The Smithsonian Institution has removed a label from the National Museum of American History exhibition The American Presidency that referenced Donald Trump’s two impeachments. The news of the removal was first reported this week by the Washington Post and confirmed to Hyperallergic by a Smithsonian spokesperson.

The exhibition alteration comes months after the Trump administration committed to a widely condemned purge of so-called “improper, divisive, or anti-American” ideology from the Smithsonian network of museums and research centers.

The official rationale for the removal of impeachment references, according to a Smithsonian statement shared with Hyperallergic, was that other displays in the presidential exhibition had not been updated since 2008. According to a spokesperson for the institution, descriptions of Trump’s two-time impeachment were added to a section that discussed presidential impeachments, public opinion, Congress, and the Supreme Court in September 2021, months after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

According to the Washington Post, the removed label also mentioned the impeachments of Bill Clinton, Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon. The Smithsonian did not provide an image of the removed display.

The American Presidency permanent exhibition first opened in 2000, and spans 7,500 square feet divided into thematic sections, including a display dedicated to Abraham Lincoln’s top hat.

“Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance,” the spokesperson said. “A large permanent gallery like The American Presidency that opened in 2000 requires a significant amount of time and funding to update and renew. A future and updated exhibit will include all impeachments.”

Adding references to Trump’s impeachment to the presidential history survey, the spokesperson continued, was intended to be a “short-term measure to address current events.”

The spokesperson said the label remained on view until some point this July, after a recent review of content. In June, the Smithsonian first announced that it would conduct reviews to ensure “unbiased” content throughout the museum, but did not specifically state that it would follow through with Trump’s demands, which included eliminating what the president called “race-centered ideology” in his March executive order.

Trump is the only US president to be impeached twice. Both proceedings occurred during his first term, but did not result in his removal from office. The president was first impeached after he was accused of pressuring Ukraine to dig up disparaging content on Hunter Biden, and for a second time for his role in the January 6 insurrection.  

Congressional democrats have called for an investigation into the impacts of Trump’s Smithsonian executive order, warning that the president’s intentions infringe on the institution’s congressionally ensured independence. The public fallout from Trump’s crackdown on the Smithsonian has so far included the resignation of Kim Sajet, who served as the National Portrait Gallery’s director for over a decade and whom Trump accused of being a “highly partisan person” on his Truth Social account. He threatened to fire Sajet, an action the president does not have the power to take, shortly before the Smithsonian announced her departure.

This month, artist Amy Sherald canceled an upcoming exhibition after she said the National Portrait Gallery considered removing her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty, “Trans Forming Liberty” (2024), and replacing it with a video of people reacting to transgender issues.

Prussian painter John Gast’s 1872 composition “American Progress,” now held by the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, isn’t very good. An unsubtle celebration of Manifest Destiny, the 19th-century American mania for westward expansion at the expense of Indigenous peoples, Gast’s painting features a zaftig blonde-haired and blue-eyed avatar of Progress aloft in the sky, moving from a civilized east of ships, locomotives, and telegraph lines towards a wild west. White settlers in Conestoga wagons and stagecoaches follow her; a group of horse-bound Indigenous people flees into the finality of darkness towards the dusky horizon behind her. Beyond the horrific politics, the perspective is amateurish and the sense of color awkward, not to mention that the wonky proportions of the eponymous toga-clad incarnation of Progress herself are more a signifier of beauty than an actual example of it. Considering the painting’s relative lack of technical skill and its deserved disregard within the American artistic canon, there must be some reason beyond aesthetics that, on July 23, the social media directors at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) saw fit to post the painting on outlets such as Facebook along with the caption: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”

The same year that Gast finished “American Progress,” a contingent of 130 soldiers of the 5th Calvary Regiment arrived at Skeleton Cave in Arizona’s Salt River Canyon, where a group of Yavapai people had been sheltering. In under an hour, the army slaughtered almost a hundred of the Yavapai, including many women and children. Within the ugly history of the so-called American Indian Wars — from the Puritans perpetrating what a contemporaneous historian called a “great and notable slaughter” of the Nipmuc Indigenous people in Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts in 1676 to local White settlers “consummat[ing] a most inhuman slaughter” against the Nasomah people in Randolph, Oregon in 1854 — the bloody events at Skeleton Cave can fade into the background. For while the stylized Indigenous people of Gast’s composition are rendered in red and black paint on canvas, the actual story of genocide on the frontier was colored in spilled blood and burnt flesh. As Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane Jr. maintain in their essay in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (1992), “there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide … anywhere in the annals of human history.” Most references and considerations of Gast’s painting are illustrative of Stiffarm’s point — the majority of scholars would admit that “American Progress” is an ugly bit of colonial propaganda, making the DHS’s extolling of the painting even more ominous. 

The social media imbroglio around Gast’s painting isn’t the only controversy that DHS has generated in recent weeks. On July 14, it posted the schmaltzy “A Prayer for a New Life” (2020) by contemporary painter Morgan Weistling, under the incorrect and chilling title “A New Life in a New Land.” It is a picture of a young settler couple on the frontier, surrounded by provisions within their Conestoga wagon, cradling their newborn (White) infant as a craggy western vista absent of any pesky Indigenous people yawns out in the background. DHS’s caption of Weistling’s painting reads “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage”; the unusual double-H capitalization led some commentators to argue that the post might be a dog whistle for the White supremacist code of “HH” for “Heil Hitler.” Whether or not that aspect of the post was intentional, its presentation of “New Life in a New Land” itself is meant to be understood in the most obvious way. Whatever group of people are manning the social media feeds at DHS (and there are more than enough creepy weirdos gestated in the fever-dream of online alt-right meme speak who fit the profile) the message is clear: Genocide of Indigenous people was no big deal, contemporary (White) Americans need not feel ashamed about Manifest Destiny, and Trump’s DHS is more than willing to enact similar policies today. 

To Weistling’s credit, he has emphasized that the post was made without his approval, while the estate of Thomas Kinkade, whose work was used in a similar post, has also disavowed the DHS’s appropriation of his work. Whatever the former’s intentions may have been, however, his painting is also not good — but it is interesting, in part because its operative mode concerns a violence of invisibility. Unlike Gast’s painting, with its fleeing Indigenous warriors, this idealized Western frontier is truly a virgin land, absent of people; colonists may thus acquire it without guilt.

“A Prayer for a New Life” evokes, albeit in a less grandiose manner, German-American painter Emanuel Leutze’s massive patriotic mural “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” which was unveiled in 1861 in Congress. In that composition, the Western frontier is settled by hardy men in coonskin caps and women in bonnets traveling on Conestoga wagons through a rugged and empty landscape where there are no Indigenous people to be found. Three years after Leutze’s work was installed, the 3rd Colorado Cavalry may have murdered as many as 600 Cheyenne and Arapaho people, the vast majority of them women and children. In a moment of devastating irony, during congressional testimony about the massacre in 1864, both witnesses and perpetrators would have walked by “Westward the Court of Empire Takes Its Way” as they entered the chamber. During said testimony, a witness named John Smith confessed to seeing “women cut all to pieces … with knives; scalped; their brains knocked out,” while reporter Robert Bent of the New York Tribune wrote that he saw a woman “cut open, with an unborn child lying by her side,” while other journalists recorded Indigenous children being used for target practice or severed body parts being collected by soldiers to be worn as jewelry. The House committee condemned the soldiers, but no charges were brought. Until recently, some memorials still had the temerity to call the Sand Creek Massacre a “battle.” 

Mere decades later, American Manifest Destiny would offer eerie parallels to Nazi Lebensraum across the Atlantic. James Q. Whitman, in Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017), notes that despite Nazi misgivings about supposed Yankee cultural decadence, “in Mein Kampf Hitler praised America as nothing less than ‘the one state’ that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order of the kind the Nuremberg Laws were intended to establish”; indeed, the fascist code was in part inspired by Jim Crow and anti-Indigenous legislation. Hitler himself once said, “One thing the Americans have and which we lack … is the sense of vast open spaces.” Timothy D. Snyder quotes that line in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015), in which he describes how the heretofore relatively middling European colonial power of Germany drew from the American example of genocide against Indigenous people as a model for how Jews, Roma, and Slavs were to be treated in the east. “Where was Germany’s frontier,” writes Snyder, “its Manifest Destiny?” As the Nazis blitzed into eastern Europe during Operation Barbarossa, Snyder argues, they were in part inspired by the exact sort of romanticized rhetoric that one sees in the novels of Karl May, a German who wrote popular Westerns when Hitler was a boy, or indeed in the kind of imagery represented by a Gast or a Leutze. 

Or, for that matter, a Werner Peiner. A professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and an officially sanctioned painter of the Third Reich, Peiner exulted in the sort of sentimental vistas that recall American 19th-century art of western expansion. “German Soil,” painted in 1940 and now owned by the Museum Würth in Künzelsau, Germany, depicts a Teutonic farmer tilling his fields of orderly wheat, moving towards a blackening horizon in the distance, his fields bathed in an eerie, immanent light. The work’s advocacy for lebensraum is more subtle than an out-and-out propaganda piece, such as the 1939 poster encouraging ethnic Germans to settle in recently conquered areas in Czechoslovakia and Poland, a swastika-emblazoned knight’s shield superimposed over those territories. Rather, as with the violence of invisibility in Leutze’s work, there is a conceit of plausible deniability for Peiner. In composition, the latter is superior to both Gast and Leutze, but he evokes the same feeling of providential ownership over land itself, of the supposed significance of blood and soil. More than just a bucolic pastoral, it should be noted that with the light setting behind the farmer, it seems clear that Peiner’s figure is moving — as the Reich itself did — towards the east. 

Nazi art also predictably traded in the enshrinement of the normative family unit as surely as Weistling’s depiction of the settler couple does (or that’s at least the clear ideological intent of the DHS’s posting of the latter). Adolf Wessel, frequently exhibited in the state-sanctioned Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, does as much in his 1939 “Kalenberg Peasant Family,” which presents three generations of a stolid rural Aryan family: a mother, father, grandmother, and three children who with grim determination stand in for the future of Hitler’s state, the same connection between blood and soil made by the artists of American Manifest Destiny. As the Nazi theorist Richard Walther Darré claimed, the “German soul with its warmth is rooted in its agriculture and in a real sense always grew out of it.” Citizenship is defined thus not by commitments, but by the land itself, or as Vice President JD Vance said at a July 5 speech at the conservative Claremont Institute, citizenship “is not just an idea,” but rather something defined by being from a “particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and a way of life.” 

Indeed, conflations of an (anonymous and invented) individual with the regime frequently took on an erotic cast, as if endorsing the propagation of a defined racial type. Look no further than the exposed leg of Gast’s Progress or Leopold Schmutzler’s circa 1940 “Working Maidens” (held at Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin) wherein four hale and healthy, coquettish and comely Teutonic peasant women walk smiling through a field — which was presented at Munich’s Great German Art Exhibition only a year after German tanks crossed into Poland to expand the “living room” of the nation. Sexualization of White supremacist tropes is increasingly mainstream today, as with the controversial American Eagle ad featuring blonde-haired and blue-eyed actress Sydney Sweeney making a homophonic pun on her “great jeans,” which, even if unintentional, speaks to the way in which fascism has become trendy. 

Americans may blanch at comparisons of the multi-century process of genocide of Indigenous people to European examples, even while historian David E. Stannard in American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (1993) described the former as the “worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed … consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people,” but it is an uncomfortable reality. The DHS posts may be hokum and kitsch, pablum and camp, but it also evidences a very dangerous current situation, particularly as the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), already operating several concentration camps throughout the United States, will increase to larger than the militaries of Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Iran, and Spain. This isn’t even to mention the US’s active support of Israel’s current genocide and famine in Gaza. 

In such a context, resistance must be as much aesthetic as material. Four years ago, when many pundits thought that Trump’s return was unlikely, Native-American artist Charles Hilliard revised Gast’s “American Progress” in the 2021 composition “Reversing Manifest Destiny.” Here, the incarnation of Liberty has been replaced with the sacred Lakota figure of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, brown-skinned with long, flowing black hair, moving from a bright West towards a pollution-darkened, smoggy east whose horizon is punctuated with belching exhaust, bringing with her Indigenous warriors and bison as the continent’s ecological devastation is erased behind her. A fantasy, of course — there are no easy escapes from our brutal history. But it’s an alternate vision to the future drawn by the twin specters of genocide and ecocide. The possibility of making a better world first necessitates dreaming it. 

