated any of this earlier, fearing that they had gotten scammed. The group acted quickly and papered the windows of the gallery with messages that their work was “stolen” and that EVAC was made up of “scammers,” “thieves,” and “criminals.”

Shinabarger volunteered to pay Hirsch’s place of residence a visit and demand answers. She told Hyperallergic that she was held up by a doorman who initiated a FaceTime call between herself and Hirsch. “I was polite about it and he said that there was a medical emergency and reassured me that everybody will get the refund and their artwork back,” Shinabarger said. “I asked when that would happen and he said he can’t answer that right now, and when I requested somebody meet us at the gallery that I was just at two hours prior, he told me he couldn’t.”

“But when I returned to the gallery 40 minutes later, they had taken down all of our signs and added the notice that the gallery was closed due to a medical emergency,” she added.

Another artist was able to secure Shinabarger’s work for her when the gallery was briefly opened for collections on April 22, but it’ll cost $86 to have it shipped back to Michigan and she still hasn’t been reimbursed for the exhibition costs.

“I’ll fall on my face for anybody in the name of art, I love it,” Shinabarger explained. “That doesn’t scare me or bother me at all. It’s the fact that my kids were rooting for me out there like that and I had to come back and tell them what happened is what hurts me the most.”

Julia Comita, an NYC-based creative professional, had shown with EVAC last February and was excited about the Times Square billboard display component that she was accepted for.

“I had no issues dropping off my artwork or picking it back up after the group show,” Comita said in a statement to Hyperallergic. “I was surprised to learn that they had sold out of tickets to the event, and truly the show was packed, leading me to believe that they are doing well with this particular business model.”

Comita said that EVAC, while responsive in the beginning, failed to communicate scheduling information around two weeks before the billboard display was meant to go live, so she consulted Integration Media, the billboard company that EVAC had contracted. Comita learned that EVAC had neither sent over her or any of the artists’ art files to the billboard company nor paid the invoice for display after signing the business contract. Hyperallergic confirmed with an account executive at Integration Media that the invoice went unpaid and that Hirsch and other EVAC employees stopped responding after signing the contract.

“It was annoying and confusing because I had spent a lot of time and attention developing this project with EVAC,” said the account executive, who asked that their name not be used.

At this point, artists from all over claim they have not received any updates, apologies, or reimbursements from the gallery for exhibition costs. Those who were able to recoup the funds managed to do so through their banks, and Hirsch has only answered questions about scheduling artwork collections without providing any other details regarding the incident. EV Grieve reported that EVAC’s gallery location at 215 First Avenue is now up for lease as of May 1, prompting more questions from the artists who say they have been left high and dry.

“To this day, I’m completely bewildered why a company that I had literally just worked with would ghost on a show they contracted anywhere from 60-80 artists to participate in with absolutely zero communication,” Comita lamented.

“Fortunately, a couple dozen artists have found each other throughout this process thanks to the wonders of social media, and made the best of a bad situation,” she continued. “My heart absolutely goes out to all the artists who not only paid for this show, but travelled from all over the world to attend this show (with family and friends in tow), and still have no idea why their art wasn’t displayed in Times Square.”

Artist Ryan Bock was wandering around an exhibition of Etgar Keret’s writings at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, stumbling across crumpled pieces of paper. As directed by the museum, he picked them up, and read them one by one. “It was a son recounting his experiences as a young child of his mother talking about escaping the Nazis,” he told Hyperallergic in an interview. 

These crumpled pieces of paper echoed the reason Bock traveled to Germany in the first place: to witness the unveiling of his family’s Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, in Frankfurt. Since 1992, these brass-plated concrete cubes have been inlaid in sidewalks in front of the homes of Jews who were victims of Nazi persecution.

In sharp contrast to the past, Bock received a warm welcome from the mayor and residents of Lich, a small town near Frankfurt back to which his family’s ancestry can be traced. “I’m going to try to move to Lich for a few months,” he said. “I think there hasn’t been a Bock in that town for 400 years. So in a lot of ways it’s like a return, a ‘fuck you; you can’t get rid of us.’” He said this with a quiet laugh, still expressing affection for the kindness the citizens of his ancestral home had shown him. 

In Frankfurt, Bock met a high school student who had found the records of one of his ancestors. Apparently, his ancestor was constantly skipping school, and yet managed to ace all his classes. “He was in a choir that’s over 200 years old, which is still in existence,” the artist said. “They performed several of the Jewish songs that the Nazis allowed them to sing in their last performance before the regime takeover.” 

“It was unfamiliar but familiar at the same time,” he said. “I wasn’t raised religious at all. So I didn’t really think that something like that would affect me so deeply. But it really did. It was incredible.”

The origin of the term “Stolpersteine” is one of many examples of how Jews have empowered themselves using aspects of the oppressor’s culture. It comes from an antisemitic saying from the Nazi era, when people would trip over a stone poking out of the ground and say, “A Jew must be buried here.”

This kind of irony and dark humor run through Bock’s art. His work’s cutting inquiries into how the United States is perpetuating authoritarianism is accompanied by a rueful laugh, if you know where to look. The artist’s high-contrast, sharply-edged aesthetic draws from the crystalline forms of the under-celebrated Czech Cubist movement and the shadowy world of the German expressionist horror filmmakers. Almost exclusively working in black and white, Bock’s cartoonishly exaggerated paintings, sculptures, and puppets lead viewers to simultaneously gasp and giggle. 

His latest installation is a full-sized chess set, recently exhibited at Artist Project in Toronto, Canada. Bock said that children quickly descended on the gameboard as soon as they saw it, eager to play. Adults soon joined in, lugging around game pieces crafted from discarded piano legs. “It’s sort of like tricking people into having fun,” said Bock. “But it’s like ritualized violence.” Noting its use in military training, Bock notes that chess is “about killing political opponents. This is a simulation of war.” 

Previously displayed in an exhibition at Ki Smith Gallery in New York City, the chess set installation Ode to Duchamp: A Liar (2022) references the artist who many see as the father of “Readymades”: sculptures made out of mass-produced objects divorced from their original use and “elevated” to art. But while Duchamp’s readymade objects, like urinals and bicycle wheels, are left in their original form, Bock’s repurposed piano legs blend seamlessly together to create completely new shapes. Without their hulking bodies, all that is left of the pianos is their ornament: spiral feet, leafy tendrils, a few pedals, and even a full ram’s head. 

Back at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, one tale in particular stuck out to Bock from the dozens he found on the ground. Safe in her new home after the war, a survivor described insisting on blasting music by the antisemitic composer, Richard Wagner. A Jewish neighbor came over and said, “What is this? You can’t listen to this!” To which the woman replied, “Well, Nazis ate apples. Am I going to stop eating apples? Am I going to stop making strudel?” Chuckling, Bock said, “The sense of humor that this woman continued to have was incredible.” 

Likewise, Bock noted, “I do borrow a lot of visual cues from fascist movements and artworks,” including Neoclassical architecture and the potent diagonals of propaganda posters. “I want to use the language that’s been used by these regimes … to warn people so that this doesn’t happen again.”

This is a delicate dance: Rather than simply repeating fascist aesthetics, the artist magnifies their grotesqueness so it’s impossible to see the pieces as anything but a wry takedown of authoritarianism. His 2018 Paris installation, I’m Afraid of Americans, lured viewers into a dizzying carnival funhouse of distorted American flags, collapsing neoclassical columns, and a looming Statue of Liberty fashioned out of an armoire. Likewise, his grinning and grimacing cardboard masks in his 2022 exhibition Bockhaus’ Haunted Haus in a brownstone in Brooklyn, call to mind the clownish costumes of Purim Spiels. Here, they poke fun at Uncle Sam, the judicial system, and the Devil himself. 

Bock, also known as Bockhaus, knows the power of a good performance. A former street artist, he often dons his own disguise as a “semi-anonymous” figure who is only photographed in a ski mask. In preparing the chess set, he wrote: “I struggled to justify my continued participation in the art market in the face of so much mounting pain and struggle in the world … What power of real truth and change could art sway over its viewers if presented as mere commodity?” His performance as a mysterious artist, shrouding his true face, highlights the ridiculousness of the art world he exists within.

Especially in the doom and gloom of recent years, I’ve lost count of the number of times “edgy” stand-up comedian fans have lectured me on why transphobic ridicule, stories about assault, and thinly veiled antisemitism are nothing but so-called jokes. “You just don’t understand dark humor,” they say. They fall into the trap of nihilism masquerading as satire: These jokes express the desire to embody the power of oppressors. A good Jewish joke, on the other hand, laughs in the scowling face of white supremacy. It magnifies the surreal nature of a truly terrible situation, allowing us to smile through pain. It is both a folk craft and a survival mechanism that’s handed down from generation to generation. 

Bockhaus has inherited this ability and takes it to a place all his own: Plunging into the darkness of those jokes, he blurs the line between humor and horror. But while his pieces travel to those depths, he does not indulge in darkness. In his shadowy, cackling universe, there is always a way out. 

A young man searches the jungle for his erstwhile lover, who may or may not have become a tiger. A man on his deathbed converses with the ghosts of his wife and son. A caretaker for soldiers who rest in inexplicable comas befriends a pair of goddesses. A woman is plagued by a sound that only she can hear. In the films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the fantastical comes across as utterly natural. His characters live comfortably in dreamlike states where no line exists between reality and unreality, and hence the everyday can feel strangely miraculous. His oeuvre includes feature films as well as a voluminous catalogue of short films, installations, performance pieces, and, more recently, even virtual reality pieces.

Film at Lincoln Center has arranged a complete career retrospective of the filmmaker, from his debut feature Mysterious Object at Noon to Cemetery of Splendour to the recent Memoria (Hyperallergic’s #1 film of 2021), along with most of his shorts. The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul also includes a program of films that have influenced Apichatpong, including works by Nagisa Ōshima, Chantal Akerman, and Abbas Kiarostami. Of particular note is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1993 masterpiece The Puppetmaster, which is extraordinarily difficult to see and should not be missed. 