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Residencies, Workshops, & Fellowships

Corning Museum of Glass – Artists-in-Residence at The Studio
Artists are invited to apply for residencies lasting either five or eight weeks. Those selected will explore new directions in glassmaking or expand on their current bodies of work while using the immense resources of the museum. There is a $30 application fee.
Deadline: August 31, 2025 | glassmaking.cmog.org

Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University – Hodder Fellowships
Open to artists demonstrating “much more than ordinary intellectual and literary gifts,” applicants are selected more “for promise than for performance.” Fellows receive a $93,000 stipend to pursue an independent project over the 2026–27 academic year, no teaching required.
Deadline: September 9, 2025 | arts.princeton.edu

Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University – Princeton Arts Fellowships
Open to early-career artists demonstrating extraordinary promise, fellows receive a $93,000 yearly stipend and benefits to spend the 2026–28 academic years at Princeton as active community members, with the expectation of teaching one course per semester.
Deadline: September 9, 2025 | arts.princeton.edu

Lower East Side Printshop – Keyholder Residency
This program offers emerging artists in the NYC area free 24-hour access to printmaking facilities to develop new work. Keyholders receive a $1,000 stipend, storage space, and opportunities to show in exhibitions and other public events.
Deadline: August 15, 2025  | printshop.org

Open Calls for Art & Writing

Featured
Gulf Coast – 2025 Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing
Writers can submit essays of 1,500 words or less to the journal’s annual Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing. Judged by writer, editor, and curator Natalie Hegert, the prize awards $3,000 to first place and $1,000 each to two runners-up.
Deadline: September 14, 2025 | gulfcoastajournalofliteratureandfinearts.submittable.com

Kickstarter x Tubi: FilmStream Collective Fund
This initiative empowers independent filmmakers with funding and distribution support. Their finalized film will then stream on Tubi, and chosen filmmakers will receive $10,000 from Kickstarter.
Deadline: August 31, 2025 | kickstarter.com/tubi

The Abbey Harris Mural Fund
This grant supports UK artists in creating semi-permanent or permanent public murals or site-specific works on walls, in any medium. Funding of up to £7,000 is available for an artist or organization producing a public mural in the country.
Deadline: October 10, 2025 | abbey.org.uk

Urban Archive – Open Call for Photos
In partnership with Melting Metropolis, Urban Archive is launching an open call for old photographs and personal histories that illustrate how New Yorkers have experienced the everyday heat of summer.
Deadline: September 30, 2025 | urbanarchive.nyc

Grants & Awards

Featured
Foundwork – 2025 Foundwork Artist Prize
The honoree receives a $10,000 grant and studio visits with jurors Ebony Haynes, Carmen Hermo, Lauren Mackler, Antonia Marsh, and Hugo Vitrani. Three artists will be shortlisted. Artists must be Foundwork members to be considered ($6/month with the option to cancel after the three-month prize selection period).
Deadline: September 26, 2025 (5pm PT) | foundwork.art/artist-prize

1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art
This prize awards $10,000 to an artist whose work contributes to a new understanding of art in the American South. Artists from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia are eligible.
Deadline: September 7, 2025 | gibbesmuseum.org

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council – Manhattan Arts Grants
LMCC’s 2026 grants offer up to $16,000 to Manhattan-based artists and arts organizations for public projects and presentations across the borough.
Deadline: September 16, 2025 (5pm ET) | lmcc.net

Vital Impacts Environmental Photography Grants
One established photographer will receive a $20,000 grant, and six emerging photographers will receive $5,000 grants. These funds are earmarked for the development of documentary projects focusing on environmental stories.
Deadline: September 15, 2025 | vitalimpacts.org

Job Opportunities

Jewish Currents – Executive Editor
The Executive Editor is responsible for leading, along with the Editor-in-Chief, Jewish Currents’s editorial work. That includes commissioning and editing various kinds of pieces, serving as top editor or final reader, supervising staff, and more.
Deadline: August 11, 2025 | jewishcurrents.org

School of the Art Institute of Chicago – Assistant Professor Positions in Fashion (Tenure-Track)
SAIC’s Department of Fashion invites applications for two full-time, tenure-track positions. Successful candidates will demonstrate experience teaching the full range of the curriculum, including courses in collection design, knitwear, sustainability, and digital advances in fashion technology.
Priority Deadline: September 15, 2025 | saic.edu

School of the Art Institute of Chicago – Assistant Professor in Art History, Theory, and Criticism – History of Modern and Contemporary Architecture (Tenure-Track)
SAIC seeks a scholar of architecture or related fields in any geographic area. The ideal applicant will offer innovative approaches to introductory courses in global architecture and contribute to the school’s diversity with perspectives and/or experiences that expand the field.
Priority Deadline: September 15, 2025 | saic.edu

The Hammer Museum – Chief Curator
The Chief Curator will lead the Hammer’s artistic and curatorial direction — overseeing the stewardship of the collection, the exhibition program, and sustaining a culture of artistic innovation, excellence, and exploration.
Deadline: August 18, 2025 (8:59pm PT) | jobs.ucla.edu

Other opportunities closing soon:

• Washington University in St. Louis – Freund Teaching Fellowships 

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

To feature an opportunity from your organization on Hyperallergic, get in touch at nectarads.com.

Raymond Saunders, whose collage-based paintings and installation works grappled with the complexities of lived experience, racial identity, and broader sociopolitical structures, died on July 19 in Oakland, California. He was 90 years old. The news of his death was announced in a joint statement from Casemore, Andrew Kreps, and David Zwirner galleries, which co-represented the artist. The cause was aspiration pneumonia, the New York Times reported.

Described as a cult-like figure in the arts community of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had lived and worked since the early 1960s, Saunders is best known for his assemblage-style blackboard surfaces bearing white chalk and chalk-like notations, smears of vibrant paint, and accumulated found ephemera. His mixed-media work is known to have influenced artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and has often drawn comparisons to Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines (1954–64) paintings.

Saunders’s death came just days after the closing of his first major museum retrospective, Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden, held at the Carnegie Museum of Art in his hometown of Pittsburgh. The show brought him long overdue recognition in a mainstream art world that has often overlooked or lumped together artists based on their shared identity, a pattern Saunders railed against in his landmark 1967 pamphlet “Black Is a Color.” In the printed essay, published in response to an article by Ishmael Reed about the Black Arts Movement, Saunders criticized the pigeonholing of Black artists, arguing that they should not feel obligated to center their art and their successes on their race. “Can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?” Saunders wrote.

While rejecting oversimplistic characterizations of identity, the artist often produced work that explored the subject of race and his own daily observations as a means to understand himself and the world around him. Pieces like “Beauty in Darkness” (1993–99) juxtaposed segregationist signage, business posters, religious imagery, pages from children’s books, and paintbrushes, disparate elements that nevertheless cohere in the composition. Other works referenced prominent Black artists and cultural figures like “Charlie Parker [formerly Bird]” (1977) and “Malcolm X: Talking Pictures” (1994); in “Untitled (Bird Lives)” (1995), a chalk-drawn symbolic Basquiat crown is featured among illustrations referencing Jazz musicians Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie.

“I’m American. I’m Black. I’m a painter. So all those things enter into what it is that becomes what I present,” Saunders said in a 1994 interview.

Born on October 28, 1934 in Homestead, Pennsylvania, Saunders was raised with his three sisters by a single mother. After his family moved to the nearby city of Pittsburgh, he began taking art classes through the Carnegie Museum’s Saturday morning youth program. There, he met one of his earliest mentors, public school arts educator Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, who helped him earn a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. While there, he also studied at the Barnes Foundation through the University of Pennsylvania.

Like Fitzpatrick’s other mentees, who included Andy Warhol and Mel Bochner, Saunders went on to study at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1960. He then moved to California and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in 1961.

Saunders relocated briefly to New York City, where he had his debut solo exhibition in 1966 at Terry Dintenfass’s East 67th Street gallery, known for representing several Black artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Richard Hunt, during a period when the city’s galleries showed primarily White artists.

The artist described his process for making art as “ongoing,” in part because of his reluctance to move on from a work: “I have other work that I sort of have around because I’m sort of wanting to continue it and know that the moment it gets out here, I can’t get it back.” 

Julie Casemore, director of the namesake gallery in San Francisco, echoed this sentiment in a statement to Hyperallergic: “His complex practice was always evolving and he was at work on multiple pieces in the studio at any given time,” she said, adding that “he painted flowers every day.”

Saunders later moved back to California, where he began teaching at California State University, Hayward (now East Bay) in 1968. He then joined the faculty of his alma mater, where he taught until his retirement in 2013 and held a professor emeritus title. San Francisco artist Dewey Crumpler, who had a decades-long friendship with Saunders, described him as “a powerful influence” on the Bay Area arts community and beyond. Crumpler initially met Saunders in 1967 as his pupil at the California College of the Arts; eight years later, the two became colleagues.

“He was impressive from the moment I saw him dressed in an embroidered gray flowered sweater and white balloon-bottom pants,” Crumpler recalled in an email to Hyperallergic. “He was too hip for words.” 

“His sophisticated use of the color black served both as a metaphor and a platform for personal liberation,” Crumpler said.

‣ The newly opened Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center is making waves, with a unique approach to ancestral knowledge, ecology, and community. Jeanette Marantos of the Los Angeles Times writes:

Inside, the exhibits are arranged in a meandering flow (just follow the blue line) that introduces visitors to a large and engaging range of interactive displays and stories, many of which were provided by elder Maria del Refugio Solares, Zavalla’s “fifth great-grandmother” and one of the last native speakers of the Chumash language Samala. Some tribal members are trying to resurrect Samala through classes and “just getting together and speaking with each other,” said Zavalla. “It’s opened so many doors to understanding our culture, our medicinal plants and ceremonies.”

Solares died in 1923 at 81, but left wax cylinder recordings of Chumash songs, stories and translations with linguist and Native American language ethnologist John Peabody Harrington. Incorporating Solares’ songs and stories makes the exhibits come alive.

For instance, near the beginning of the permanent exhibit there is a cave-like room explaining the Chumash understanding of the universe, which is divided into three levels. The upper world is inhabited by celestial Sky People, such as Sun and Sky Coyote, whose peón gambling games affected the seasons for everything from harvesting acorns to hunting game. The dark, eerie lower world is dominated by two giant rattlesnakes whose writhings cause the ground in the middle world — our world — to shake.

‣ British-Mexican painter Leonora Carrington often extended her painted worlds onto the page, writing short stories, novels, and plays. Celia Bell considers her newly reissued novel against the backdrop of World War II for LitHub:

Occultism, in whose rituals The Stone Door is deeply steeped, is not necessarily a tool of liberation. Leonora’s intuition, during her nervous breakdown, that the war was being waged by hypnotic power was perhaps not entirely wrong. To the Surrealists, madness was a sacred state, an illumination that revealed, as André Breton, high priest of Surrealism, put it, “that we are not alone at the helm of the ship”—that the great and small coincidences of our life are directed with the participation of forces to which we have no conscious access. But even as the Surrealists were experimenting with ritual and divination in the face of horror, the Nazis also embraced occultism, with its secret and hierarchical rituals of power. Magic and ideology are both practices of belief: how to inspire it, how to turn it into action. How to turn a human into a statistic, an alien, an enemy combatant–transformations worked not through incantation, but through the movement of paper in government offices.

‣ This week in cake criticism, The Cut published an article calling out ugly social media cakes, without contacting the bakers for comment. The Cake Zine Substack swiftly responded with the most thoughtful piece of — er, about cake that I’ve ever read:

What we found particularly frustrating about the piece is not that the author expresses a subjective opinion instead of simply going to the nearest grocery store and buying a $30 sheet cake. It’s that the article uses images of these independent bakers’ cakes, and then hyperlinks specific criticism directly to the baker’s pages. No outreach. No quotes. We can’t see the point in hyperlinking directly to the bakers whose work you are publicly ridiculing (except to send snarky readers to their pages to laugh along).

We launched Cake Zine with a focus on cake because of its cultural richness. Cake reflects a moment in time: the aesthetics in vogue, the economic conditions that shape what ingredients are prized or even just available. The artists driving this most recent evolution in cake are largely independent, self-taught, and incredibly driven—and through the magazine, we have been lucky to sample their (non-ugly, non-dry) cakes and see the hard work that goes into them.

Nobody made us the defenders of cakes, or cake bakers. But after seeing familiar names in these hyperlinks, we reached out to some of the bakers to hear their response:

Lulu Prat of Bodega Cakes: “Of course not every style resonates with everyone—that’s the nature of creative work. What I did find disappointing was seeing an entire space—one made up almost exclusively of small, femme-owned businesses—reduced so casually.”

‣ A new documentary about NASA astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman to go to space (who was surely rolling in her grave during the Katy Perry debacle), grants us a window into her private life and the homophobia that forced her to conceal her queerness. M. G. Lord writes a moving review of it for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Interviewed for Sally, fellow astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan describes Ride’s marriage as a “great PR move.” Hawley, Ride’s former husband, saw it differently. Ride was not that cynical, he told Costantini. Their union had had meaning, even if it ebbed with time.

I was struck by the kindness of his words. Not all ex-husbands look back with compassion and forgiveness. My own marriage ended less politely in the 1990s.

Either way, staying in the closet certainly benefited or protected Ride, and though it’s easy to take issue with historical figures who choose to conceal their sexuality, viewing Sally might temper the rush to judgment. With a handful of news clips, Costantini evokes the overt bigotry of the 1970s. “[T]wo out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear,” one CBS news report begins. Then, in an on-the-street interview, a teenage boy blurts, “I think they should be shot, if you ask me.” Celebrities were not exempt. In 1981, Billie Jean King’s same-sex palimony lawsuit caused her to lose all her endorsements.

Ride also had a legal reason to be silent. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which, for the first time in civil service law, named “sexual perversion” as grounds for firing or not hiring federal workers. In the military, homosexuality was grounds for a dishonorable discharge. Although NASA had pointedly been established as a civilian agency, this directive made it as exclusionary as the armed services.