Ahead of the series, Hyperallergic sat down with the filmmaker over Google Meet to discuss his work, durational cinema, VR and video games, and more. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Hyperallergic: You create a singular atmosphere in your films. It’s very calming and peaceful.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul: I think it’s very open, how you can approach them. And some people maybe have the opposite effect of [experiencing] nervousness or anxiety, even confusion, and give up.

H: Do you think people might have differing reactions to the conventions of the long takes? Do you think some people get uncomfortable?

AW: Some people, yes. I think it depends. How do you synchronize with another person the way you look at the world? What’s the definition of cinema? I think when you’re confronted with something out of convention, it shows your character, whether you’re willing to join that.

H: Your cinema calls for a lot more engagement just by letting things run long and demanding people’s attention. 

AW: I think it’s about freedom, no? When you see this open frame, you have the freedom to not only look at the characters, but also the trees and the actions. You realize the dynamics of things around in life, and for me [the shots are] not that long. It’s about being present and going along with the film without having so much noise or a voice in your head. When you’re looking at films in general, you’re thinking ahead about what the story is going to be, and you really empathize with the characters. But for me, it’s more about not only the characters, but also empathizing with all humanity, with animals, with trees, with everything.

H: When you plan your films, how much of the story do you shape in the scripting stage versus when you shoot?

AW: Most of the time, the script is based on actual events that I observed or heard about. And because we have always a low budget, the shooting is quite strict in following that order. So during rehearsal with the actors, with the camera person, with everything, that’s the time to change from the script. It’s a lot to do with the actors. In Memoria, there are many times when there’s no dialogue, so when I wrote it, I had one thing in mind, but when Tilda [Swinton] tried things out, it was always changing in different takes. And I also cut many scenes out from the script.

H: A lot of your films (Memoria, Cemetery of Splendour, Uncle Boonmee) are about people suffering from illnesses, or include characters seeing doctors at some point. What informs this concern with illness, sickness, and healing or not healing from it?

AW: It’s a pretext for the story, but it’s more about suffering, the suffering we all share, but also the joy of living. There are no good guys or bad guys; there are just conditions. I think people are striving to find happiness, as simple as that. For me, my films are not complex at all. It’s just all about people try to reach that. And in the end, maybe it’s just left hanging. It’s just an observation of this cycle, of a goal that is never fulfilled — which I think, when you’re aware of that cycle, that’s really liberating.

H: In Memoria, it turns out that the main character’s condition is part of a connection to the past via a supernatural phenomenon. Do you think suffering can be a way for people to connect to something beyond the normal world?

AW: Not beyond, but inside us. It’s something we sometimes overlook, this connection. I always treat film as an illusion. It’s not real. It’s fiction. Tilda’s character is not real. I’m calling attention to the filmmaking itself, that it’s just a tool. It’s just a two-dimensional thing. Sometimes you’re immersed in the sound and everything, but sometimes, when you are confronted with duration, you realize you’re sitting in a theater waiting for something to happen. It’s this push and pull of reality, sometimes being part of it and sometimes not, that’s a key challenge for me, seeing if film can deliver this idea.

H: You’ve worked in other media as well. Do you approach art, VR, installations, or short films the same way?

AW: Yes, I think so. Many of them are also moving images, but the interaction with the audience is different. When you create something while knowing the audience can move around or can go in at any point, it’s different. It’s more abstract and demands a lot more active participation from the audience. When I started working with VR, I thought it would take cinema somewhere else, that it’s going to propel the future of cinema. But in fact, it’s another language. It really showed me how in cinema you create something linear and controlled. We have close-ups, panning, all kinds of camera movements to guide the audience’s emotions. But in VR, you’re very open, there’s no frame. In my work, the audience can walk anywhere without the wire. I think it’s more theatrical, more like a performance, where you design the environment. So all these media are very different. But I always play or experiment with time, and with this awareness of your body in space.

H: I think of VR as the intersection between cinema, theater, and video games. Have you played games at all?

AW: I used to a lot, up until the time of the Nintendo DS. But then suddenly I started getting motion sickness. So I cannot play anymore. It’s a pity. It gives me a headache now just playing something on an iPad, for example. But before that, I played quite a lot of games.

H: When you played games, which ones were your favorites? You said you played Nintendo. Did you play Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda and all that?

AW: Not really. What was that one game that is about original life and evolution …

H: Spore?

AW: Yes! And before that, what did I play? … I was playing as early as the Atari. Even though people hate it, I like E.T., the game.

H: Really?

AW: It’s a terrible game to most people, but for me, I was fascinated by it. Just walking around the neighborhood and doing nothing. He’s digging, trying to find something …

H: Parts for a phone, so he can call home.

AW: Yeah, yeah. Pretty nice.

H: A lot of those early video games were inspired by the creators’ love of exploration. I know you’ve talked about having a fascination with the jungle when you were growing up, in the stories you read. Do you think that’s a similar interest?

AW: Yeah. I was totally into space travel, science fiction, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, the classic generation. Along with ghost stories, it’s another kind of exploration. I think all these books reflect our fear of the unknown. And they ask these questions about what is God? or what is being human?

H: FLC is doing this full retrospective. Did looking back on your career cause any new revelations for you, or any thoughts about what you’ve worked on up till now, or clarify what you want to do in the future?

AW: Yes. With the features and shorts together, I feel that there is already a lot I’ve done. I think if I die today or tomorrow, I’m okay. It’s this sense of … I don’t know the word in English. Resignation? Resignation. And at the same time, it really pushes me to work more outside my comfort zone, and so to travel and [to think] of the process of filmmaking as living. It’s not about the product; it’s about meeting people and finding great problems and solutions.

The World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul runs at Film at Lincoln Center (144 and 165 West 65th Street, Upper West Side, Manhattan) from May 4 to 14.

The 30th annual New York African Film Festival (NYAFF) returns to Lincoln Center on May 10 with a lineup of more than 50 screenings and artist talks. This year’s films range from dramas to animated shorts to personalized documentaries, and many of the works will be making their United States debuts at NYAFF.

The festival will open with Moussa Sène Absa’s Xalé (2022), which was Senegal’s selection for the Oscars’ International Feature category this year. The film concludes a three-part trilogy that Absa created to center the experiences of women. In this final work, a 15-year-old girl seeks liberation from her violent uncle.

The cast and crew are from Senegal, and the movie is shot on a Dakar beach that Absa frequented as a child. (Absa, age 65, previously used French and Canadian production crews for his movies.) The director will hold a question-and-answer session after the screening and a talk about migration on May 13.

The festival’s centerpiece film is Hyperlink (2022), a multi-part project created by Mzonke Maloney, Nolitha Mkulisi, Julie Nxadi, and Evan Wigdorowitz. The work is broken into four short films, each of which tells a different story that highlights the power of social media over human relationships.

Other highlights at this year’s NYAFF include Ota Benga (2022), a six-minute animated short from Chadrack Banikina and Cecilia Zoppelletto that delves into the life of the film’s namesake. In 1904, 21-year-old Benga was kidnapped from the Congo, trafficked, and forced to participate in an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. NYAFF marks the film’s world premiere.

In lighter subject matter, Fatou Cissé explores the life of her famous filmmaker father in A Daughter’s Tribute to Her Father: Souleymane Cissé (2022), and Ottis Ba Mamadou tells the story of an unemployed husband financially dependent on his wife in the comedy-drama Dent Pour Dent (2022).

“The New York African Film Festival was founded to counteract the voice-over where Africans were being spoken for over grim images,” Mahen Bonetti, who founded the New York African Film Festival in 1993, told Hyperallergic. “And to provide a place where the seventh art could become a weapon for us to reclaim our voices, to reappropriate our images and to add layers to the narrative.”

Bonetti now serves as the executive director of the larger African Film Festival, which runs programming year-round across the country. The New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center will run through May 16.

Hyundai Motor Group has announced the Grand Prix recipient of the 5th VH AWARD for new media artists in Asia. A virtual ceremony was held on May 3 for the premiere screening of Subash Thebe Limbu’s winning work, Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous. Art by finalists Zike He, Riar Rizaldi, Su Hui-Yu, and zzyw was also showcased during this event.

Established in 2016, the VH AWARD discovers and supports emerging media artists by sharing their artistic experiments and showcasing their work across global platforms.

Subash Thebe Limbu received this year’s Grand Prix for Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous (2023). In this video work, the Yakthung artist imagines futures where the actions and existence of Indigenous people traverse the space-time continuum. Through a conversation between two Indigenous people from very different timelines, Limbu asks viewers to investigate their own potential roles in searching for possible futures worth striving for while reflecting on the struggle against colonialism and overcoming obstacles.

From October 4 to December 16, 2022, five finalists participated in professional development sessions and regular mentorship meetings in an online residency program hosted by the New York City-based art and technology center Eyebeam. Each artist was granted a sum of $25,000 for the purpose of creating a screen-based audio-visual project. Furthermore, as the recipient of the Grand Prix award, Subash Thebe Limbu will receive an additional $25,000.

Artworks by the 5th VH AWARD finalists and Grand Prix recipient are now being screened at HMG (Yongin, South Korea) and Elektra Virtual Museum (Montreal, Canada). They will also be presented at various art institutions and platforms around the globe, including Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) and Museum MACAN (Jakarta, Indonesia).

To view the art online, visit 5th-vhaward.common.garden.

About Hyundai Motor Group
Hyundai Motor Group is a global enterprise that has created a value chain based on mobility, steel, and construction, as well as logistics, finance, IT, and service. With about 250,000 employees worldwide, our mobility brands include Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis. Armed with creative thinking, cooperative communication, and the will to take on any challenge, we strive to create a better future for all.

Learn more about Hyundai Motor Group at hyundaimotorgroup.com.

About Eyebeam
Eyebeam Residency supports those creating work that engages technology and society through art. For the 5th VH AWARD, Eyebeam supported the five finalists through an online residency program from October 4 to December 16, 2022. Visit eyebeam.org to learn more about the organization.