‣ Chris Smalls, who made headlines in 2021 for founding the Amazon Labor Union, was abducted from a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza and beaten by Israeli soldiers. Smalls was released today, but as the only Black member of the flotilla, his assault sparked outcry online. Adria R. Walker reports for the Guardian:

The Handala, which carried food, baby formula, diapers and medicine, was attempting to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza, as Palestinians there continue to starve in what UN-backed hunger experts have called a “worst-case scenario of famine” that is unfolding.

“The Freedom Flotilla Coalition confirms that upon arrival in Israeli custody, US human rights defender Chris Smalls was physically assaulted by seven uniformed individuals. They choked him and kicked him in the legs, leaving visible signs of violence on his neck and back,” the Freedom Flotilla Coalition wrote in a statement posted on Instagram on Tuesday morning.

“When his lawyer met with him, Chris was surrounded by six members of Israel’s special police unit. This level of force was not used against other abducted activists. We condemn this violence against Chris and demand accountability for the assault and discriminatory treatment he faced.”

Smalls, the only Black person onboard the boat, was one of 21 members of the group who were detained. Others included 19 civilians, including parliamentarians, medics and engineers, and two journalists. Jacob Berger, a Jewish American actor who shared on Instagram that Smalls was in “great spirits” after his detention – everyone else who was detained, he said, should be released on Tuesday or Wednesday.

‣ Last month, Kenyan police killed 16 people in youth-led protests across the country, held a year after massive demonstrations against several governmental policies. Scholar Muoki Mbunga reflects on the movement’s connections to the anticolonial 1950s Mau Mau Rebellion, explaining in Africa Is a Country:

Among the key lessons that today’s Gen Z activists can learn from Mau Mau, the most essential are building an organized movement and expanding political education among the youth. Over the past twelve months, Gen Z activists have shown that they are extremely effective at mobilizing thousands of young Kenyans through social media to come out to protest. The street demonstrations have become an important avenue for these youth to grieve in community, release pent-up anger and frustration, and ensure that their voices are being heard. The period of mobilization and actual demonstrations usually lasts for about a week before the energy begins to fizzle out. Everyone then goes back to their daily routine, the conversations continue online, and several weeks or months go by before the next round of protests starts all over again.

But what would happen if the periods of lull after every cycle of protests were used to build and expand the Gen Z movement? What difference would it make if members of the Gen Z movement congregated on their own terms rather than in response to yet another police killing or abduction of a government critic?

‣ Fireflies have been popping up a bit more around the US this summer due to rising humidity levels, but they’re still at risk of extinction. For Atmos, Oliver Milman talks to scientists about the future of the luminous critters:

Paradoxes swirl around fireflies like few other creatures, yet it is partly because of this mystery that an animal the length of a fingernail can appear to possess magic. “You’d have to be a cold person to hate fireflies,” said Heckscher. “I mean, they can create light from their own bodies. If we were to discover such a thing on another planet people would freak out, and yet it is happening in our backyards.”

Some of the scientific fogginess around fireflies has started to lift recently. A 2021 assessment of 132 species in the U.S. and Canada found that, while data on half this cohort was lacking, at least 18 species are threatened with extinction. “The last five years have been an exciting as well as a scary time for fireflies,” said Sara Lewis, an expert at Tufts University who cochairs the firefly group for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “It’s exciting that we’re now examining fireflies and have discovered a lot of new species. The scary part is there are quite a few firefly species being pushed to the edge of extinction.”

We are losing nature’s magicians before we properly know them. 

‣ It was time to cancel that NYT subscription, like, yesterday:

‣ Every American history museum ever:

‣ Not gonna sully the conversation with mention of that American Eagle ad, but let’s just say this is the version we all would’ve preferred:

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

Welcome to the 296th installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, artists prepare to say goodbye to their current studio and draw on the earth tones of an upbringing spent in the Southwest.

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

Janet Van Fleet, Barre, Vermont

How long have you been working in this space?

Twenty-five years.

Describe an average day in your studio.

I usually work from 9am until 3 or 4pm. I work in series, and on more than one thing at a time, often modifying pieces that I’m not altogether happy with by scavenging old work for good parts. I like silence, so I don’t listen to anything but the sound of the drill or the sander.

How does the space affect your work?

I’ve produced a lot of work in this studio over 25 years, and it’s getting pretty crowded with old work and materials. But I have arranged the room so that there’s a display/sitting space on one side and a working bench/storage space on the other, and that seems to be a good use of the space that has served well for many years.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

My studio is at Studio Place Arts (SPA), a three-story brick building in Barre, Vermont, that’s an art center with four exhibition spaces/galleries, a classroom, and 12 artist studios, so there’s much collegiality and lots of interesting work to see and discuss.

What do you love about your studio?

It’s comfortable and familiar and nestled in a space with other artists.

What do you wish were different?

I wish I had more room, but I’ve already got one of the biggest studios in the building — and the only one with a couch. I guess I could ditch the furniture, but you’ve got to have bread AND roses …

What is your favorite local museum?

There is none. SPA is it (though not really a museum).

What is your favorite art material to work with?

Many years ago, I used to be an oil painter, but now I make constructions with found natural and manufactured materials, primarily wood and metal (I avoid plastic). But there’s the additional question of color. I grew up in New Mexico, and I think those umber, sienna, black, and cream earth tones have lodged themselves in some emotional brain region (as they say that smells do).

Danqi Qian, Bushwick, Brooklyn

How long have you been working in this space?

Around a year.

Describe an average day in your studio.

I usually go in the afternoon since I work as a freelance designer during the day. I often work on several paintings at once so I can return to each with a fresh perspective. Before painting, I have a little ritual: I put on a posture corrector and a mask — it reminds me to maintain good posture and protects me from inhaling toxic fumes. These steps help shift my mindset from work mode into my painting world. Lately, I’ve been listening to audiobooks while I paint. They help me get into the zone faster than music. I used to listen to a lot of French pop like Paradis and Lewis OfMan, but I realized it makes my mind too active. Right now, I’m listening to Big Breasts and Wide Hips (Fengru Feitun) by Mo Yan.

How does the space affect your work?

My current studio has a large window where you can sometimes catch a beautiful sunset. It’s a really nice space that makes you want to spend time working. I like renting short-term studios in shared spaces — it makes me feel free. I can paint around others or by myself, depending on how I feel. I’m actually moving out of this studio soon. My next one is just a few minutes away, and I’ll be sharing it with three other artists. I’m really excited about it. Right now, I’m sharing my space with a showing artist who’s incredibly hardworking. Her dedication has really influenced me — making art takes both talent and a whole lot of hard work. There are days when I feel really frustrated with my work. I’ll look at my studiomate’s basket, filled with rolled-up canvases — I’m not sure if they’re finished, unfinished, or archived. But somehow, it encourages me to keep going. It reminds me to let go of perfectionism and high expectations, and just keep painting and do not give up.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

I live 10 minutes’ walking distance from my studio, so sometimes I walk to my studio where I’d pass lots of factories and storage places. The graffiti on the walls is so interesting to look at. I sometimes go to Greenpoint Art Circle critique nights. It’s a community of visual artists where we share our creative practice and grow our connections. It’s good to hear feedback from fresh eyes.

What do you love about your studio?

I feel really lucky to share my studio with a showing artist who is very generous about sharing her knowledge about art. She would always give me positive feedback, which really keeps me going.

What do you wish were different?

Nothing 🙂 I love everything about it!

What is your favorite local museum?

I love the Museum of Modern Art! Especially their Surrealism gallery and the room with Matisse’s “The Swimming Pool.” One day, I’d love to create an immersive art experience like that, something that transforms an entire room. My partner’s really into photography, and we recently visited the International Center of Photography. I saw Edward Burtynsky’s work there. It was incredible and super inspiring. It happened to be the opening night, I bought his book and even got it signed, lol.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

I used to love working with oil pastels — the instinctive, organic connection with color really spoke to me. You can just pick them up, start painting, smudge with your fingers, and get your hands dirty. Lately, I’ve been using oil paint with Gamsol because I want to build up more layers in my work — something that’s hard to do with oil pastels since they never fully dry.

You could’ve fried an egg on the sweltering sidewalk I trekked across last Friday to get to the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) — which is, happily, a city-mandated cooling center. Lately, the Central Branch’s resplendent Art Deco facade has been illuminated after dark with a projection of a creature vaguely resembling a hippopotamus, one of the beloved Moomins from late Swedish-speaking Finnish author and artist Tove Jansson’s illustrated universe. 

I first spied the Moomintroll, as he’s known, earlier this year at Stockholm’s Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, which staged a massive show about four Nordic illustrators in honor of the 80th birthday of Jansson’s captivating cast of fantastical characters. Collectively called the Moomins, the charming trolls have now taken over the BPL’s flagship library for Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open, where chapters of the queer artist’s remarkable life invite us into a sorely needed world of play.

Libraries are public spaces first and foremost, something Jansson believed in deeply — so it’s only fitting that The Door Is Always Open weaves its way through the very fabric of community at the Central Branch. Installations explaining her career and the genesis of the series dot the airy lobby, emphasizing the trolls’ appreciation for the natural world, equality, and individuality. The installations were cleverly designed to alternately resemble a chapter book, an unfolding accordion of pages, and even a living room from the trolls’ home in Moominvalley. Visitors can step into the free and adventurous everyday world of the Moomins, from the idiosyncrasies she bestowed on each character (Snufkin loves to play the harmonica and spend time alone) to the carefully designed Moominhouse (whose door, as the exhibition name suggests, is always open). Librarygoers wandered past and through the installations, while students typed away on laptops and families rested at the cafe, a scene that I suspect would’ve made the artist smile.

If this show is any indication, Jansson was a force of nature. The second floor of the library chronicles her work as an illustrator for books like a 1962 edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), her later years and travels with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä, and the legacy of the Moomins brand she founded alongside her brother in the late 1950s. We learn that she sustained herself with a practice that spanned poetry, advertising, murals and public art, and playwriting, and had established a successful career as a painter by her mid-20s. 

But when she published the first Moomins story at age 25, the course of her life shifted away from commercial painting. And there’s a reason she threw herself into writing the story of the Moomins instead. According to the wall text, “just as Tove was beginning to make a name for herself as an artist, the Second World War broke out and painting seemed meaningless.” I was struck by that sentence, in no small part because it mirrors what many artists may feel amid the genocide in Gaza and the seemingly endless injustices of our world flaring up all at once.

What was meaningful to Jansson in that moment, though, was making art of a different kind. Fashioning this other world entirely of her own making — one where trolls aren’t enemies, as they’re so often depicted in Scandinavian and other mythologies, but cherished friends and family, and fairy tale conventions give way to the principles of justice that ground her characters, even as they face internal and external challenges. The exhibition even extends into the children’s section on the first floor of the library and includes little Moomin cut-outs standing at a height where children can look them in the eye, offering a way to practice Jansson’s call to approach strangers as friends.

To my mind, it’s no accident that a queer artist and author dreamt up such a compassionate haven, where difference isn’t demonized and conflict is an opportunity for growth. As the programming around the exhibition makes clear, she recognized the wisdom of children and the invaluable role of art in nurturing imagination and empathy.

The portal as a metaphor is nothing new. Yet, regardless of your age, The Door Is Always Open empowers you to feel its true meaning — gently and generously, as if for the first time.

Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open continues at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library through September 30. The exhibition was organized by the Brooklyn Public Library with Moomin Characters, Moomin Arabia, Finnair, and the City of Tampere in Finland, home to the world’s only Moomin Museum.

The harsh realities of our world are softened by the steadfast gifts of nature, and August in Upstate New York brings its annual plentitude with art to match. As sunflowers rule the land this month, solo shows and group exhibitions around the region bring warmth and glee. Daniel Giordano presents a red-hued site-specific installation at the experimental Green Lodge in Chatham. Dynamic gallery shows in Kingston include paintings and sculptures by Jeanette Fintz and Monika Zarzeczna, respectively, both showing at 68 Prince Street Gallery; and Brandon Thomas Brown tells the story of ancestry through collaged photographs at Pinkwater Gallery. Exquisite mixed-media works by Ken Ragsdale at Front Room Gallery in Hudson will charm you, and Lynne Tobin’s line studies at Cross Contemporary Art Projects in Stone Ridge are cool and conceptual. Check out stoic paintings of the United States by Little Walt Dog at Ruffed Grouse Gallery in Narrowsburg and experience the vibrant energy of a group show at Gallery 495 in Catskill. With mighty August as our guiding light, let us enjoy these fleeting days of summer and an abundance of art this month!

Daniel Giordano: I Knew Your Father When He Had Cojones

The Green Lodge, 80 Center Street, Chatham, New York
Through August 17

Born and raised in Newburgh, New York, multi-media artist Daniel Giordano experiments with a broad range of atypical media to create eccentric sculptures and assemblages that defy categorization, with captions that read like epic poems. With recent solo shows at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts and the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York, Giordano is on a steady course toward ever-greater stardom. His site-specific installation, “I Knew Your Father When He Had Cojones” (2025), is as wild as it gets: He has burned the walls from the ceiling down, adding drawings on the windows and puffy fabrics on the floor, inviting viewers into his immersive fiery lair. Launched during Upstate Art Weekend with a special experimental live sound performance by the 181 Collective (an artist group based in Oregon and North Carolina), this show is a radiant vision of Giordano’s riotous art practice.