Contact
VH AWARD Executive Office: vhaward.official@gmail.com

Massachusetts College of Art and Design is pleased to present MFA Thesis 2023, showcasing the work of 12 Master of Fine Arts candidates in the final semester of their graduate programs in 2D/3D Fine Arts, Photography, and Film/Video. The exhibition is on view in two parts at the MassArt x SoWa gallery through June 4, with a student-curated on-campus component, My Feelings These Days, on view at the college’s Doran Graduate Gallery through June 2.

Featured 2023 MFA Thesis artists include Yukai Chen, Hadis Karami, Catherine LeComte, Kierra LoRayne, Lucie March, Dara Morgenstern, Yuxiao Mu, Yana Nosenko, Ashley Pelletier, Katalina Simon, Piyu Somani, and Jialin (Tiffany) Wang. Hailing from multiple countries, this year’s MFA Thesis artists mine personal histories and question norms. Their approaches to subject, methods of making, and unique combination of personal, political, and historical narrative complicate our assumptions, leaving us unpacking the work and pulling together tender threads.

The main two-part exhibition, curated by MassArt Art Museum Executive Director Lisa Tung, takes place at MassArt x SoWa. Now entering its third year, this satellite graduate gallery is situated in Boston’s SoWa arts district. In addition to presenting the thesis work of the college’s Master of Fine Arts students, MassArt x SoWa features premier work from MassArt’s graduate design programs, as well as curatorial projects, alumni exhibitions, student and faculty curated shows, and collaborative exhibitions with community partners.

The 12 graduating MFA candidates present public artist talks on Friday, May 26, on campus and via Zoom at 1:30pm (ET). The talks are free and open to the public, and will be followed by an on-campus gallery reception and theatrical screening of time-based works. Register here.

Now in its 150th year, MassArt has built a legacy of leadership as the first freestanding public college of art and design in the country, and the nation’s first art school to grant a degree. MassArt offers a comprehensive range of graduate and undergraduate degrees in art, design, and art education, taught by world-class faculty.

For more information about MFA Thesis 2023, visit massart.edu.

Did you know that the German nature painter Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), who was an insect fanatic, laid the foundations of modern zoology with fantastic illustrations of more than 200 insect species? Have you heard of the English paper collagist Mary Delany (1700–1788), postwar Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako (b. 1947), and Venezuelan Minimalist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912–1994)?

After reading Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023, US edition), several educators may aspire to redesign their art history surveys and syllabi — and perhaps trade some Picassos or Pollocks for Merians and Gegos.

The book is a well-researched, readable, and accessible study that presents hard truths. I flinched when I read that the highly sought-after Swiss Neoclassical painter Angelica Kauffman was denied access to training and opportunities in 18th-century London. Moreover, rather than being painted as a figure, her presence was reduced to a mere painted sculptural bust, displayed in a corner, in the official portrait of painters of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Bearing in mind that male artists in the West have been painting nude women since antiquity and sculpting them since prehistory, Hessel provides other damning facts. For instance, it took the Academy a century to admit another female painter after Kauffmann. And another 30 years passed before women were granted the right to paint nude figures from live models. This reflects a few of the biases against women artists based on sex by then-prominent art institutions.

In her introduction, Hessel notes, among her motivations to pursue this line of research, the limited number of women artists in both leading art historical literature and contemporary exhibitions. The book introduces the practices of many lesser-known yet prolific artists active between 1500 and 2020 with whom readers may be unfamiliar, including Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1924–2015), American artist Judith Scott (1943–2005), and the African-American, community-based Gee’s Bend Quilters. The global roster of artists ranges in geography from Brazil to Japan and beyond, and in genre from painting and sculpture to performance to traditional craft mediums such as textiles, fiber, and ceramics.

Hessel also touches on issues of representation explored by contemporary artists via painted portraits and photography. For instance, multiple complex notions of identity that encompass race and sexuality are channeled in the works of South African nonbinary artist Zanele Muholi (b. 1972). Addressing the current discussions around these themes Hessel writes, “Overlooked artists are not a trend. Women artists are not a trend. Queer artists are not a trend. Artists of coulor are not a trend.” Thus, readers are encouraged to be wary of social media-fueled fads that oversimplify artworks by these artists, reducing their importance in art historical literature.  

The Story of Art Without Men is a measured, even study, albeit one that occasionally presents the artist as “heroic,” while lacking in in-depth analysis (this could offer an opportunity for future research). It may be best to consider the volume as an introductory survey of several women artists who have not yet been appreciably researched or entered the art canon. 

We can revise the ways in which art history is recorded, but does this forge a path for ubiquitous representation? Global institutions continue to exhibit and collect far fewer works by female artists than by their male counterparts. The art market puts less monetary value on works created by women. However, revised literature that becomes the core of updated educational programs or social media debates is not enough. A cultural, social, and economic shift in the way we value art by women must be our goal. Katy Hessel has aimed to achieve this by updating readers’ impressions of women artists, positively. Perhaps, the next book will hint at this one’s success by simply being a story of art.

The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel (2023) is published by W. W. Norton & Company and is available online and in bookstores.

I’m not a fashion girlie by any means and I’ve never tuned in live for the Met Gala’s red carpet, but I always look forward to the memes and tea the next day. The annual event, held the first Monday in May, is a fundraiser for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Last year’s bash brought in over $17M; this year’s total has not been released yet.)

Every edition has a theme, and this year’s was “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” in anticipation of the Costume Institute’s upcoming namesake exhibition examining the work of the late fashion designer and creative director of Fendi and Chanel, who died in 2019. Lagerfeld is credited with reviving Chanel’s reputation and pushing the envelope; however, he has also been criticized over the years for his notoriously bigoted attitudes toward migrants, plus-sized people, and many other subgroups.

Unfortunately, none of this was mitigated by the celebrity red-carpet rollout, a highly anticipated part of the night that typically yields a generous bounty of memes the next day. This year’s gala was stoppered by one of the driest themes that left almost no room for interpretation, with many resorting to repetitive black and white tweed work, pearls and chains, and unimaginative dress cutouts.

Nevertheless, we persisted — so here is a round-up of Met Gala memes that elicited a stronger-than-usual exhale from my nose.

The highlight of the entire evening that brought some much-needed NYC realness to the most important night of the year in fashion was Variety’s live coverage of the cockroach scurrying up the striped carpet. Photographer Kevin Mazur snapped some good detail shots of the roach gone stag prior to its death that evening, and painter Travis Chapman immortalized the unexpected guest striking a red-carpet pose. Talk about committing to the theme!

Naturally, the Internet capitalized on this as one of the few memorable and meme-able moments of the evening and treated the now-deceased icon, perhaps an ambassador for La Roach-Posay, of the evening with the utmost respect from fan art to funeral cards.

Up next, we watched, we assumed, and we … lost? For as long as I can remember, the men who attend the Met Gala have been dragged up and down the aisle by their hair for pulling up to the scene in unremarkable black suits. Every year, the same Spiderman meme gets pulled off the shelf and dusted off for its rounds during and after the Met Gala. See below:

However, this year they came correct and we weren’t ashamed to admit it! Honestly, it was the most effort I’ve ever seen:

Sadly, no one took the above advice … Slay detected, nonetheless. But enough with that, I know all of you are here for the roasts. So without further ado:

Listen, I’ll never complain about seeing Janelle Monáe and I’m certainly a witness of fitness, but the resemblance is uncanny.

Olivia Wilde unintentionally raised awareness for those of us with a heavier flows — no choice but to stan! 😍 

Except she wasn’t the only one …

Yikes: obligatory Rihanna pregnancy meme that’s on brand.

Some annual Pete Davidson slander with this photo that was truly on nobody’s 2023 predictions bingo card …

Catfight on the red carpet? I know, that was low-hanging fruit … But look at what I’m working with here!

Perhaps the sentiment that most resonates across the Internet, however — even more than the roach memes — is that we should all book-end this boring evening. Hopefully, I’ll have some more material for you next year.

Editor’s Note: The following story contains material related to sexual assault. If you or someone you know is struggling, call 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit online.rainn.org to reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline.

In September 2022, 31-year-old artist Mirela Cabral along with two other women filed a complaint against the Brazilian artist Rubens Espirito Santo, 53, who created the Conglomerado Atelier do Centro (CAC) over 20 years ago. What started as an informal school ostensibly founded to offer teaching and advising for young artists is now being described by some of its “alumni” as a cult.

The so-called art school functioned right in the city center of São Paulo, Brazil, enrolling dozens of students until it was forced to shut its doors following accusations aired on the podcast O Ateliê, presented this January by journalists Chico Felitti and Beatriz Trevisan. In theory, anyone could attend the Atelier, but it was mostly frequented by young people of the upper class. They were charmed by the middle-aged man who convinced them that he was an intellectual and the “Marcel Duchamp of current times,” as former students have said he described himself. They agreed to call their teacher “master” and have him refer to them as “disciples.” They wore overall uniforms labeled with working titles and they succumbed to bizarre exercises for artistic development. But was it really all in the name of art?

Rubens Espirito Santo is currently being investigated for false imprisonment and “violação sexual mediante fraude,” translated in English as “sexual assault by deception.” Chief of Police Cristiane Rocha explained on the Brazilian TV network Record that the latter allegation stems from “Rubens using students as an instrument for sexual acts by leading them to believe it was in an artistic context.”

Espirito Santo has been summoned by Brazilian police to give a statement in court four times, but his lawyers have said that he wasn’t able to attend because of sickness. A psychiatric hospital was mentioned in their justification. Two letters were published on Atelier do Centro’s digital channels in response to the accusations made in Felitti and Trevisan’s podcast. In the most recent one, posted on January 5, Rubens Espirito Santo wrote in part: “The material produced by him [Chico Felitti] includes reports from former students who accuse me of physical and psychological aggressions, which I will address throughout this text. To these students, I sincerely apologize for any excesses, though consensual, that have occurred in our relationship, which was largely marked by affection, complicity, mutual learning, and long periods of coexistence.”