Jeanette Fintz and Monika Zarzeczna: Elusive Thresholds

68 Prince Street Gallery, 68 Prince Street, Kingston, New York
Through August 17

68 Prince Street Gallery presents two sensational abstract solo exhibitions at once in Elusive Thresholds. Work by Jeanette Fintz includes large-scale paintings that appear to groove and grapple with a quasi-architectural geometric language of endless possibilities, including vibrant works such as “Transit Adagio” (2022) and “Elusive Threshold” (2024). Monika Zarzeczna presents small wood sculptures arranged together on the wall and painted with bright acrylic colors that give them a capricious edge, and works such as “Chance is it?” (2025) and “Or Determined” (2025) are both layered and spacious, giving the impression of an open-ended narrative that we can arrange and re-arrange in our minds. 

Invoke & Imbibe

WomensWork.Art, 12 Vassar Street, Poughkeepsie, New York
Through August 24

A female-run gallery and platform for underrepresented creatives, WomensWork.Art in Poughkeepsie presents the juried exhibition Invoke & Imbibe, featuring works by 26 female and non-binary artists active in the Hudson Valley and beyond as selected by guest curator Jaime Ransome. With a desire to celebrate “unapologetic female energy,” as stated in the press release, Maria Krasnopolsky’s “Veiled Emilia” (2024) depicts a naked woman covered in a ghostlike veil as her hand gestures toward us. “One Without Shame” (2023) by Lauren Hollick features yet another naked woman, this time in the fetal position, lying flat on a cozy bed of natural moss and little white mushrooms. Evelyn Gardiner’s “To Consume A Butterfly” (2024) is a sultry oil painting that includes Latin text; in it, two women attempt to eat glorious butterflies in a natural setting as they try to escape. 

etheReality from breath to air, and back

Ann Street Gallery, 104 Ann Street, Newburgh, New York
Through August 31

A watery blue tone surfaces throughout various mixed-media works in the group show etheReality from breath to air, and back, which embodies the celestial. Curated by gallery director Alison McNulty, works such as “Enter Through Smoke” (2023) by Mollie McKinley radiate a mystical energy; made of carved and charred salt and blown glass, it is both organic and otherworldly. Linda Stillman’s “Daily Skies” (2011), a series of paper panels, appears to hum harmoniously with diverse shades of cobalt in a geometric pattern, while Amy Talluto’s clay sculpture “Multi-head (Spill Vase)” (2022) is a form that simultaneously resembles a fleshy human and something never before seen.

Ken Ragsdale: Symphony

Front Room Gallery, 205 Warren Street, Hudson, New York
Through August 31

Among the most impressive exhibitions in Upstate New York this month is an exhibition by Ken Ragsdale, where the Twilight Zone meets theatrical movie set mock-ups in a mesmerizing suite of 12 elegant paintings. Each title begins with “Symphony #1” (all works 2025), and a mysterious story unfolds from there: In “Symphony #1 2^nd Movement Evening ‘The Tractor Tire,’” we come upon a defunct tractor backlit against a cerulean night with thin white drawings of spinning gears occupying the sky. The other works follow a similar pattern: enigmatic worlds below with mathematical constellation-like drawings above. In “Symphony #1 1^st Movement Afternoon ‘The Slide,’” a children’s playground full of empty slides appears to be at the threshold of another galaxy, while “Symphony #1 2^nd Movement Morning ‘The Tent Trailer’” takes us into a trailer park environment but leaves us guessing as to where we are and what got us there. 

Ancestry: The Photography of Brandon Thomas Brown

Pinkwater Gallery, 237 Fair Street, Kingston, New York
Through September 2

Exploring the rich intersection between beauty and Black identity, photographer Brandon Thomas Brown is a master at capturing human complexity with candor and care. Ancestry brings together recent works that employ collage techniques and portraiture to express depth of character while hinting at personal wounds. “Operation” (2024) features a younger woman’s face cut apart and dissected to reveal an older woman at work under her skin against a deep pink background, while “No Time for Black Tears” (2025) is a portrait of a pensive man who leans forward, the hazy blue-hued lighting revealing the scars on his face. Set against a similar indigo backdrop, “Untitled [Dakaibo]” (2025) features a bare-chested man turning away, his stoic pose suggesting an intimate moment of personal reckoning. 

Adam Linn: Fascinator

Turley Gallery, 609 Warren Street, Floor 2, Hudson, New York
Through September 7

Turley Gallery typically presents at least two exhibitions at once, and this time around Adam Linn: Fascinator is one of three terrific shows (a visit there this month also gives you the chance to see magical glittery collaged works by Vickie Pierre and a theatrical site-specific installation by Sara Stern). Combining a graphic edge with a masterful command of colored pencil, gouache, and watercolor, Linn’s paintings feel like Pop-inspired industrial animation. “Fixations” (2025) is a vigorous yellow scene piqued by two opposing screwheads; meanwhile, one feels seduced by the sumptuous glowing pink machine of “Metalmouth” (2025), while the gears of “Rainbow Elixir” (2025) appear to melt into pure electrical magnificence.

Lynne Tobin | Line Studies Drawings

Cross Contemporary Art Projects, North River Electric House, Stone Ridge, New York
Through September 13

Lynne Tobin knows that the simple line is the ultimate muse. Her solo show is a celebration of the indomitable black line: going here, going there, going everywhere as guided by Tobin’s careful directions and discoveries. In “Threads #7” (2023), layers of them (one on top of the other) give the impression of woven fabric, while “Line Drama” (2018) is a long vertical drawing of five frantic black lines that start on the wall and run down to the floor in a beautiful and messy calligraphic jumble. In “Untitled” (2017), a meditative wave coming in from the right fades out into broken streaks of black stardust to the left. 

Little Walt Dog: Crossing America

Ruffed Grouse Gallery, 144 Main Street, Narrowsburg, New York
Through September 21

Taking inspiration from the diverse culture of his native Los Angeles and influential social moments such as the Watts Rebellion of 1965, a series of uprisings in response to violent confrontations between White law enforcement and Black civilians, Little Walt Dog (L.W.D.) paints with a brave spirit. His solo exhibition Crossing America features stark oil paintings (all works 2025) that offer barren and blunt visions of an empty United States occupied by lone cars. In “Crossing America #12,” a yellow vehicle approaches a black bridge against a bare background, while in “Crossing America #8,” two cars drift along a white road. In “Crossing America #15,” that same yellowish car from the overpass disappears into a bluish haze without a horizon as the headlights lead both the car and the road into a deserted mist.

In This Here Place, We Flesh

Gallery 495, 495 Main Street, Catskill, New York
Through October 4

Figuration plays a central role in the group exhibition In This Here Place, We Flesh. Curated by Maty Sall, three artists explore modes of humanity and the physical-meets-metaphysical in dynamically expressive works. “Between Thoughts” (2022) by Shiri Mordechay is an oversized watercolor work in which dolls, creatures, monsters, and swinging lightbulbs meet in a maelstrom of morphing forms. Aineki Traverso’s “Sub Specie Aeterni” (2025) is a row of works on paper with mystical abstract shapes and human eyes that extends down the wall, while Nkechi Ebubedike’s “Fragmented Figure II” (2025) combines dismembered parts of a figure, including legs and half a face, within an abstract architectural environs reminiscent of de Chirico, resulting in a lyrical vision of flesh within and without a place.

A 34-year-old man died after a fall from the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan on Wednesday, July 30.

Police responded to a 911 call at around 5:26pm, the New York Police Department (NYPD) told Hyperallergic. Upon arrival at 99 Gansevoort Street, they found the man “unconscious and unresponsive on the sidewalk outside the location with injuries indicative of falling from an elevated position.”

Police could not confirm whether the man fell accidentally or jumped, but Whitney Museum Director Scott Rothkopf told staff in an email Wednesday evening that “an individual jumped from Whitney property onto the plaza below,” as first reported by Artnews and confirmed by Hyperallergic.

The museum’s nine-story building in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, inaugurated in 2015, features tiers of terraces and outdoor exhibition spaces connected by an exterior staircase.

“Authorities are still determining the details, but we are devastated that a visitor lost their life,” a Whitney Museum spokesperson told Hyperallergic. “Our thoughts are with their family and friends, and with our staff, visitors and neighbors who were nearby when it occurred.” The Whitney will remain closed today, Thursday, July 31.

The identity of the deceased is being withheld pending notification of the family, police said. The investigation remains ongoing.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

I work at the New York Historical, a national history museum in New York City, and am tasked with helping to build thoughtful programming on how to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.  

There is much to navigate: funding cuts, Meta policies that discourage discourse, and a cultural moment that defaults to partisanship and cynicism. Yet notwithstanding this terrain, when we actually engage citizens, we have been finding great idealism and optimism.

“I wish citizens could gain the dedication to our country like the Greatest Generation had,” writes Letha from Texas on our virtual wish wall for the nation’s 250th. “I wish we could regain the unity they had, strongly dedicated to our country, working for a better future with a sense of duty and gratitude for our freedom.”

Our Museum began its work just after the presidential election and immediately sought funding for the initiative. One nascent idea we had was building a digital platform to collect “birthday wishes” from citizens across the country for our nation and its democracy. In one meeting with a prospective and well-connected donor, I made my pitch for a site that would be both celebratory and sober — and rigorously nonpartisan. He quickly worried about this approach, suggesting that even the invocation of “birthday” was too light under the current circumstances. “I believe there is a more than 50% chance the President will cancel the midterm elections – and this is no time to celebrate a birthday.” Clearly, the mood is dark for at least some. 

Notwithstanding his counsel, we moved forward on a site entitled OnOur250th.org that invites users to leave five- to 50-word submissions. We built a coalition of 27 history museums across the nation to join in collecting physical and digital notes over the next year. Meeting with museum leaders from red, purple, and blue states was instructive. They were game to join — which was critical, as collecting notes from only New York City residents has limited value — yet issued sharp warnings: when they have engaged the public in recent years, they were flooded with attacks and anger. These museums helped us develop a list of “ground rules” that we could use so that we could be transparent about why we were not going to post unproductive submissions, which generally include profanity, violence, or irrelevant content.

And then came Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. In the middle of the night, a junior museum administrator received emails informing us that promised funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services would be cut. Suddenly, the museum’s budget could be out of balance. We explored the path of corporate support. Yet, this world too has been turned upside down, as companies that have traditionally supported museum work on nonpartisan history projects now fear any civic engagement might be too controversial. Getting other, smaller museums to chip in was also not possible. So, we decided to move forward on our own, cutting spending on exhibition advertising and hoping some success would generate support — which wonderfully it did, as a generous foundation stepped up.  

I’ve led communications at nonprofits for decades and — with rare exceptions — subscribe to the “as long as they’re spelling our name right” school of public relations. But the complications around OnOur250th.org were different, particularly the gravitational force to be drawn into political conflicts. One media outlet was interested in covering our work, but only if we would agree to comment on the Trump Administration’s attacks on national museum leaders and arts funding. “Wouldn’t your museum want to speak up for democracy at this moment?” asked the reporter. Of course we are appalled at the attack on museums and their independence. But we exist for a more circumscribed purpose: to educate Americans about their history, so we can help create a more perfect union. 

And so we reached out to national television cable networks, eventually securing a coveted segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe for our institution’s leader. In a prior era, this interview, plus the NPR and arts publication coverage we received, would’ve been considered great victories. Now, one museum supporter emailed her lamentation that we were only launching on “liberal media.” When the museum sought to make a modest purchase of digital ads to promote OnOur250th.org on Facebook and Instagram, Meta flagged our content as “political.” That’s because, wait for it, our ad agency says we dared to use the word “democracy” in our copy.

In fairness, the media have reason to consider celebrating our nation’s birthday a political act — three White House administrations in a mere five years have offered dramatically different approaches to the 250th. During his first term in 2020, President Trump launched a national commission for the 250th that quickly devolved into partisan accusations and arguments. President Biden tried a new approach that received modest traction, only to be quickly ended and then replaced by America250, led by former Fox News pundit and current US Chief of Protocol Monica Crowley, who observers point out was rewarded for organizing the recent military parade in Washington, DC, on the president’s birthday.  

Yet somehow and wonderfully, once we launched OnOur250th.org the postings have continually come in from our fellow citizens, and they have been breathtaking and inspiring. “My wish is for greater national unity and for us to return to standing as a country united in serving all its citizens,” wrote Phyliss from Illinois. Themes of equality, education, and opportunity are ever-present, and very rarely do we have to suppress a comment for violating our content guidelines. We’ve received submissions from middle schoolers to senior citizens, from almost every state in the union. It’s certainly not easy — I had no idea how hard it would be to persuade people to take the time to share a submission about democracy, and while we are at 10,000 or so now, we hope for many more.

Much more locally, I found inspiration in a community in the Adirondacks. 

Every year, my wife and I spend the Fourth of July up north with friends, where key battles were fought in the Revolutionary War. We stay on a lake with 50 houses or so, where one family has an annual multi-generational gathering for days, the highlight of which is a parade organized down a dirt road, where about 30 adults, children, and dogs march while waving small flags.