The statement continues:

“At Atelier do Centro, we actually adopted a very rigorous method. We worked with small groups of artists, architects, filmmakers, and other creative professionals who are interested in radical experiences in the field of the arts. In this work context, it is natural and deliberate that conflicts and situations of confrontation arise, as provocative elements. The intense and radical coexistence that we propose can result in excesses, which I recognize may have taken place in relationships with former students, to whom I apologize once again if they felt negatively affected. I respect the criticism and pain of each one of them.”

Hyperallergic attempted to reach Espirito Santo several times for this article. The Atelier do Centro responded to our multiple email inquiries with messages that were blank except for the artist’s name. Messages sent to Espirito Santo’s WhatsApp also went unanswered.

“Psychological Kidnapping”

People went to Atelier do Centro looking for an art school, but what they found was something different. It was a place where conversations about very intimate aspects of the lives of students happened regularly. In a recording viewed by Hyperallergic, a student who was supposed to be teaching others about the so-called “RES Method” spent more than an hour making eight people discuss one young woman’s lack of confidence as she cried.

Many of the former students claim to have joined the group in a moment of vulnerability. One of them, who asked to be kept anonymous for fear of retaliation and exposure, described Rubens Espirito Santo’s conduct around students in an interview with Hyperallergic.

“He mapped out your sorrows and created an emotional bond that made you think your healing depended on him,” they said. “After that, you could no longer break that bond. He merged into you and took all your autonomy.” That same student spent years in the Atelier do Centro and claims to have been sexually assaulted, humiliated, and beaten up, alleging that Espirito Santo used his students to satisfy his sexual desires.

The Spanish psychologist Margarita Barranco, interviewed by Record, explained what she perceived as a mechanism of psychological manipulation: “There are people in this kind of group who are very intelligent, but it’s their emotional part that fails,” Barranco explained. “That makes them vulnerable. Their hearts make them vulnerable. And what the manipulator does is take advantage of that situation to conquer them and have them integrate the group.” A former student who spoke to Record used the term “psychological kidnapping” to describe their personal experience at the Atelier. Defined by the American Psychological Association Dictionary as “depriving a person of the free functioning of his or her personality,” the term is sometimes used to describe “the psychological mind control attributed to cults.”

Hyperallergic obtained access to a revealing diagram constructed by students under Espirito Santo’s instruction during a class at the Atelier in 2014. Titled “Organizational Chart of the RES Method: Towards a New Stochastic Pedagogy,” the diagram is a circle divided into named parts. The word discípulo (“disciple”) in bright green directs to the moss-green words estupro (“rape”), violência (“violence”), atravessamento (“crossing”), and milagre (“miracle”). 

“He promoted the idea that it was necessary to surpass boundaries and suspend rules to reach a new level of consciousness,” the ex-student explained, a dynamic that he said made young artists believe it was acceptable to be kicked, insulted, or sexually assaulted. If someone arrived late, they could be punished by being forced to lay naked on the floor while someone threw a bucket of water on them, the same former student alleged. Espirito Santo allegedly kept a Nazi medal in his apartment, which was accessed frequently by students; swastikas also appeared in graphics produced by the Atelier.

Dudu Farah, a former student and a witness to the legal claim, narrated one of his experiences on the podcast O Ateliê. In the middle of lunch with the group, Espirito Santo allegedly asked Farah if he believed in the school rules. After an affirmative answer, Farah claims Espirito Santo demanded that a female disciple remove her pants and underwear and asked Dudu to perform oral sex on her. He allegedly obeyed.

“That was the worst of the distressing experiences I went through there,” Farah told Hyperallergic. “In my case, the abuse was more psychological than physical, although he did slap me on some occasions.” Another former student who spoke to Hyperallergic corroborated Farah’s account.

Mirela Cabral, the artist who filed the lawsuit, spent almost three years in the “school.” She claimed in the podcast O Ateliê that in the first few weeks, she was insulted and had her hair pulled until she fell to the floor while a group of students watching her stayed still. She also said the violence escalated with time. Even though former students stated that Rubens Espirito Santo treated the richer students better than the poorer ones, and Cabral was part of the wealthiest group, witnesses interviewed for the podcast said she received the worst treatment possible. She stated that he would grab her genitals and slap her thighs. Cabral also said that Rubens Espirito Santo once asked her, in front of a group of students, whom she loved more, him or her boyfriend. “I answered that it was him, coerced,” she told Hyperallergic.

Financial Exploitation

Another important aspect of Atelier do Centro involved money. Once admitted, students would have their income and expenses analyzed by Rubens Espirito Santo so he could decide how much they should pay him. They would also be asked to work, performing tasks such as cleaning, cooking, managing the Atelier’s finances, and assisting Espirito Santo in a range of tasks, such as taking him to the doctor. Was the master literally being paid to have employees? “Look at the size of this power dynamic. He was a father figure, a teacher, a master and a boss,” a former student told Hyperallergic. 

Espirito Santo also came up with the idea of an “Art Collection Fund.” Students were strongly recommended to pay more than the monthly fee, which mostly varied from R$500 to R$1,500 (~$100 to ~$300), to start collecting his work. This meant that many gave an extra amount as a payment in installments to afford to buy artwork. One of the students claimed on her website, which is now offline, that she made a lifelong collecting pact with the artist in 2011. 

The list of students who have RES collections is shown in the book Technical-Virtual Learning Platform RES = Pedagogy + Visual Art + Basic Survival Concepts in a Dystopian and Insolvent Reality in Latin America, self-published by a student in September 2021. That same book also includes a list of 16 art world figures outside the “school” who own Espirito Santo’s work, including top collectors Andréa and José Olympio Pereira; journalist Evelyn Ioschpe; art critic Rodrigo Naves; Justo Werlang, the first president of the Mercosur Biennial; and founder of the SP Arte fair Fernanda Feitosa. 

The Art World’s Silence

Mirela Cabral, the ex-student who spoke out about her experience at the Atelier do Centro, told Hyperallergic that she is “paying the price” for going public with her allegations.

“I didn’t want the whole story to be about me, but I ended up being the underlying theme because I was the only one who accepted being exposed,” Cabral said. “Rubens [Espirito Santo] said that they don’t work in the shadows, but they do. There is a pact inside the group and everybody was coerced not to say what happened in there. Until someone broke the silence, they didn’t know what really went on.”

Looking through comments on social media channels, however, it is rare to find statements about Espirito Santo by Brazilian cultural figures. The podcast has reached 4 million people, but the art world is silent. Why would this be the case? Is it because they believed Rubens Espirito Santo when he said in a recorded interview that the Atelier had nothing to do with art, therefore vindicating the art world of any responsibility? Is it because they don’t care? Or is it because they agree with Brazilian art critic Fabio Cypriano, who said Espirito Santo has no relevance in the circuit and it was the naivety and fragility of students that allowed the artist to maintain Atelier do Centro for more than 20 years?

But Espirito Santo and even Atelier do Centro did have recognition in the art world. Besides being represented in important private collections, he had exhibitions in public and private art institutions and galleries in São Paulo. “I don’t believe they were unconnected to the art system,” Brazilian curator Ana Carolina Ralston said in an interview with Hyperallergic. “They were integrated in it, so much so that there was a gallery that represented Atelier do Centro.” Ralston was one of the artistic directors of that gallery, Emma Thomas in São Paulo, which held an exhibition of works by members of the group in 2019 and presented some of them at the SP-Arte Foto fair. The since-shuttered gallery was owned by artist Marcos Amaro, who took classes with Espirito Santo years earlier. (Amaro did not respond to our request for comment.)

Ralston would have been one of the curators of the exhibition Méthodo at the Atelier do Centro, but after visiting the studio, she refused the job. “It was clear that there was abuse there, but we didn’t know the extent of the violence,” she said.

Some students interviewed by Hyperallergic cited another factor that contributed to them staying at the Atelier do Centro: the fact that the father of one of Espirito Santo’s students was José Olympio, CEO of J. Safra Bank in Brazil.

“I was captured by this,” said a former member of the group who asked not to be identified. “Rubens would say: ‘I don’t know if you are aware of this, but her father is the biggest art collector from Latin America, he is São Paulo Biennial Foundation’s president.'” Olympio’s daughter, Anna Israel, is the same artist who has a lifelong collecting pact with Espirito Santo and was in charge of teaching students about his method until the school shut down this year. José Olympio and Anna Israel did not respond to Hyperallergic’s requests for comments.

“I’m terribly involved with the art system because I have a student, the one who has been here the longest, that is the daughter of José Olympio,” Espirito Santo said in a voice recording of his interview with Chico Felitti and Beatriz Trevisan, shared by them with Hyperallergic. When the two journalists sent a reporter undercover as a potential student to CAC in August of 2022, Rubens Espirito Santo also made sure to mention this.

In investigating this story, Hyperallergic spoke to university professors, curators, gallerists, and artists from São Paulo’s art scene. Those conversations made it clear that most people knew who Rubens Espirito Santo is, but they might not have known the extent of the violence that went on in Atelier do Centro, as Ralston pointed out. Now that formal allegations have been made by three women, supported by five witnesses in the lawsuit and journalistic investigations that conducted over 40 interviews, can the art world stay silent? Should it?

On April 13, 2019, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in Iowa was set to open a temporary exhibition titled Written in Stone: The Rosetta Stone Exhibit. Traveling from the Origins Museum Institute in El Paso, Texas, the show was slated to run at the Presidential Library through October, featuring an “exact replica” made from a cast of the original Rosetta Stone alongside other rare and authentic objects from the ancient “Near East.” The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported that the exhibition was to feature a “timeline of authentic artifacts” including “some of the oldest idols and sacred representations of deities ever found.” Previewing the exhibition on April 8, however, I noticed that something was off. The imagery carved onto the stamp and cylinder seals was strange, the dates questionable, sizes incongruent, but most notably, all the seals on display seemed to be carved by the same hand despite allegedly being created in different periods. 

Later that night, I found out that the “authentic artifacts” I had seen that afternoon in glass display cases were also available for purchase online at Sadigh Gallery in New York City. Together with University of Iowa Art History Associate Professor Björn Anderson, we concluded that most (if not all) the objects included in the exhibition were neither rare nor authentic, but instead modern-day forgeries. The exhibition was canceled three days before its opening.

The works were on loan from the Origins Museum whose collector and founder, Marty Martin, purchased them from Sadigh Gallery. As Martin describes in a recent podcast, he found Sadigh online and while scrolling through the many categories of objects for sale, he (unsurprisingly) discovered “just what [he] was looking for.” Martin purchased over 100 pieces that were assured “authentic”; each came with a certificate of authenticity. Sadigh provided false documentation that duped Martin. The Sadigh Gallery “Certificate of Authenticity” is almost laughable in its quality, but perhaps its brazen simplicity should prompt us to ask what makes for a satisfactory provenance.

Sadigh Gallery was raided by police in 2021. Investigators discovered a “functional fabrication studio” behind the storefront, complete with a haphazard assembly line that transformed modern “replicas into ‘ancient’ artifacts.” When seen individually, a Sadigh fake might be able to perform its trick, but with so many together as they were at the Hoover, they gave themselves away. To my eye, the presence of a visible hand at work in the carving of all the seals from different periods indicated a shared workshop origin; a modern, not ancient one.

The Hoover incident exists in a larger, problematic institutional framework that does not adequately value provenance, a history of ownership, or archaeological origin. 

Last month, March 2023, investigations revealed the dubious origins of over 1,000 objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, which attests to the fact that the issue is widespread. These reports demonstrate the close connection between conflict zones, looting, and contemporary collecting practices and standards. As Tess Davis, executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, asked: “If The Met is letting all of these things fall through the cracks, what hope do we have for the rest of the art market?”

Lack of provenance is troubling in the case of antiquities from the Middle East because of the rampant looting that occurred during and after the US occupation of Iraq, which led directly to increased demand for these objects, as has long been denounced by artists, activists, and experts. As art historian Zainab Bahrani and Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz have argued, the West fetishizes the archaeological heritage of the East while showing utter disregard for the people living in these regions today. In a 2021 lecture, Rakowitz discusses the aims of his ongoing project, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist. Recreating objects looted, excavated, and displaced, these “reappearances” push viewers to see the links between people, places, and objects in a more meaningful manner. His work highlights the “voracious” appetite the Western art market has for Middle Eastern antiquities. An open secret, it is complicit in looting, implicating associated collectors and cultural institutions in the same unethical act. And the vast disconnect between the exhibition space and the world outside of it enables and encourages that. 

The Hoover was enthusiastic about its exhibition and was eager to celebrate knowledge about the past by creating a special experience for museum visitors. But an exhibition unmoored from the sources and stories of these objects erases questions that might otherwise arise: What construction of the past is being celebrated? What kind of history is written when objects missing recorded archaeological find-spots are viewed in this ungrounded manner? How can any exhibition label provide enough context for ancient objects whose origins have either been obfuscated or gone uninvestigated? 

When objects enter a museum, there is an unspoken assumption that someone has done due diligence to ensure that an object has been obtained legally and ethically. But the paperwork, where it exists, can be easily falsified. Recent returns of ancient, authentic objects looted (either in the wake of the US-led invasion of Iraq or the Gulf War) at Emory University, Cornell University, the Museum of the Bible, and amongst private collectors, all show that the issue is flagrant, ongoing, and unresolved — that a larger shift in the market and collecting practices is necessary. While some suggest that such a change is already in motion, these arguments rely too heavily on an all-too-often fictive separation between legitimate and illegitimate market spaces. For example, in the latest case at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, a sphinx furniture fitting was purchased by the university’s Carlos Museum based upon false documentation stating that it entered the US in 1969. Emory was duped by “what appeared to be legitimate provenance documentation.” As one FBI agent described, “We realize there was no ill intent on behalf of Emory University.” 

Fakes fill in when there is an established market demand for authentic antiquities because supply is limited. While the object in Emory’s collection was stolen during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the lack of provenance closes the gap between an object looted and an object forged. Both create a market without transparency. In some cases, fakes are sold at a more affordable price, and the lack of meaningful paperwork can be overlooked by a zealous collector’s desire to have an encounter with the ancient world, however generalized and imaginative such a world might be. This was certainly the case for the fake objects on display at the Hoover. The fact that the Hoover is one of 15 presidential libraries run by the United States Federal Government and no one questioned their right to display the unprovenanced history of the Middle East is problematic, especially since at the time of the exhibition there were US troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq (where some 2,500 troops remain today). Written in Stone came with explanatory museum labels for display and a catalogue, which was only intended for use by museum staff. Accompanied by these contrived materials, the exhibition performed a nonchalant display of colonial power. The museum relied upon a disconnect that distances the audience from conflicts abroad. I was in my first year of Ph.D. coursework at the University of Iowa when I spotted fakes at the Hoover. I felt insecure, and although I was right, the authority of the museum display case nevertheless held sway over me. But, I was able to connect the objects to the Sadigh Gallery after only a few minutes of searching online.

It is important to remember that every time we engage in the act of reconstructing the past, no matter how big or small the effort, we bear our cultural baggage — political, historical, and ethical. These objects take on new narratives when they are presented without provenance, eliding the critical distance between the real and fake, subject and object, past and present, history and projection.

For the exhibition Message from Our Planet: Digital Art from the Thoma Collection at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, curator Jason Foumberg brought together 19 international artists who use digital media in their work. The exhibition takes inspiration from a time capsule included in Voyager 1, the space probe launched by NASA in 1977, containing a record of human civilization.

Tabita Rezaire’s video work, “Sorry for Real,” (2015) follows a phone call to outer space from the Western world, apologizing for crimes against Africans and Afro-descendants. As a cell phone glows, the “Speak & Spell” sounding voice apologizes for slavery, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and for claiming to have discovered the g-spot. The unseen recipient of the phone call mocks the apologizer through a chat exchange with another friend. They quote Tupac and reject the apology while a phone floats toward an autonomous existence in outer space.

In the video “Time Traveler ™” (2007-14) by Mohawk artist Skawennati, a protagonist from the future travels to significant moments in Indigenous history like the US-Dakota War and the Occupation of Alcatraz. Skawennati created the work as a machinima (machine cinema) using the 3D virtual world platform, Second Life. 

Some works in the exhibition, including Robert Wilson’s “Lady Gaga: Mademoiselle Caroline Riviere” (2013) use 21st-century technologies to reinterpret art history. In the video work with sound, the pop star is dressed as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s portrait of the same title, sans Gaga, (1805). In Wilson’s version, birds pass behind the subject, her eyelashes flutter, and a haunting score by Michael Galasso plays quietly. Already an iconic figure herself, Gaga’s presence transfixes the viewer in the same way as the work’s original subject.

Paul Pfeiffer’s silent lopped video depicts the last minutes of heavyweight boxer Bermane Stiverne losing his world title in “Caryatid (Stiverne)” (2018). The work is captivating in the way it erases the violence of the action. The artist digitally omitted Steiverne’s opponent, leaving only an excoriating view of the boxer’s face rippling with punches. By taking away the sounds of the ring and the victor himself, Pfeiffer critiques the way that hypermasculinity is glorified in the sport of boxing, and in our culture more broadly. Deleting the victor takes away his glory. 

“White Tower,” (2007) by Jenny Holzer, punctuates the exhibition nicely. Hyperbolic phrases scroll up with flashing lights. “Don’t control or manipulate,” Holzer writes. “Make amends. It all has to burn. It’s going to blaze.” The frantic, post-apocalyptic tone of the messages places the work in the aftermath of late-stage capitalism, represented by the towered structure of the tower where the words scroll continuously. A message for the end of the world indeed.  

As a whole, the artists in Message from Our Planet use various technological tools to shake the viewer awake. We aren’t going in the right direction, many of them seem to be saying. Wake up and change the world before the planet isn’t here anymore. 

Message from Our Planet: Digital Art from the Thoma Collection is on view through May 14 at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Amidst art galleries and bustling brunch spots near the Spring Street station in Manhattan’s trendy Nolita neighborhood, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) is showcasing the bloated budget of the New York Police Department (NYPD) — $11 billion per year, or $29 million per day.

It’s the second time the advocacy organization has presented an exhibition in its pop-up Museum of Broken Windows; the first was in 2018. The current show, titled Twenty-Nine Million Dreams, runs through May 6.

The museum name references the “broken windows theory,” a policing strategy developed in the 1970s. The concept hinges on the idea that petty crime will lead to larger crimes; that if people in a neighborhood observe minor criminal acts happening around them — drug use or graffiti, for example — citizens will perceive their community as uncared for and this will lead to greater criminal activity. Although the concept remains unproven, it has been applied to neighborhoods and cities with disastrous results (Mayor Rudy Giuliani implemented it in New York in the early 1990s). When the “broken windows theory” is put into practice, police departments do not focus on stopping major criminal acts and instead attack individuals on the street-level, persecuting people including drug users, street artists, and sex workers.

The theory creates policing methods that persecute poor communities and provides a pseudo-scientific framework for race-based policing.

“When we were designing this show, we knew we were looking for artwork that spoke to the heaviness and the seriousness — the weight — of excessive policing,” Daveen Trentman, who co-curated the exhibition alongside Terrick Gutierrez, said in an interview with Hyperallergic. “But also artwork that really uplifts the beauty of people and of community and that showcases an affirmative vision of a world that doesn’t rely on the police to fix all of our problems.”

The ground floor of Twenty-Nine Million Dreams uses text, infographics, old newspaper articles, and artwork to communicate the issue with extreme clarity.

City politics often emerge into the public consciousness as seemingly never-ending, tedious, and confusing, but the show explains the urgency of these conversations. Currently, the City Council and Mayor’s Office are in negotiations over the municipal budget, which allocates funding for the NYPD. Funding for libraries and other services is under threat, and an infographic on the stairs shows the distribution of city money in relation to the police budget, which continues to grow.

Trentman said the floor of the exhibition is intended to display the seriousness and human consequence of the policies being discussed.

“As we’re talking about things such as how much we’re spending and what kind of policies we need, we really want people to be reminded that there are severe, sometimes deadly consequences to those things,” Trentman said.