There’s a connection between this gathering and the founding of our nation. In 1776, in large and small cities, towns, and villages, copies of the Declaration of Independence were posted in public squares, which provoked gatherings of calls for independence.

I feared that partisanship and animosity would infect the festivities this year, as the lake residents surely have a variety of views. I was wrong to worry. The parade had not an iota of politics, and people proudly waved American flags (and a few Pride flags) and wore goofy red, white, and blue attire. Soon the parade stopped in front of us, and we all sang along to “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” 

A nonpartisan gathering of community about our nation brought us joy and optimism.  Similarly, Mike from Pennsylvania wrote on our wish wall, “May our country continue as it has been, a beacon of liberty and goodness to the world, as we strive to form a more perfect union.”  

By shining a light on these sentiments, surely we can be a more perfect union.  

BERLIN — The Berlin Biennale had not even opened its doors to the public when criticism started rolling in. In May, curator Zasha Colah told an interviewer, “There is no censorship, I would say, in Germany.” In reality, there is ample documentation of the German state’s active repression of expressions of solidarity with the people of Palestine through police force, accusations of antisemitism, targeted arrests, criminal charges, coercion through the justice system, deportation, and banning. Organizations that stand for decolonial, queer, and feminist positions have had their funding withdrawn; artists and writers have had prizes rescinded and readings and events canceled; and speaking languages other than German or English at demonstrations can lead to police harassment and arrest. It’s been a policy of intimidation and punishment with the aim of ruining the reputations and careers of anyone voicing compassion for the victims of what more and more people are finally — after nearly two years and 60,000 dead — daring to call a German-government-enabled genocide. 

Under repressive regimes, art and literature of political heft are forced into hiding to escape persecution. In Germany, on the other hand, cultural workers are unwilling to go out on a limb and express an opinion for fear of repercussions for their careers or funding, an anxiety that might be described as “preemptive obedience” and that essentially amounts to self-censorship. Although Colah is herself no stranger to the unique difficulties attached to public funding, and one can only imagine the tightrope walk this exhibition must have entailed, choosing a curatorial concept that circumvents what is happening in the here and now in Berlin and Germany is questionable at best. Inspired by the city’s nocturnal wildlife, the 13th Berlin Biennale frames “foxing” as an ostensibly subversive position that adopts the animal’s slyness and “fugitivity.” Yet failing to address the repressive political climate or take a stance involving even a modicum of risk amounts to complicity — even if many of the works included model resistance, their contexts are notably deemed “safe” in Germany.

The works shown in the Berlin Biennale come from nearly 40 countries, the majority of them employing strategies hatched in non-German sociopolitical contexts. In offering what are essentially blueprints for how art can respond to lawful violence in unjust systems, they read like a call to action for artists in the West whose main struggle has, until very recently, been trying to balance a teaching job or freelance employment with their studio practice and the rising cost of rent. 

In Berlin, much of the activism and cultural political discourse has retreated to the private sphere, where artists open up their studios for intimate meetings among friends, and invitations are extended by word of mouth. And indeed, the curatorial focus of the Berlin Biennale is on fugitive, i.e., oral and participatory, forms of information transmission. One of the most salient examples is a film from 1977 by the Akademia Ruchu (Movement Academy), a Polish group led by the late Wojciech Krukowski. “Potknięcie” (Slip) was performed in front of the Communist party headquarters in Warsaw, with members posing as anonymous passersby suddenly (and flamboyantly, and hilariously) stumbling on the pavement to the surprise of the uninitiated around them. Posing as absurd theater but closely tied to Lech Wałęsa and the powerful anti-communist Solidarność movement, the political resistance Akademia Ruchu enacted in public space was lost on no one — and contributed, in a very real way, to the overthrow of an oppressive regime. 

“Potknięcie” is just one of many potent forms of collective resistance presented by the Biennale, and although many of these groups are no longer active, they continue to serve as powerful models for the present. In the aftermath of the massacre in Srebrenica, Serbian artist Milica Tomić co-founded the artists’ collective Grupa Spomenik (Monument Group) to explore whether art and theory can generate a language to speak about genocide. Highlighting the work of Jacques Lacan and his “Borromean Knot,” a model for analyzing human subjectivity, Grupa Spomenik interrogated false narratives to better understand the limits of representation. In her performance “The Berlin Statement. Who Makes Profit on Art and Who Gains from It Honestly,” which expands on Yugoslavian conceptual artist Raša Todosijević’s “Edinburgh Statement” of 1975 to incorporate the digital realm and defines art as a site of political and ideological conflict, Tomić calls out people who attend exhibitions “not to encounter art, but to scan for potential violations” and everyone who refuses to accept a reality that “demands they live in a world without Palestinians.” In the midst of what is otherwise a striking absence of artists speaking to this harrowing reality, Tomić’s statement comes as a relief. 

Spread out over four venues, the Biennale features many works that implement civil disobedience and humor to undermine power. Mila Panić’s stand-up comedy routines use hilarity to bypass the pieties of political correctness and break through the rhetoric surrounding war, displacement, and refugee life. Additional highlights are the works of Erfurt, an underground group of East German feminist artists active between 1984 and 1994; paintings by Burmese artists Busui Ajaw and Htein Lin, the latter of whom used scraps of bed linen to create vivid paintings that were then smuggled out of a prison he spent six long years in; Italian artist Anna Scalfi Eghenter’s installation “The Comedy!” (2025), which traces the history of socialist revolutionary Karl Liebknecht, whose trial took place in the very building housing the exhibition; and Isaac Kalambata’s tactile, multi-media work “Witchfinders,” which explores how allegations of witchcraft served colonialist goals in Zambia. 

Luzie Meyer’s “Berlin Piece for Voice and Tap Music” (2025), a six-channel audio piece in the form of six small loudspeakers mounted on three walls at the Sophiensäle, is one of the only other works in the Biennale that directly addresses the current cultural-political context in Germany. Drawing from notebooks and overlaying fragments of news coverage, Senate debates, and personal reflection, voices that sound vaguely like AI merge with minimal music and percussion to create a sound poetry that feels like it’s occurring just below the threshold of consciousness. Phrases such as “cultural policy is euphemism turned flesh” unexpectedly punctuate the soundscape, and at some point, startlingly, one hears, or believes one has heard, “hypocrisy, Germany’s second-largest export” — a jolting, largely isolated moment of frankness that speaks to the silencing of dissent in the exhibition’s host country. 

Several works in the Biennale have adopted the fox as trope. At Hamburger Bahnhof, for instance, Larissa Araz’s delicate drawings in chalk on the black walls of the darkened space portray the Vulpes vulpes kurdistanica, the Kurdistan red fox whose territory lies in the wild borderlands between Turkey, Armenia, and Kurdistan. In one of many attempts to render invisible a people whose existence it finds inconvenient and dangerous, Turkish authorities renamed the animal Vulpes vulpes, a taxonomic example for how language is routinely altered to erase history. Correspondingly, the chalk of the drawings is just as easily erased, suggesting a strategy of clandestineness, fugitivity, and deniability in the simple act of recording that which is no longer part of the official record. 

No one has better described the inherent ambiguity in adopting the fox as a totem than the late Croatian exiled author Dubravka Ugrešić, whose Fox (2017) famously plays with the manifold traits traditionally associated with the reclusive animal, among them “cunning, betrayal, wile, sycophancy, deceit, mendacity, hypocrisy … and vindictiveness ….” It is a strategy of survival that uses, unapologetically, every means at its disposal; given the political climate, it’s a potent image for a curatorial concept. Yet it’s difficult to understand how an exhibition as visible as the Biennale can fail to address its own volatile context. Paradoxically, World War II guilt and a decades-long process of “Aufarbeitung” — reckoning with the atrocities Germany committed in the war, while remaining mute on the colonial-era massacre of the Nama and Herero people and its complicity in the current genocide — have paralyzed the country’s ability to live up to its own moral code of “Never Again.” In One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025), the Canadian-Egyptian journalist Omar el Akkad writes: “When the past is past, the dead will be found to not have partaken in their own killing.” His book has just been translated into German; let’s hope that, in joining the other lonely voices crying out in the dark, cracks emerge in the façade of silence to illuminate what has long been hiding in plain sight. 

The 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art continues at multiple venues across Berlin through September 14. The exhibition was curated by Zasha Colah and Valentina Viviani.

MEXICO CITY — A group of anti-gentrification protesters vandalized the contemporary art museum of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) on Sunday, July 20, as demonstrations against rising housing prices and the growing displacement of local residents continue across the city.

Black bloc protesters graffitied and broke windows on the campus before arriving at the cultural center, which houses the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), a concert hall, several theatres, and other facilities, including the Julio Torri Bookstore, which they broke into and ransacked. Protesters smashed the glass balustrade surrounding the museum’s angled façade and cracked half a dozen tempered glass panels, which dangled near a small pile of burning books on the esplanade while others graffitied Rufino Tamayo’s monumental outdoor sculpture “La Espiga” (1980). Protesters did not gain entry to the museum, and no other artworks sustained damage. 

According to one of the organizers, Náme Villa del Ángel, the protest was not meant to arrive at the UNAM’s campus, but had branched off from the planned route after being harassed and kettled by riot police. The previous day, organizers had explicitly called for a peaceful protest on social media, citing the possibility that the march might face a smear campaign. Police, who do not usually enter the campus because of the university’s self-governing status — although they are not legally barred from doing so — were no longer on the scene when demonstrators arrived at the MUAC. The UNAM, Mexico’s largest university and an important civic symbol, was on a three-week summer break, with the campus sitting largely empty.

The extent of the damage, and a perceived incongruity between the cause of the march and the museum’s public mission, generated a local news avalanche. A group of notable academics and artists, including Graciela de la Torre, a former MUAC director, issued a statement on July 22 condemning the events and demanding “the origin of these acts of vandalism be clarified.”

Among the signatories was artist Magali Lara, whose ongoing career retrospective at the MUAC is visible from the gallery windows facing the esplanade. 

“It looks more like ‘shock groups’ than a real protest,” said Lara, referring to the historic use of paid groups to subvert righteous causes in Mexico. “I think it is very dangerous that the UNAM or any other public institution be exposed in this manner to groups that are bent, it appears to me, on destruction.”

The most infamous of Mexico’s shock groups was the Halcones (“Falcons”), a paramilitary group involved in the Corpus Christi massacre of June 10, 1971, when a student protest in favor of university self-governance ended in bloodshed. The “Halconazo” marked the beginning of the period known as the “dirty wars,” a time of increased social repression in the country.

Supporters of the anti-gentrification movement framed the events within the context of a city-wide dispute over public space, water, and housing. 

“There is a lot of anger, there is a lot of outrage,” said Villa del Ángel. “Contemporary art represents elitism and an elitization of spaces that were initially created for the working class, like the UNAM.”

The impact of gentrification in Mexico City has been felt profoundly by many of its residents, and its root cause is a topic of heated political debate. A measurable increase in demand for short-term rentals — especially through Airbnb — in centrally located, trendy neighborhoods has fueled a perception that so-called “digital nomads,” who work from the city remotely and earn in stronger currencies than the Mexican peso, drive the issue, displacing less affluent renters to the city’s periphery.

This is the second time in less than a year that the MUAC’s building has been targeted during a demonstration. Last fall, an exhibition by Argentinean artist Ana Gallardo generated protests for its inclusion of derogatory language toward elderly sex workers. The museum apologized, removed two works from view, and organized a series of public programs in collaboration with the aggrieved parties.

While sympathetic to the anti-gentrification movement, Lara is skeptical that the recent protests will help the issue.

“We live in a complicated moment. But that does not justify the destruction of an institution whose function has to do with learning, connection, critique, and dialogue,” she said. “The MUAC may have many flaws, but not these.”

Awdah Hathaleen, a beloved Palestinian activist and teacher who worked on the Oscar-winning documentary film No Other Land (2024), was shot and killed by an Israeli settler on Monday in Umm al-Khair, in the Occupied West Bank.

Yuval Abaraham, an Israeli investigative journalist and co-director of No Other Land, shared a distressing video on X of a settler identified as Yinon Levi brandishing a firearm in front of a bulldozer and firing.

At one point in the video, Levi is seen pointing his gun upward and firing toward a fence. A separate X post from film co-director Basel Adra shows medical supplies scattered near a pool of blood behind a nearby fence. Hathaleen reportedly had been standing about 150 feet away from Levi at a nearby community center when he was shot in the chest, per Abrahm’s account.

Reached on X, Abraham told Hyperallergic that Hathaleen assisted the Israeli-Palestinian director collective in filming the documentary, which chronicled Palestinian mass expulsion from nearby Masafer Yatta. Abraham did not specify which scenes Hathaleen worked on.

“I can hardly believe it,” co-director Adra, the film’s main subject, wrote on X. “My dear friend Awdah was slaughtered this evening. He was standing in front of the community center in his village when a settler fired a bullet that pierced his chest and took his life. This is how Israel erases us — one life at a time.”

Levi has a notorious history of engaging in settler violence against Palestinians. He was one of the initial four Israeli settlers sanctioned by the United States last year under the Biden administration. President Trump has since repealed those restrictions, however, which included visa bans. The State Department accused Levi of regularly leading groups of settlers to assault Palestinians and Bedouins and making threats of further violence unless they left their homes. Israeli police arrested Levi following this week’s attack, but he was later released on house arrest.

In March, Palestinian film co-director Hamdan Ballal was beaten by Israeli settlers and subsequently arrested by Israeli soldiers.

No Other Land generated impressive accolades in the film festival circuit, securing the Oscar award for best feature-length documentary. During their Oscar acceptance speech, the film’s four directors called to “stop injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.” Despite its critical acclaim, the film does not have a US distributor.

In 2008, I gave birth at home, in the bed I still sleep in today, to my second child; and instead of marveling at their vernix-covered scalp and the fact of their being born in the caul during a full moon, I had an extended anxiety attack, convinced I wasn’t a good enough feminist to be a good mother to this baby who I thought at the time was a girl. This led to a reckoning — in order to love and parent my children, I had to love and accept myself — and forced a shift in my art practice toward short bursts of feminist performance that I could accomplish after bedtime.

It’s with this and many other experiences in mind that I approached Jordan Troeller’s new book Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury (2025), which looks at the community of Bay Area women modernists around Asawa in the 1950s and ’60s, including Merry Renk, Beth Van Hoesen, Sally Byrne Woodbridge, and Imogen Cunningham. Asawa and her circle didn’t make work about motherhood; they made work while mothering. Troeller argues that by using the rhythms of the domestic as organizing principles and forging an interdependent care and creative community, and in spite of ideas of the modern male genius alone in his studio, these women modernists “made motherhood into a medium.” 

I’m not sure about motherhood as a medium in and of itself — it’s certainly an art — perhaps best understood as endurance art. Nonetheless, I loved reading about Asawa’s art practice while she raised six children and made work not in a standalone studio but in the house where they lived together. Troeller shows us the lives and practices of artist-mothers who nurtured children, creativity, and communities simultaneously. 

She organizes the book into three parts: “Household Objects,” “Metaphors of (Pro)creation,” and “Caretaking in Public.” The first usefully delves into the artists’ chosen materials, such as paper and wire, that had no fumes, and were thus not dangerous to children and compatible with nurture work. Troeller writes that Asawa “was someone in constant dialogue with fragility, dependence, and vulnerability.” Interruption and responsiveness are not just conditions of childcare and time and space, Asawa affirmed, but of creativity and generativity. The skills of keeping a human alive are inherently artistic.

Imogen Cunningham, a photographer who was many years Asawa’s senior, is a major focus in the book’s second section. In one arresting spread, we see her portrait of Gertrude Stein from 1935 across from her similarly posed portrait of Ruth Asawa from 1975 — both “portrayed as titans, imposing figures at the height of their powers,” Troeller writes. Troeller also beautifully connects the technique of repetition in their work; Asawa’s rows and rows of looped metal echo Stein’s “a rose is a rose is a rose.” 

Asawa’s belief that “you can only learn by doing” guides the third section, which focuses on arts education and art making as community care. She wanted an artist in every public school and spent a decade working on a pedagogical experiment called the Alvarado School Arts Workshop (now the San Francisco Arts Education Project). I appreciated the amount of space Troeller spends on “baker’s clay” — the flour, salt, and water concoction that hundreds of students used to make self-portraits, and that Asawa used to model what would become her Hyatt Fountain. 

In this way, the author gets to the heart of something extraordinary: “motherhood not as a biographical horizon but as a relationship to artistic materials, a feature of artistic self-fashioning, and a condition of reception.” My hours on the kitchen floor making slime are part of my aesthetic; I know this, yet I still love to see it reflected back at me.

Like Hettie Judah and other authors in recent years, Troeller uses the term “artist-mother” rather than “mother-artist,” and shows us how reciprocity and caretaking become the work itself, not just the subject or the conditions. For art and children to survive and sometimes thrive, I depended on multiple sticky web systems: a child care co-op in Williamsburg (where we’d sometimes breastfed each other’s babies) and another one later in Jackson Heights, a shared garden with shared childcare responsibilities, an Upstate commune for three weeks every summer, a few years of collaborative performance work with No Wave Performance Task Force, curator-mothers who understood the work, two residencies at the Museum of Motherhood in St. Petersburg, and dozens of art moms near and far to commiserate with and challenge and hold and love. 

Troeller has crafted a lucid and ludic portrait not of a singular artist, but of an artist among other artists. This deeply researched and insightful book models non-patriarchal forms of both making art and narrating its history, reminding us that taking care of children and making art — be it public art, community work, with children, or for children — are radical acts of parenting and anti-totalitarian making.

Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury (2025) by Jordan Troeller is published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press and is available online and through independent booksellers.

Sometimes it seems like the art world has a short attention span, skipping from one trend to the next, so it’s satisfying to find exhibitions that hold onto histories and memories. In different ways, the shows below all maintain a connection with the past. For artists Candida Alvarez and Thomas Holton, this may mean summoning childhood memories and cultural traditions or looking back on tender and casual moments among family. For other artists, such as those included in Queer Lineages at the Wallach Art Gallery, drawing on the past involves learning from artistic precursors who broke down boundaries. Or, if you’re squeezing in a late-summer trip upstate, you could be exploring a fascinating history of mushrooms and the equally fascinating story of a renegade mycologist. —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor

Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop

El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan
Through August 3

“Throughout [Alvarez’s] oeuvre, abstraction and representation bleed into one another in the same way that memories momentarily coagulate into images before dissolving again.” —NH

Read the full review.

Thomas Holton: The Lams of Ludlow Street

Baxter St. Camera Club, 154 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan
Through August 13

“These photos reveal the beauty emergent from a lifestyle of frequenting businesses run by those of the mother culture, of scrimping and upcycling, and of dutiful ingenuity.” —Lisa Yin Zhang

Read the full review.

Homage: Queer Lineages on Video

Wallach Art Gallery, 615 West 129th Street, 6th Floor, Manhattanville, Manhattan
Through October 19

“In Homage: Queer Lineages on Video, artists draw upon the legacies of folks who opened the doors we now get to walk through.” —Daniel Larkin

Read the full review.

Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms

New York State Museum, 222 Madison Avenue, Albany, New York
Through January 4, 2026

“Not only was [Banning] one of the first women to put a name to an entire group, or taxon, of fungus, but a full 23 of the 175 species she records in the manuscript were unknown in the field at the time” —Alexis Clements

Read the full review.

Picture this: You are a set of clothes hangers strung out on a rooftop clothesline, placed there by a family trying to extend their supply of square footage and fresh air in their small apartment (“Drying Laundry,” 2004). You are part of the family order created and maintained by the mother and captured by the photographer: In “Bathtime” (2004), for instance, you hang expectantly above the bath, and you are indispensable to “Family Portrait” (2004), framing the top edge of the composition with a line of coats. You watch the shadows grow long (“Peeking at the Neighbors,” 2003), watch a little boy bike around, watch him grow up. The little girl becomes a moody teenager, holding a flip phone in her hands (“Bored,” 2011), and then a smartphone (“Watching Black Mirror,” 2019). The stylish mother is now embracing her fashion sense — in “Outfit of the Day” (2024), she’s in full streetwear, including a tan jumpsuit and a Supreme bag. 

Throughout The Lams of Ludlow Street, an exhibition of photographs by Thomas Holton at the Baxter St Camera Club of New York, certain objects, like those clothes hangers, will pop up over and over again. Holton’s photographs are drawn from his eponymous series, begun in 2003, that follows the Lams, a Chinese-American family living in New York City’s Chinatown. The project centers on domestic textures, drawing attention not only to where but how the Lams live. This risks fetishization: Part of the appeal of the series is peering into the lived realities of five people in a cramped, 350-square-foot apartment. And who can forget Israeli artist Omer Fast’s 2017 exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, also in Chinatown, in which he transformed the upscale gallery into what he imagined the space to have looked like beforehand — peeling awning, folding chairs, broken ATM? 

There is a sensitive way to approach immigrant and/or diasporic aesthetics, and I think Holton does so here. These photos reveal the beauty emergent from a lifestyle of frequenting businesses run by those of the mother culture, of scrimping and upcycling, and of dutiful ingenuity. Small details caught my eye: the rainbow duster I’ve seen in many a shop in Flushing, the Chinatown of Queens (not to sound like Eric Adams); the calendars produced by Chinese pharmacies; the shoelace that holds a door open in “Passport Photos” (2003), reminding me of the SunnyD bottle my grandfather once affixed to a showerhead to increase the water pressure. Items like the family-sized box of Quaker oats in the background of “A Month Before College” (2018) feel vital to me, a symbol of how we subsume American brands into our culture rather than the other way around in the classic tale of immigrants assimilating or “Americanizing.”

Holton is an insider’s outsider, or maybe vice versa: A lifelong New Yorker of mixed Chinese and “American” descent, as the press release confusingly puts it, he grapples with a “sense of detachment from his Chinese roots” through this series, “bridg[ing] the gaps in his own identity through the lens of another family’s experiences.” Indeed, thresholds feature prominently. The ajar apartment door in “Passport Photos,” the first work on view, seems like the proverbial open door to the show for viewer and photographer alike. “Front Door” (2005) captures the Lams’ thickly painted apartment door from the outside, as if Holton can’t quite work his way inside. 

I first saw a selection of these photos in May 2021, just a year after the police murder of George Floyd ignited international protests and racial reckoning. We were still in the thick of COVID-19, and its attendant rise in hate crimes against Asians. Across two-week iterations, four photographs — “Bath Time,” “Waiting for Dinner” (2011), “After Swimming” (2013), and “Watching ‘Black Mirror’” (all in this show)— were exhibited at Home gallery, a storefront window on Ludlow Street. As I wrote in a review for the Brooklyn Rail, I was initially discomfited by what I perceived to be a voyeuristic gaze, central to photography in general but particular to a photographer who wanted to understand himself better through his subjects. I was soothed after talking to Michael Lam, the oldest of the siblings, who spoke of Holton as an “uncle” who babysat the children while young and drove them to college a decade or more later. 

Indeed, seen in this way — dozens of large and small photographs hung in loosely chronological order, with some in frames and others pinned directly to the wall — what comes through most clearly might be the depth of Holton’s commitment to the Lams, which transcends Ludlow Street. New works display elements of the their own self-fashioning, as the children have grown into themselves. My favorite piece in the show might be “Taylor Swift Karaoke” (2024), in which that once little girl is luminous, even ecstatic, singing with her eyes shut and her palm splayed open in what is decidedly not a Chinatown apartment. Even the style of the photographs shows signs of change: The blue and pink light (“bisexual lighting,” in internet parlance) of “A Crowded Christmas” (2024), which depicts her staring straight out at the camera, looks like it could be a still from Euphoria. “Lunar New Year Dinner” (2024) looks distinctly more Instagram-y to my eye — overhead perspective, saturated colors — than 2011’s subdued “Dinner for Seven,” taken from the perspective of a dinner guest. 

The Lams of Ludlow Street inaugurates Baxter St Camera Club’s new white cube space — on Ludlow Street. It would have been an unthinkable tenant during much of the photographs’ time span. I hope it proves as rooted, committed, and accountable to its Lower East Side community as Holton has been to the Lams.  

Thomas Holton: The Lams of Ludlow Street continues at Baxter St Camera Club of New York (154 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through August 13. The exhibition was organized by the institution.

According to a United Nations report released in June, Israel has destroyed more than half of all religious and cultural sites in Gaza. The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said of the findings that attacks on cultural sites, including museums, mosques, and archaeological landmarks, hinder Palestinian self-determination and will have impacts for generations to come. Although it is known that the destruction of cultural and religious sites serves to erase historical connections to the land, the issue is rarely the focus of nuanced reporting, according to human rights journalist Mischa Geracoulis.

In her new book Media Framing and the Destruction and Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2025), Geracoulis, who is the managing editor of the media literacy organization Project Censored, argues that the way in which assaults on heritage are presented to the public is critical to linking these attacks to atrocity crimes, including genocide and war crimes.

Narratives that engage in victim blaming surrounding cultural heritage exacerbate dehumanizing treatment in Gaza, Artsakh (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh), and beyond, she explains in her text, which examines how news narratives around heritage attacks inform humanitarian responses. 

“There’s just been so little coverage,” Geracoulis said in an interview with Hyperallergic, characterizing Western media reports on cultural destruction in those regions. “It’s been more of an absence of coverage than just glaring mistakes.” 

Geracoulis pointed to a failure of major media organizations to frame the destruction of cultural sites in both Gaza and Artsakh as human rights violations. Framing, referring to the journalistic perspective of certain events, involves both the journalist’s perspective and what is included or excluded from a story. Her new book, which is geared primarily toward students and academics, is part of Routledge’s series on media and humanitarianism.

The media coverage that does contend with heritage attacks, Geracoulis said, often parrots propagandized official rhetoric. Geracoulis points to oversimplified Western news narratives as informing lackluster efforts to halt cultural destruction or further dehumanization of the oppressed.