Images of Breonna Taylor and other people killed by police are scattered throughout this first floor. A printed text in the back of the space explains the severity of the crisis at Rikers Island — 17 people died there last year, the highest recorded number in its 90-year history. Artist Jesse Krimes’s 20-by-34-foot “Rikers Quilt” (2020) quite literally reveals the horrors inside the massive jail.

Krimes’s work comprises 3,650 individual squares to represent every day of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2017 promise to close the prison in 10 years. Calendar dates are printed on top. The colorful work, made with prison-issued bed sheets, stretches from the ceiling of the vast gallery space to the floor.

“Jesse’s theory of beauty is that as humans, we’re drawn in to vibrant colors and visually pleasing things to the eye,” said Trentman. Krimes was formerly incarcerated at Rikers.

“But as you get drawn in, he created a second layer,” Trentman continued. The outer part is intended to be slashed open, although only a couple squares have been so far. Documented photographs of abuse at Rikers lie beneath the quilt’s bright facade.

A work created by co-curator Gutierrez depicts an NYPD floodlight. Mayor Bill de Blasio sent hundreds of these machines to public housing projects in a campaign to stop nighttime crime. They still illuminate those spaces. (The initiative was unbelievably named “Omnipresence.”)

“These shine into the homes of families and elderly people and are really harmful,” Trentman said. Guitierrez replaced the floodlight’s serial number with its Kelvin temperature. Anything over 3,000 is considered harmful to the human eye, but the floodlight clocks in at almost 4,000.

Upstairs, Trentman and Gutierrez have created a space “designed to be an almost visceral, tonal shift,” according to Trentman. Natural light illuminates a space filled with greenery and plants. The artworks on its walls celebrate individuals and communities. Those works include a 2018 series of photographs taken by artist Andre Wagner of people in Bushwick and images by Steven Eloiseau and Eva Woolridge that depict a father and son and the hand of Woolridge’s mother.

Just as showcased in the works a floor below, the art upstairs also exhibits active resistance. A two-part series by Susan Chen, for example, celebrates Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood and documents collective organizing in response to the the proposed Chinatown mega-jail. A three-part series of photographs by Gabriel Chiu showcases a picket line in Chinatown while also exploring concepts of poverty and gentrification.

“All of the work on the second floor showcases the beauty of people or communities,” Trentman said. “And really shows what a world could look like if we weren’t so reliant on the police.”

In 1981, Ronald Reagan deadpanned to a convention of carpenters, “Status quo, you know, is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in.’” Technically, status quo means “state in which,” but the joke is resonant because of the toxic stagnancy of 2022 and 2023, when these Pratt MFA students were developing their work. It may seem bizarre to open a review of Pratt’s MFA Fine Arts thesis show, Part 2, with a bad joke by a man who declared ketchup a vegetable, refused to say AIDS, and widened the gap between rich and poor. But this show is all about depicting the mess we’re in as the toxic capitalist, racist, misogynistic, transphobic status quo drags on in the United States and world is caught in such a precarious and discombobulated place. Why aren’t we changing it?

Like many in the show, Niousha Kiarashi is trying to work through the post-pandemic challenges and PTSD that formed the backdrop of the 2022–23 incubation period. As the artist explained to Hyperallegic, “My work is all about invasion, and the messiness of emotions, and how they become part of us at the moment when we start experiencing them, and they invade us … in my work I want to visualize the complexity of emotion as creatures … like species, the way they grow spikes … and different patterns influenced by nature.”

Kiarashi transformed a closet into an exhibition niche, layering mulch on the floor and enhancing the atmosphere with an eerie soundtrack. A tiny video is visible in the mouth of an unidentifiable ceramic creature with many tentacles. The video reveals another monster within the larger monster, while the tentacles are a metaphor for the complexity of dealing with our feelings, particularly at this time. As the artist stated, “it was not easy to make art in 2023.”

Throughout the course of the show, Cameron Burgoyne has been “activating” the space containing his artworks. Or, rather, wrecking his own works. What viewers are left with is the chaos of dust, paint splatters, and materials strewn about the space. 

In a separate room, Michelle Frick presents several “creature” sculptures. An undulating soundtrack of swishing water envelops the space. Something is growing inside each creature — for instance, salamander embryos made out of cast silicone are visible within “Protected” (2022). In an exhibition with so many metaphors for the messes our planet is in, it’s good to be reminded that gestation is also a messy process. The artist addresses climate change through salamanders, a sensitive indicator species. Yet, sadly, global polluters are getting in the way of gestating the next generation of the animals.

Although “place” was presented as the show’s umbrella theme, that curatorial framing came off as a bit vague. Instead, the mess jumped out as the recurring motif. The particular place to which Pratt MFA artists kept leading visitors was not a pristine, organized, or tranquil one. It was a messy one — rife with paradoxes and contradictions. Audre Lorde once remarked that, “The tensions created inside me by the contradictions is another source of energy and learning. I have always known I learn my most lasting lessons about difference by closely attending the ways in which the differences inside me lie down together.” 

In other words, acknowledging the mess and its contradictions is a crucial step not only in disrupting our own stagnant inner status quos, but also in challenging those of others. We break the status quo when the wealthy White upper class starts to recognize their own inner messes and the festering contradictions between their genuine desire to do good and their denial about the harms they inflict. Pratt’s MFA students drew viewers in with their unique visual metaphors for messy places.   

Making Place: Politics and the Body, Part 2 of Pratt’s Fine Arts MFA thesis exhibition continues at the Pfizer Building (630 Flushing Avenue, 7th floor, South Williamsburg, Brooklyn) through May 5. The exhibition was curated by Sofia Shaula Reeser-del Rio.

BERLIN — Gallery Weekend Berlin 2023 came and went fringed with various joys. There is, of course, a glittering official success story: The 19th edition of the initiative was the biggest ever, with 55 galleries (big, small, institutional) from across the city showing more than 80 artists, including both celebrities and veterans. All this basking in the sweet glow of corporate sponsorship (Gucci, BMW) promising lavish dinners and thumping techno parties.

Gallery Weekend is not a Wagnerian endurance test. Since it’s impossible to see everything, especially for its fretful participants, it’s more like an art-world version of Wacky Races: glorious prepared chaos. There’s no grand curatorial theme dictated to galleries from above. This is surely an act of generosity, allowing different exhibitions to contradict each other, inviting excited chatter among visitors. Curators, collectors, and critics all hop froggishly in and out of sleek-interiored shuttle buses, gossiping deliriously at brunches, huddled in smoking areas; ordinary folk listen politely to gallerists’ spiels, mostly in smiling silence, with the bravest asking insightful questions mercifully free of names of other artists they’ve heard of, shows they’ve seen, or technical artspeak; the appallingly stylish local art crowd sweep shimmering and moody through the fresh damp streets. 

One thematic standout, however, were exhibitions motivated by political ideas. Kapwani Kiwanga’s 15-piece wall work series Sisal (2023) at Tanja Wagner consists of light sisal drapes, interrogating the material’s colonial history. In Rhea Dillon’s We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils at Sweetwater, ten sculptures embody passages from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). The six versions of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Medical Examination (1894) that appear in self-described “political dominatrix” Reba Maybury’s [erp] From Paris with Love at Efremidis Gallery are produced by her “submissives.” Each of them has to donate to charities of her choosing and fill out an extensive application form before they serve her, and the works, reflecting on the emotional toll of the moral terrorism waged on sex workers by state-backed medical authorities, are named after their pseudonym, occupation, age, and where they are based. Meanwhile, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s Heart Core at Barbara Weiss reflects on the gendered history of the human heart as an example of devotional symbolism, redeploying the forms of triptych altarpieces and 15th-century Flemish painting.

There was also a thematic and often material scale to some of the exhibitions that reflects the magnitude of Gallery Weekend as a whole. These include shows by veteran artists who may well be known outside the art world, like Hito Steyerl and Cao Fei, as well as less obvious names like Hiwa K and Monia Ben Hamouda. The latter’s exhibition About Telepathy and Other Violences at ChertLüdde consists primarily of works from the artist’s Aniconism as Figurative Urgency series (2021–ongoing) of twisting steel sculptures influenced by Arabic calligraphy, with brown, black, and white dusty scatterings made from spices (chili, cumin, henna, coconut charcoal, dried beetroot, salt) forming winding paths beneath them. I saw Adam Budak, curator at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, circling these works, careful and pensive. He told me, whispering excitedly in the momentary hush between curators’ and collectors’ tours, that these twisting forms as exhibited a “sensuality and a wicked sense of belonging.”

Ben Hamouda’s gnarled linguistic forms dangle from the ceiling, as do the big glass-blown lamps made to look like melons in Hang Don’t Cut by the art collective Slavs and Tatars at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. That’s not their only similarity. The Slavs and Tatars show tells a story about the fruit’s complex status in central Asian societies (specifically Uzbekistan and Xinjiang), where it’s stored in warehouses to artificially ripen late, contrasting the arid, unyielding landscape. It also enjoys a hybrid social role: Melons form a part of local religious mythology, since they are said to have grown as splendid divine gifts in the Garden of Eden, with the cracks in their earthly forms reflecting the sweeping gestures of Arabic script. Where Ben Hamouda contorts words and characters that Arabic readers might once have understood, Slavs and Tatars offer a sweet, juicy taste of the redemptive power of words. Both sets of objects, however, withdraw from the possibility of being deciphered at the same time as they give us the aching taste of what knowledge might be like. 

Partially inaccessible truths also form the basis of Hiwa K’s “View from Above” (2017) from Like a Good, Good, Good Boy at KOW. Originally created for Documenta 14, the work consists of a resplendent, carpet-like floor model of the city of Kassel seen from above and destroyed by war; the video lets us listen in on the artist describing his hometown from an imaginary perspective derived from memory, as if he were looking down on the city from above with a bird’s-eye view. This is what the German system requires from its asylum seekers, as a court looks down on maps of “unsafe” places to determine whether the person seeking asylum is telling the truth about the place they come from and the legitimacy of their claim on this basis.