Checking the framing of a story, Geracoulis said, is equally important to standard fact-checking. Relying heavily on official spokespeople to report on the destruction of cultural heritage might portray a reality different from “on the ground” reporting, Geracoulis told Hyperallergic. Instead, journalists should provide historical and geographic context and solicit information from the ground. 

Geracoulis’s family emigrated to the United States in the early 20th century as a direct result of the Armenian Genocide from 1915 to 1923, during which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were exterminated under the Ottoman government. After the genocide, Ottoman-allied Azerbaijan razed Armenian heritage from Nakhichevan, a territory given to the country by the Soviets, from which it expelled Armenians. By 1924, 10,000 medieval Armenian cross-stones, called khachkars, located in the largest ancient Armenian gravesite, were reportedly reduced to 3,000. Khachkars contain devotional depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion, and each one is unique. The Azerbaijani military has reportedly been filmed intentionally destroying these stone crosses in Artsakh.

Azerbaijan seized the formerly autonomous Armenian territory of Artsakh in 2024, displacing more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians from the region. In 2022, Azerbaijan violated its ceasefire with Armenia and Russia by blocking the Lachin corridor, the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. The blockade prevented the flow of necessities, prompting the former chief International Criminal Court prosecutor to warn that a genocide was being committed. Turkey and Azerbaijan, which are closely allied, deny the Armenian Genocide. (Biden became the first US president to recognize the Armenian Genocide in 2021.)

Geracoulis also traces the lack of accountability for the Armenian Genocide as paving the way for Azerbaijan’s ongoing destruction. 

Among the landmarks in Gaza destroyed by Israel’s military, according to the UN, was the Great Omari Mosque, the oldest on the strip. A quote from an anonymous Israeli official cited in NPR’s reporting stated that the mosque “contained a tunnel shaft used by militants,” an accusation frequently made by the Israeli military when it targets civilian hubs and heritage sites. The UN report commission also documented allegations of artifact looting from the Pasha Palace Museum, built in the 13th century and home to artifacts of local archaeology, the Israa University museum, and a warehouse belonging to the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jerusalem. 

While international human rights responses to these attacks might be limited, media organizations can influence governments to act on crimes of cultural destruction, Geracoulis writes. 

At best, major media can activate what Geracoulis dubs the “toolbox of international relations.” But narratives that frame victims as complicit in aggravated assault on their cultural heritage promote a view of humanitarian aid and other actions as unwarranted. Cultural heritage should be “part of an ongoing conversation, not … novelty news items,” that frames atrocity with more nuance.

“Language and stories around cultural heritage have geopolitical implications,” Geracoulis writes. “Because conflict is often justified through historical narratives, and because cultural heritage is tied to identity and homeland, stories around cultural heritage may be purposed to either legitimate or exploit geopolitical aims.”

A three-alarm fire tore through parts of the Miccosukee Reservation in the Florida Everglades on Sunday night, destroying family homes, a community center where residents learned sewing and weaving, and a traditional Chickee structure, as well as troves of art and artifacts.

The blaze broke out around 8:40pm on July 27 at the Miccosukee Tiger Camp along the Tamiami Trail. The fire is believed to have been accidental, the Miccosukee Police Department said, but an investigation is still ongoing. No casualties were reported.

Khadijah Cypress, a patchwork artist who led the now-destroyed Creativity Center, lives next door to the camp and said she first saw the flames engulfing resident Mary Jane Cantu’s home on the property.

“I was banging on Mary Jane’s door, yelling out, ‘There’s a fire!’” Cypress told Hyperallergic. As they waited for fire trucks to arrive, her father and other community members rushed to the scene, attempting to put out the blaze. But then Cypress heard the explosions of the propane tanks.

“In my heart, I knew everything was gone at the first pop of that propane tank,” she recounted.

Cypress said she felt fortunate that the fire did not reach her home and emphasized the urgency of supporting displaced families by donating to the Tiger Camp Relief Fund. In the coming days, Cypress hopes to meet with Tribal members and start a donation pool for the Creativity Center, which was entirely consumed by the blaze, turning everything from beloved designs to decades-old fabrics into ashes.

“I gave seven years of my life to that center. It felt like it was my calling,” Cypress said. “My late grandfather had always told me, ‘Us, as Miccosukees, we have to learn as much as we can about ourselves. Because if you don’t pick up on anything, we’ll lose everything.’”

The project began with her sisters learning how to sew out of a small shed behind their mother’s property. Three sewing machines grew to eight and then 12 as more and more girls came to bead, stitch dolls, weave baskets, and create taweekaache patchwork in the Miccosukee and Seminole traditions. Eventually, Cypress’s grandfather, then the Tribe’s assistant councilman, helped them establish a permanent home in an unused section of the Tiger Camp building. Community members donated any supplies they could get their hands on to help maintain the sewing stations.

“Most people don’t have a lot, but they said, ‘Don’t worry, I got you,’” Cypress recalled. “Now the last piece of showing how much they care is gone. That’s what hurts me the most.”

The fire has left Tribal members heartbroken as they mourn the loss of a multigenerational cultural anchor. Tiger Camp dates back to the times of Buffalo Tiger, the Tribe’s first elected chairman who played a key role in its fight for federal recognition in the 1950s, and the site has a long history as a gathering hub for organizing, according to Betty Osceola, a Tribal member, activist, and educator.

The Miccosukee Tribe recently made headlines for its opposition to the nearby immigrant detention center notoriously dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other Republican lawmakers. Advocates say the prison, which lies just hundreds of feet away from Tribal villages, will be detrimental to the Big Cypress ecosystem and to Miccosukee rituals and ways of life. The Tiger Camp fire comes at an already tenuous moment for the Tribe, which is once again faced with threats to its ecosystem decades after helping lead protests against the construction of an airstrip on what is now the Alligator Alcatraz site in the 1970s.

“The emotional and economic impact will be felt for some time, but the cultural significance that the Tiger Camp has on the history of our Community cannot be [overstated],” Chairman Talbert Cypress said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic.

“We as a Community have celebrated so many milestones and holidays at the Tiger Camp and have all grown up with fond memories of the original Miccosukee Indian Village,” Chairman Cypress continued, adding that the extent of the damage is still being assessed and requesting privacy for the Tiger family.

Wesley LePatner, an elective trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Blackstone executive, was among the four individuals killed after a gunman opened fire in a Midtown Manhattan office building yesterday evening, July 28.

LePatner, who is survived by her husband and two children, was elected by The Met’s Board of Trustees in February and belonged to the institution’s Friends of European Paintings, a group of donors committing $10,000 annually to the department to support acquisitions and programming.

In a statement shared with Hyperallergic, Met Director Max Hollein described LePatner as “a brilliant and visionary leader, a generous spirit, and a person of deep intellect and warmth.”

“Wesley’s extraordinary professional accomplishments were matched by her commitment to education, culture, and community, and we were honored to welcome her to The Met family earlier this year,” Hollein said.

LePatner earned her Bachelor’s degree in History at Yale University and spent more than a decade working at Goldman Sachs before she ascended to the role of chief executive officer of Blackstone Real Estate’s Investment Committee. She also belonged to Yale’s Library Council, according to a biography on Blackstone’s website.

“She was brilliant, passionate, warm, generous, and deeply respected within our firm and beyond,” Blackstone said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic.

Police have identified 27-year-old Shane Tamura of Las Vegas as the shooter. Investigators believe Tamura entered the 345 Park Avenue building with the intention of targeting the National Football League, whose offices are also located there. Security guard Aland Etienne, off-duty police officer Didarul Islam, and Rudin Management employee Julia Hyman were also killed in the shooting.

I was in my second year of college when I first heard about the alternative folk artist Daniel Johnston. It was the fall of 2017, two years before his death, and a classmate I liked wanted to show me a song. On his laptop, he opened an album from September 1983 titled Hi, How Are You with a black-and-white cover featuring a simple line drawing: a peculiar-looking frog creature with wide-open eyes hovering above his head and a gaping mouth shaped like a Cheerio cereal. The character looked as though it had been conceived by a child, not unlike the album’s whimsical songs referencing cheeseburger smiles and the experience of walking a cow. 

The wide-eyed frog known as Jeremiah the Innocent is Johnston’s most iconic character, immortalized not only by the artist’s home-recorded cassette album, but also a beloved brick mural in Austin, Texas; collaborations with mainstream footwear and apparel brands; and sought-after posters and t-shirts like the one famously donned by late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.

This illustration is just a sliver of the vast visual lexicon that animated Johnston’s musical output and lifelong struggles with bipolar and manic-depressive disorder, as explored in the ongoing exhibition I Think, I Draw, I Am, on view at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn through August 10. Spanning more than 300 marker and pen works on paper set to the soundtrack of Johnston’s songs, the show examines the recurring motifs, themes, and stylistic elements that appear throughout Johnston’s art, which he was known to produce impulsively and obsessively. 

Displayed without titles in identical wooden frames, the drawings are pulled from the thousands of original artworks comprising the Daniel Johnston Trust, which is managed today by Dick Johnston, the artist’s older brother who also sits on the board for the Hi, How Are You Foundation, a mental health nonprofit established in his honor. 

“People caught on to this that Daniel was something …They didn’t know if he was going somewhere or not, but he propelled all kinds of people,” Dick Johnston told Hyperallergic.

Tinged with dark humor, the drawings range in tone and content, but tend to revolve around similar clashes between good and evil, hope and despair, and love and anguish, exemplified by heroic characters pitted against villainous figures. These include Johnston’s own inventions, like a flying eyeball known as Fly Eye; Jeremiah’s foil, the multi-headed Vile Corrupt; and a hollow-headed boxer named Joe, which reemerges throughout the drawings, offering commentary that alludes to the artist’s personal internal monologue.

Curated by Lee Foster, who co-owns Electric Lady Studios and serves as the curatorial advisor for the Daniel Johnston Trust, the Pioneer Works show is a glimpse into the dizzying psyche of an artist whose maximalist creative output was his main form of resistance against his mental demons. It’s a familiar storyline, akin to that of artists like Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Vincent Van Gogh. Johnston’s close-up marker portrait of the latter depicts the painter engrossed in a study of his mutilated left ear, which he is known to have cut off during a mental breakdown. (Johnston, for the record, was known to have had bouts of violence during the worst of his mental illness and was institutionalized several times, as explored thoroughly in Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston.)

Many of the pieces contain references to Johnston’s passion for comics: Captain America, Superman, and other heroes make frequent appearances as redemptive figures. Another running tangent is Johnston’s harrowing fixation with the devil — a fear stemming from his Christian fundamentalist upbringing that was magnified by psychotic illness. This paranoia is illustrated in an amusing drawing depicting the heavy metal band Metallica, a group he was convinced was satanic; in this vein, he portrays the band’s drummer as a skeleton. 

Unrequited love is also a thread throughout the drawings, many of which include portrayals of women with flipped bob hairdos. These are juxtaposed against eerie, reductive, and limbless female forms, and one work that simply centers on the head of a blonde-haired woman whose body is substituted with a human foot. “I’ll just turn and walk away, never return,” she says in floating speech bubbles. 

During a panel event at Pioneer Works in late June, Dick Johnston recalled their father’s characterization of these fascinations. “My Dad would say, ‘He believed in the idea of love, but he couldn’t execute it … It was an unreachable thing, and he idolized it in such a way that he made it unreachable,’” Johnston said.

The show aligns with the release of a book centered on the late artist and his legacy. Authored by Foster, Daniel Johnston: I’m Afraid Of What I Might Draw (2025) reflects on four decades of Johnston’s artwork and features essays by artists who have been inspired by his work. It comes after the publication of photographer Jung Kim’s Daniel Johnston: Is Always (2023), which offers an intimate view of the last years of Johnston’s life and the immediate aftermath of his death.

At the June panel, Foster described Johnston’s creativity as “manic obsessive,” as opposed to being purely intentional. “You couldn’t have stopped him,” Foster said. “It was just going to come out one way or another.”

Or, as Johnston’s high school friend explained in the 2005 film: “He never sits and thinks, ‘What am I gonna do?’ He just grabs something.”

MONTEREY PARK, Calif. — “EN CADA BESO UNA REVOLUCIÓN.” “LESBIANAS. UNIDAS. ¡FELICES!” Such battle cries embody the poetic optimism of Latina lesbian activism across borders at the Vincent Price Art Museum’s On the Side of Angels. Captured by posters for marches in Mexico City and Washington, DC, respectively, and made nearly 20 years apart, they chart an ongoing struggle for liberation. Importantly, these activists rallied not around a single issue but against intersectional forms of oppression: sexism, racism, homophobia, and classism. 

Presented in partnership with the Latina Futures 2050 Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, the exhibition diligently utilizes the archives of its Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) to extend a legacy of Latina lesbian activism in Los Angeles, spanning the 1980s to 2000s. It also illuminates the hemispheric nature of the movement — efforts from the privileged economic position of the United States, for instance, expanded care for peers in Mexico, as seen in a 1989 interview published in the women’s quarterly Connexions. It shows that Latina lesbians sat at the heart of a swirl of sociopolitical issues that continue to affect millions of people today — unjust labor practices, LGBTQIA+ discrimination, and housing insecurity — and that these oppressions are linked worldwide. 