It’s easy for those of us who come armed with art theory ammunition to read this like a high-stakes inversion of Marco Polo’s descriptions of imaginary places to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972). For many, however, including some visitors who were visibly moved by the work, treading carefully over the “carpet” as if they were in their own home, this is a reminder of the specific kind of bureaucratic humiliation exacted upon the most vulnerable.

Hito Steyerl’s “Contemporary Cave Art” (2023), part of the exhibition at Esther Schipper, is a site-specific version of her “Animal Spirits” (2022) environment. This film, complete with live computer-generated animation projected on custom-made surround screens, produces a primordial, cavern-like space for experiencing the work’s combination of historical footage, animation, motion graphics, and interviews. Several viewers said they felt totally immersed in the work’s darkness, a primordial palace of screens. The proceeds of the sales of individual glass spheres, which contain measure proxies for plant health that respond to the interaction of visitors, will go to victims of the recent earthquakes in Turkey and northern Syria.

Simurgh. Ten Women Artists from Iran at Crone takes Islamic poet Attar of Nishapur’s 12th-century epic poem “The Conference of the Birds” as its starting point for displaying works by the women who will help create a new Iran when the Islamic Republic eventually ends. The show’s sheer density means it’s quite cluttered in the gallery’s space on Fasanenstrasse, but this doesn’t make what it says about art’s contribution to future democracy any less worthy, with Berliners nodding their solemn assent. In particular, Anahita Ramzi’s “No National Flag Uses a Gradient #1-8” (2022), which features the titular phrase on a series of eight flags running on a black-and-white gradient, is a timely and solemn reflection on the visual language of democracy and what is at stake when we long for radical social change.

Fo Finally, Cao Fei’s Duotopia at Sprüth Magers is an expansive post-digital playground featuring multiple video works; a cosmic viewing platform that makes viewers feel like they’re doing cybernetic stargazing; a badminton court with the artist’s sleek post-post-internet dystopian-adjacent imagery as a net; a camping scene with tents and a gazebo with fold-out chairs placed in front of a screen showing real people doing exactly what viewers are pretending to do; and so much more. The work is a meditation on the metaverse and the long history of philosophical reflections on the way we look at the world to work out reality from what is merely illusory.

Dodging the badminton court, one woman craned her neck to survey the baffling visual banquet: “My goodness,” she gasped, German-accented, full of unselfconscious wonder. We could probably do with more of that.

On the eve of COP28 in the UAE, NYU Abu Dhabi’s art gallery considers the intersection of human-planet interactions in art. the only constant brings together major projects ranging from poignant large-scale landscapes to sprawling installations considering our impact on the planet. Curated by Maya Allison (Executive Director of The NYUAD Art Gallery), this exhibition is part of her ongoing study of landscape in contemporary art.

The artists here confront contemporary landscape as a site of profound tension: we change the landscape, and it changes us. Even as we might long for an untouched paradise, humans build futuristic utopias. Utopia and paradise arrive, and then depart (change is the only constant). This tension is fundamental to questions we face as humans on this planet.

These artists transform the act of looking into an experience of bearing witness: to observe whorls of pollution recorded on delicate rice paper (Vivek Vilasini); washing an entire ship’s hull by hand, to acknowledge the loss of the Aral Sea (Patty Chang); or to closely examine each detail of a dense landscape, at night (Sharon Lockhart). The exhibition begins with the idea of paradise (Thomas Struth), opposite an untamable sea (Clifford Ross). It centers on technological aspiration, and the incomprehensible imprint of our existence on our planet. Taus Makhacheva asks, “When is land an object to be owned or a territory to be marked?” Without humans to damage the landscape, abandoned luxury homes would have incredible views (Gil Heitor Cortesão). What if we were to surround the sun in solar panels, and block out the light? The exhibition ends with Haroon Mirza visualizing this question in a living garden, fed by light from those solar panels.

Maya Allison, Executive Director of The NYUAD Art Gallery

the only constant is open until June 4, from Tuesday through Sunday, 12–8pm.

For more details, visit nyuad-artgallery.org.

Established in 2014, The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery is the first of its kind in the Gulf, and among the only university galleries in the region with a program of scholarly and experimental museum exhibitions.

Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life, a newly opened exhibition at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, is a timely examination of the Bay Area arts ecosystem. It showcases 23 local artists who have stuck it out during the crises of our times: a pandemic, gentrification, high cost of living, limited access to resources, insurrection, and racist, xenophobic, and transphobic violence. Their responses are evident in their artworks. From them, we get a sense of what it takes to make it in the Bay Area now. Curated by Jacqueline Francis and Ariel Zaccheo, Fight and Flight is about the struggle to live and work in the Bay Area where, despite the lack of affordable housing and studio space, the participating artists’ histories are nuanced expressions of the determination to remain.

The exhibition’s subtitle, Crafting a Bay Area Life, denotes action: Crafting refers not only to the creation of art but also designing a creative life, whether or not the artist identifies as a craftsperson. Recent narratives have placed San Francisco and its surrounding urban areas “in the shadow” of larger art metropolises. The Bay Area finds itself in the penumbral margins of the art world conversation. So too is craft often marginalized or footnoted in the canon of art history. To survive and thrive in the margins is a radical act that occasionally requires the will to fight.

Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life is on view at the Museum of Craft and Design through September 10.

Participating Artists
Libby Black, Craig Calderwood, Erica Deeman, Cheryl Derricotte, Ala Ebtekar, Liz Harvey, Angela Hennessy, Alexander Hernandez, Liz Hernández, Cathy Lu, Michelle Yi Martin, Adia Millett, Nasim Moghadam, Richard-Jonathan Nelson, Ramekon O’Arwisters, yétúndé ọlágbajú, Woody De Othello, Related Tactics, Charlene Tan, Margaret Tedesco and Leila Weefur, Lauren Toomer, and Jenifer K Wofford.

For more information, visit sfmcd.org.

Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life is generously supported in part by Anonymous, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation.

The Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought (PACT) Division of the European Graduate School is pleased to announce our 2023 program.

From June 22 to July 25, we are holding our Silver Anniversary session in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. We are calling this our “Last Dance in Saas-Fee,” since we are planning to move to a new venue in the coming year. We want to make this a special meeting, so we are inviting alumni and guests to join our MA and PhD students for what we think will be an outstanding session featuring eight seminars with distinguished professors such as Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek, and Achille Mbembe. We also look forward to a special visit by Sergei Loznitsa.

Students and guests also have the option this year of returning with us to Valletta, Malta, for four more exceptional seminars from October 1 to 15.

For a full presentation of our schedule and offerings, as well as an overview of possibilities in our unique low residency degree programs, visit egs.edu.

For further information, you may also contact our Assistant Dean, Nemanja Mitrovic, at nemanja.mitrovic@egs.edu.

Please note that our seminars are open to qualified participants who are not registered in a degree program. It is also possible to join us online for our live-streamed seminars. We welcome guests to these intellectual events that assemble uniquely diverse groups.

Apply here to be part of these sustained encounters with some of the most creative thinkers in the world.

Hyperallergic’s monthly Opportunities Listings provide a resource to artists and creatives looking for grants and paid gigs to further their work.

Subscribe to receive this list of opportunities in your inbox each month. Sign up here!

Residencies, Workshops, & Fellowships

Featured
Oak Spring Garden Foundation – 2024 Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence
The fellowship will be awarded to an early career artist working on projects that address plants, landscapes, or gardens. It includes a $10,000 grant and a two- to five-week stay at OSGF in Northern Virginia.
Deadline: May 31, 2023 | osgf.org

Featured
Two Trees – Cultural Space Subsidy Program
Accepting applications for affordable studio space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Emerging and mid-career artists with a strong exhibition history or community-focused practice are eligible to apply.
Deadline: May 31, 2023 | twotreesny-cssp.submittable.com

Center for Architecture Lab
Up to three residents will receive $10,000 stipends to participate in this six-month multidisciplinary program addressing the ways NYC architecture and design shape residential and domestic life.
Deadline: May 19, 2023 | centerforarchitecture.org

Los Angeles Performance Practice – California Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship Program
LA County artists can apply for funding and statewide recognition in one of three tiers: Emerging Artist Fellows ($5,000), Established Artist Fellows ($10,000), and Legacy Artist Fellows ($50,000).
Deadline: June 2, 2023 (11:59pm PT) | performancepractice.la

McColl Center – Artist-in-Residence Program
Artists who work in a variety of practices can apply for this 10-week residency in Charlotte, North Carolina, which includes a $6,000 stipend, private housing, and more. The cost to apply is $35.
Deadline: May 26, 2023 | mccollcenter.org

New York Public Library – Martin Duberman Visiting Fellowship
Open to established and emerging scholars, the fellowship will provide $25,000 to fund one awardee’s research at the library. They are expected to utilize the LGBTQ+ collections but are not restricted to those areas.
Deadline: June 30, 2023 | nypl.org

Northern Clay Center – McKnight Artist Fellowship for Ceramic Artists
Two mid-career Minnesota ceramic artists who identify with any methodology will each receive unrestricted cash awards of $25,000. They will also be featured in a workshop and an exhibition with a catalogue.
Deadline: May 19, 2023 (5pm CT) | northernclaycenter.org

Olney Theatre Center – Vanguard Arts Fund
Development support of up to $25,000 is available for diverse teams of artists interested in creating works — especially those that cross disciplines — in a collaborative environment in the Washington, DC, metro area.
Deadline: May 12, 2023 | olneytheatre.org

Studio Museum in Harlem – Artist-in-Residence
Three artists of African or Afro-Latinx descent working in any medium receive studio space, research support, institutional guidance, and a $37,500 stipend paid out over the course of the residency.
Deadline: May 22, 2023 | studiomuseum.org

The Nicholson Project – Artist Residency Program
Artists and creatives of all types can apply for this 10-week residency at a historic home in Southeast Washington, DC, which includes a $5,000 stipend among other benefits. There is a $15 application fee.
Deadline: May 10, 2023 | thenicholsonproject.org

Open Calls for Art & Writing

Featured
LA ESCUELA___ – Open Call for Art and Education Projects
The artist-run platform has a $25,000 fund to support the creation of 29 online and on-site educational projects and editorial content. Proposals must address pressing issues in Latin America through the lens of art and education.
Deadline: June 15, 2023 | laescuela.art

Featured
Master Drawings – Ricciardi Prize
The $5,000 award is given to the best new and unpublished essay on a drawings topic by a scholar under 40. The winning submission will be published in a 2024 issue of Master Drawings.
Deadline: November 15, 2023 | masterdrawings.org

A.I.R. Gallery – Call for Curators
Seeking curator proposals for the 2024 CURRENTS exhibition. Benefits include a $1,500 curatorial fee, WAGE-certified artist fees, a $3,000 shipping budget, and more. The sliding cost for applications is $10–$30.
Deadline: May 15, 2023 | airgallery.org

CUE Art Foundation – Open Call for Curatorial Projects
One emerging curator will organize a group exhibition at CUE’s NYC gallery in 2024. There is a $2,500 honorarium, a budget for artist fees, mentor support from an established curator, and more. The application fee is $10.
Deadline: June 30, 2023 | cueartfoundation.org

CUE Art Foundation – Open Call for Solo Exhibitions
Each year, the organization awards three artists opportunities for solo exhibitions. These come with a $5,000 honorarium, a budget for shipping and handling, mentor support, and more. There is a $10 application fee.
Deadline: June 30, 2023 | cueartfoundation.org

Grist – Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors
Writers from around the globe can submit short stories about futures in which climate crisis solutions improve our world. In addition to online publication, first place wins $3,000 and finalists also receive prize money.
Deadline: June 13, 2023 (11:59pm PT) | grist.org

Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco – Meantime
Bay Area artists will be given $1,500 stipends to activate ICA SF through pop-up performances, workshops, and events, or via longer-term residency projects that use the museum as a studio space.
Deadline: May 21, 2023 | icasf.org

Living Walls – Laura Patricia Calle Grant
This all-inclusive $20,000 grant will support the full production of a mural in the Metro Atlanta region. It should inform on the subject(s) of social equity, feminism, immigrants’ rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and cultural diversity.
Deadline: June 30, 2023 | livingwallsatl.com

The Boston Printmakers – 2023 North American Print Biennial
Over $12,000 is available in juror-designated purchase prizes and materials awards for this printmaking show in Boston, Massachusetts, in the fall of 2023. The entry fee is $45.
Deadline: May 12, 2023 | bostonprintmakers.org

Grants & Awards

Andy Warhol Foundation – Arts Writers Grant
Ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 in three categories — articles, books, and short-form writing — these grants support emerging and established writers addressing both general and specialized art audiences.
Deadline: May 17, 2023 | artswriters.org

Firelight Media – William Greaves Research and Development Fund
Mid-career nonfiction filmmakers from racially and ethnically underrepresented communities in the US, as well as filmmakers in Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Colombia, can apply for up to $40,000.
Deadline: June 6, 2023 | firelightmedia.tv

Queer | Art – Illuminations Grant
Awarded to draw attention to an existing body of work, this annual $10,000 grant is intended to support and shed light on Black trans women visual artists. Four finalists will also each receive $1,250.
Deadline: July 12, 2023 | queer-art.org

The JGS Fellowship for Photography
New York State-based photographers (and artists whose practices involve photographic techniques) who don’t live in NYC are invited to apply for this $7,000 unrestricted cash grant.
Deadline: June 15, 2023 | nyfa.org

VIA Art Fund – Artistic Production Grants
Accepting letters of inquiry from artists, nonprofits, and institutions for $25,000–$100,000 to support commissions outside museum or gallery walls, within the public realm, or in non-traditional exhibition environments.
Deadline: May 18, 2023 | viaartfund.org

Other opportunities closing soon:

• BRIC Arts Media – BRIClab 2023/24
• Oak Spring Garden Foundation – 2024 Interdisciplinary Residency
• Velvetpark – LGBTQ+ Visual Artist Residency

Check out more opportunities at hyperallergic.com/tag/opportunities.

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In The skin of the earth is seamless at Tina Kim Gallery, Maia Ruth Lee draws inspiration from her own life, including her youth in Seoul and Nepal and experiences of migration, to consider both the confinement and freedom associated with a life in motion. The solo show spans paintings, sculptures, and an intimate, poetic film entitled “The Letter” (2023). This film grounds the exhibition, pairing old family videos that her father took, many featuring rural Nepal, with text from letters Lee wrote during the pandemic. Candid clips of daily life show people traveling and standing on piles of colorful fabrics at markets, and stunning views of the mountainous landscape. The words offer glimpses into Lee’s inner thoughts, her concerns for issues of family, and the concept of home.

Lee pairs “The Letter” with sculptures made of an assortment of colorful fabrics and tarps, much like the ones seen in the video, as part of her Bondage Baggage series (2018–ongoing). Bundled together and wrapped tightly in a cage of rope, twine, and tape, the dense packages are arranged in piles on the floor. In making these, she had in mind luggage she saw on conveyor belts at the airport in Kathmandu. Representative of the people to whom they belong, each parcel bears stories of travel and migration. Lee’s bundles likewise hold evidence of the human hands that tightly wrapped each material. 

The bound items push against the ropes that confine them, bulging through the grids of their encasement, rendering an image of containment. In her paintings, Lee takes the sculptures as inspiration, applying ink to the unprimed canvas wrapped into the tight bundles. She then frees the canvas, cutting the rope and relieving the pressure. The evidence of having been bound is preserved in the grid and impression of ropes. The burden, however, is gone. Areas that were once squeezed through small holes in the lattice are smooth, the surface nearly flat. While the tracks of the ropes remain, the canvas stands taut and strong, an embodiment of freedom. Scattered on the floor below are the empty rope cages, their pod-like shapes intact despite the contents having been removed, a visual reminder of their former role.  

Bringing the viewer from the clips of migration and tight bundles of personal items to the vibrant paintings that seem to have exploded out of their exoskeletons, Lee presents a powerful story of the tensions and metamorphoses that migration begets. 

Maia Ruth Lee: The skin of the earth is seamless continues at Tina Kim Gallery (525 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through May 6. The exhibition was organized by the gallery. 

A career spanning 65 years is always challenging for a retrospective to encapsulate. But what can an exhibition do when the artist draws not only fashion designs but also Islamophobic caricatures? When he hides his family’s Nazi past to make a career in Paris after World War II?

These are the pressing questions in light of the upcoming exhibition Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, opening May 5, 2023. The exhibition will be preceded by the famous Met Gala benefit tonight, May 1. From the museum’s recent public announcements, it is clear that this exhibition is a celebration of Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) and his work that allows no space for criticism.

Lagerfeld’s life holds not only the story of a multi-talented and commercially successful designer but is also a political biography yet to be properly uncovered. To start, consider Lagerfeld’s handling of his family’s Nazi past. On a German talk show in 2012, he told this anecdote from after the Second World War: On the way to the dentist, he and his mother ran into his teacher. “Can’t you even tell your son to cut his hair?” the teacher asked the mother. She pushed back and replied, “Why? Are you still a Nazi?” Lagerfeld gave the impression that the mother stood up to the Nazis, but at this moment, he concealed the fact that his parents were actually Nazi sympathizers.

Only research after Lagerfeld’s death provides reliable insight into his family’s history. In a biography published in 2020, journalist Alfons Kaiser wrote that both the designer’s mother and aunt shared a positive attitude toward National Socialism. While his aunt turned away from the Nazis after the pogrom against Jews in November of 1938 — known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass — his mother remained loyal to Nazi ideology until the early years of the war. His father, Otto Lagerfeld, became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933, the year it began controlling the German parliament. Karl Lagerfeld was also born that year. As the founder of a condensed milk company, his father hoped that membership would bring him business advantages. His parents went out of their way to demonstrate their allegiance to the system, flying the swastika flag on their property after the annexation of Austria (Anschluss) on March 12, 1938. After the war, his parents are said to have lied to the Denazification Commission and thus escaped possible punishment; his father posed as a critic of the regime and his mother hid her membership in the party.

Karl Lagerfeld cannot be held responsible for the shoddy work of the Denazification Commission or the misdeeds of his parents, but he became an accomplice by remaining silent. He grew up in a household of convinced Nazis. He could have publicly criticized such socialization and would not have been the first to do so. A retrospective of his work should show how the designer benefited from his family’s political and economic opportunism during and after the Nazi era. It is important to consider how Karl Lagerfeld’s privileged background allowed him to move to Paris in 1952 and begin his career there.

And when the author Hal Vaughan proved in his 2011 book that Coco Chanel collaborated with the Nazis, attempted to Aryanize her company, and had an affair with a master spy, Lagerfeld had already been Chanel’s Creative Director for 30 years. He was not known for his willingness to come to terms with Chanel’s past.

For him, the antisemites were always the others, like the Muslims who have been fleeing to Europe since 2015. Of them, he said on French television in late 2017, “One cannot — even if there are decades between them — kill millions of Jews so you can bring millions of their worst enemies in their place.” He reinforced these Islamophobic and xenophobic statements with his cartoons, such as a woman in a hijab at the borders of Europe. He also criticized then-Chancellor Angela Merkel for her humanitarian refugee policy. At one point, he illustrated her wearing a hijab and wrote in German: “Mrs. Merkel’s new migrant-friendly look … and you don’t have to go to the hairdresser forever.” Although his visuals and arguments are right-wing populist, in other cartoons he blamed Merkel for the rise of right-wing parties. 

In the last years of his life, Lagerfeld wrecked his reputation at a breathtaking pace. Whereas in previous decades he refrained from making political statements in fear of damaging his business, he shocked the public with his reactionary views before his death. Will The Met follow the credo of his successful years and banish the political, lest it hurt the museum’s business? Will the retrospective hide his crude views behind haute couture for the super-rich, sophisticated fashion for the economic upper class? Or will The Met live up to its claim as a museum and undertake a critical contextualization of Karl Lagerfeld’s work?