As just one example of the exhibition’s emphasis on collectivity, it sources its name from archivist and former CSRC librarian Yolanda Retter Vargas’s 1999 dissertation. In it, she in turn nods to the gargantuan effort of those before her: The first generation of activists had to unearth, piece by piece, a continual lesbian presence in 400 years of documented United States history. The show includes a video interview between Retter Vargas and Civil Rights advocate Laura Esquivel — whose archive is also prominently featured — in which the former speaks candidly about her experience within activist circles, emphasizing the importance of their intersectional activism and relationships to one another. 

This feeling of communality reverberates throughout the varied sections of the show, including one focused on Gay & Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), the first organization to advocate for both LGBTQ+ and Latina/o/x communities. (Esquivel became the organization’s first female president in 1984). Copies of GLLU’s newsletter, Unidad, are seen alongside a flyer in which a sultry Betty Boop beckons the public to an event at Kitty’s bar in Montebello, hosted by the Lesbianas Unidas (LU), a task force that separated from the organization in 1994. Members of LU, in turn, went on to lead Connexxus, a women’s center that provided professional development workshops, counseling, and support groups. It also partially funded Chicana lesbian photographer Laura Aguilar’s prodigious Latina Lesbians (1986–90) series, which continues to reshape contemporary perceptions of this community. On view is an invitation to an exhibition Aguilar staged at the organization’s West Hollywood location, drawn from tenant rights attorney Elena Popp’s papers. 

Co-curators Vanessa Esparza Quintero and Jocelyne Sanchez’s careful handling of these remarkable archives weaves intricate narratives that both sprout from and culminate in Retter Vargas’s ardent compassion for her kin. A restoration of the herstorian’s Lesbian History Project, a community bibliographic research repository, for instance, is browsable on an antiquated iMac. And if her words, voice, and technological archive were somehow not enough to convey the depth of her compassion, there is also an altar to her consisting of a bandana, pins, and tool belt that she regularly wore during her shifts as a librarian. Such presence and visibility cannot be overstated in a time of persistent crisis. As the curators and activists in the exhibition make clear, only we have the power to advocate and organize for ourselves, especially in the face of those who refuse to accept our existence. 

On the Side of Angels: Latina Lesbian Activism continues at the Vincent Price Art Museum (1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, California) through August 30. The exhibition was organized by the Latina Futures 2050 Lab, an initiative of the University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, in collaboration with Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College. It was curated by Vanessa Esperanza Quintero and Jocelyne Sanchez.

Robert Rauschenberg’s 32-foot-long (~9.7-meter-long) silkscreen painting “Barge” (1962–63) will be among over a dozen works exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan this fall, part of a global celebration of the late American artist’s centennial. 

Slated to open October 10 and run through April 5, 2026, the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped will reexamine the artist’s use of visual media and commercial printing techniques through notable works held in the Guggenheim’s collection, alongside loans from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. The show aligns with a string of programming at institutions around the world in commemoration of Rauschenberg’s birth, including the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany; Fundación Juan March in Madrid, Spain; and the Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan. 

Originally from Texas, where he was raised with no formal art training, Rauschenberg is considered a pioneering figure of Pop art whose work was defined by his groundbreaking use of materials that challenged established notions of art disciplines — namely painting and sculpture. He is particularly remembered for his Combines series (1954–64), which integrated found objects and real-world images with abstract painting, and his collaborations with dancers, musicians, writers, engineers, and other artists.

In the Guggenheim’s centennial presentation, “Barge” will return to the museum after nearly three decades, following its inclusion in a sweeping 1997–98 retrospective of the artist’s work. An amalgamation of transportation-related imagery and other recognizable visuals pulled from everyday life and Old Master paintings, it is the largest piece in Rauschenberg’s series of 79 silkscreen paintings and was produced largely during a single 24-hour period. Other key artworks that will be exhibited include the crimson mixed-media work “Untitled (Red Painting)” (1953–54) and an untitled silkscreen painting from 1963 centering on choreographer Merce Cunningham, one of the artist’s longtime collaborators.

Joan Young, who worked on the 1997 retrospective as a member of the curatorial team and is now the Guggenheim’s senior director of curatorial affairs, told Hyperallergic in an email that the show primarily celebrates the artist’s legacy of “endless spirit of experimentation” that merged mediums and disciplines.

“His work encourages viewers to reconsider what art can be, embracing innovation, risk-taking, and the unexpected,” Young continued, citing the museum’s ongoing mid-career retrospective Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers as an example of Rauschenberg’s enduring impact. Drawing from various disciplines including literature, philosophy, and music, the show meditates on contemporary Black culture, history, and identity through an array of spray-painted text canvases, black soap and shea butter sculptural installations, and video works.

“Johnson, who works across performance, painting, sculpture, and more, is deeply influenced by Rauschenberg’s innovative approach and use of diverse media,” Young said.

Alongside Life Can’t Be Stopped, a special performance program will focus on the artist’s dance collaborations by re-staging select works with the Trisha Brown Dance Company and Paul Taylor Dance Company on October 15 as part of the Guggenheim’s Works and Process performing arts series.

Candida Alvarez’s Circle, Point, Hoop at El Museo del Barrio gets its title from a 1996 collage-painting by the artist. The understated work — a dark blue circle adorned with white string threaded through nails — is a stark contrast to the vibrant mosaics of color that suggest stained glass in more recent paintings. Yet its circular form and continuous threading suggest the connectedness of each period in her life as an artist.

Alvarez’s first large-scale museum survey spans styles and media across nearly a half century. Born in New York City to parents from Puerto Rico, the works reflect the artist’s Diasporican identity and her upbringing in the Farragut Houses, a public housing complex in Brooklyn, with many cultural traditions her parents retained from Puerto Rico. Memory is visualized in her art, but it often hovers on the cusp of representation. Early works on view evoke the artist as a childhood observer, seeing the world through a window in her family’s 14th-floor apartment or watching the rituals of adults. In “Bolero” (1984), a textured surface creates a dreamlike atmosphere for a dancing couple rendered in soft, jewel hues; another dreamlike painting, “Soy (I am) Boricua” (1989), shows a young woman in a window amid kaleidoscopic swirls of color that hint at a landscape without cohering into one.

Though loosely chronological, the exhibition is smartly organized by theme, offering insight into the through lines that interweave seemingly disparate works. These range from, for instance, the atmospheric chiaroscuro of the John Street charcoal drawings (1988) and manic scratched surface of the grisaille abstract painting “Stretching, Nesting, Reaching, Feeling” (1992) to the jubilant lime-green orbs that populate “Ramon” (1996), named for her son, to the mixed-media collages of The Hybrid Series (1982).

Throughout her oeuvre, abstraction and representation bleed into one another in the same way that memories momentarily coagulate into images before dissolving again. A recent show at Gray Gallery, Real Monsters in Bold Colors (April 30–July 3), foregrounded this effect, pairing Alvarez’s paintings with those of Bob Thompson; as Thompson’s figurative works brought out hints of figuration in Alvarez’s abstract pieces, her paintings coaxed Thompson’s figures further from representation.

Alvarez’s most recent pieces, featured in the Gray Gallery show with a few examples included in this exhibition, trade the sense of architectural space in much of her earlier art for cartographic space — in “Partly Cloudy” and “Clear” (both 2023), irregular shapes that fit together like puzzle pieces map a topography dominated by bucolic blues and greens. The works reflect her move in 2021 to a home studio on six acres of land in southwestern Michigan, not far from the Lake Michigan coastline. 

They also project a sense of calm after the untethered energy of her multicolored Air Paintings (2017–19), two-sided works painted on PVC mesh and hung in freestanding aluminum frames. The pieces, with their loose washes of color and tentative forms, process a series of traumatic events — above all, Hurricane Maria’s devastation to Puerto Rico, where the artist has family, and the passing of her father. “Estoy Bien”(2017), defined by soft, dusty pinks and amorphous shapes, offers a gentle, if impermanent, respite from the chaos. The title refers to a common refrain she heard from Puerto Ricans following the hurricane: “I’m fine.” 

Though born of pain, the Air Paintings are buoyed by color and light; they go beyond perseverance to convey the transformative power of art in life. As she says in her personal statement, “I use personal knowledge to build magical dimensions.”

Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop continues at El Museo del Barrio (1230 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan) through August 3. The exhibition was curated by Rodrigo Moura and Zuna Maza with Alexia Arrizurieta.

LOS ANGELES — From the 1920s to ’60s, the Catskill Mountains, with its woody resorts and bungalows, were a playground for middle-class Jewish families traveling Upstate from New York City. Dads grilled while lounging mothers shielded beehive hairdos from their children’s poolside splashing, and dinners were marked by heaps of sour cream on plates of offal.

By the 1970s, the glory days of the “Borscht Belt” — a derogatory nickname derived from the Russian soup that many Ashkenazi Jews favored — had faded. Post-World War II, Jewish people found greater social acceptance, and could travel to vacation destinations by plane. The Borscht Belt would be reduced to postcards and Polaroids.

Marisa J. Futernick uses these mementos as fodder for fantasy in her solo exhibition Away in the Catskills: Summers, Sour Cream, and Dirty Dancing at the Skirball Cultural Center, reconstructing her grandmother’s vacations through family photographs, a video essay, and an installation. Having never been to the Catskills as a child, she uses the images and souvenirs as writing prompts, crafting fictional dialogue that playfully depicts Jewish-American leisure.

As such, Futernick employs a technique theorist Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” which aims to help marginalized people reclaim their narrative from the colonial voices that largely wrote history, often mischaracterizing, overlooking, or stereotyping disempowered subjects. In Futernick’s dialogue, she gets to shape a more authentic representation of Jewish culture, and play a role in her family’s depiction in the future.

In the photo series Dirty Dancing (2017), which makes up the majority of the exhibition, Futernick blows up old slice-of-life photos, like her then-teenage uncles posing on a diving board, and her grandmother looking up from her Mah Jongg quartet. In “Do the Twist,” just below a photo of a man mid-dive, floating above unbroken water, are two lines of dialogue on a simple white background: “‘The fish is dry.’ ‘But they give a good portion. I like a nice portion.’” There are no attributions to the text, but one imagines they come from two women sitting on a white bench in the background. The simple exchange taps into the highs and lows of budget-conscious travel, of a class that could afford a vacation, but not luxury.

In the video essay “I Never Learned to Play Mah Jongg” (2025), Futernick juxtaposes the archives with present-day images of the Catskills. Now, the roads are lined with decaying buildings, and the small Jewish population in the area is predominantly Hasidic, a much more observant sect than the conservative Jews who vacationed there earlier. In one part, Futernick shows snapshots of old deli advertisements, mentioning that her family doused spaghetti with ketchup instead of tomato sauce. The anecdote perfectly encapsulates the assimilated Jewish experience: doing all one can to be seen as an American, but still not getting it quite right, remaining ostracized from the gentile majority. 

The Mah Jongg set also reappears in the installation “Bam, Crack, Rock, Pop” (2025), an arrangement of keepsakes on three floating shelves. Near it lies a small, pearl-beaded handbag, from which Andes mints spill out. The green-foiled candies were also a large part of my childhood, and I had never considered them canonically Jewish until now. But it should’ve been no surprise, because my own grandmother, who also spends her days kvetching over Mah Jongg with her sisters, seems like a carbon copy of Futernick’s bubbie.

Away in the Catskills is highly personal, but also universal for its demographic. As younger generations of Jewish people, like me, choose a more secular path, enclaves for Jewish Americans disappear. Futernick’s archives and fictions are an invaluable script for preserving a fading culture.

Away in the Catskills: Summers, Sour Cream, and Dirty Dancing continues at Skirball Cultural Center (2701 North Sepulveda Boulevard, Los Angeles, California) through August 31. The exhibition was curated by Cate Thurston.

A prolific storyteller, transformative educator, and devoted political activist, Toni Cade Bambara dedicated her life’s work to countering hegemonic institutional power structures. Through artistic mentorship and collaboration, literary education, and social justice work, the Black feminist writer of revolutionary novels such as The Salt Eaters (1980) and Those Bones Are Not My Child (2000) never wavered from her commitment to uplifting those subjected to injustices. “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible,” Bambara famously said in a 1982 interview. 

Decades after her untimely death at the age of 56, these words have continued to inspire generations of artists and activists. Among them are the filmmakers behind TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing (2025), a feature-length documentary kicking off Philadelphia’s 14th annual BlackStar Film Festival next Thursday, July 31.

Directed by Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez, who both worked with Bambara on the documentary W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1996), the film retraces the artist’s life and work through interviews with Bambara herself alongside close friends and colleagues, including Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney, and Haile Gerima. 

The film is just one of 92 productions comprising this year’s lineup at BlackStar, which celebrates independent cinema by Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers and media artists from around the world. Running through Sunday, August 3, the festival will also host a variety of programming, from panel discussions and virtual screenings to community events.

Bookending the festival on Sunday, August 3, Jenn Nkiru’s 52-minute experimental documentary The Great North (2024) spotlights the diverse communities and cultures that make up the northwest English city of Manchester, with a special focus on its Black, Asian, and Irish residents. A combination of archival footage and new video set to the music of the city’s underground arts scene, the film uses Manchester’s industrial history as a launchpad before moving through Black community spaces and zooming out to the rest of the world.

Throughout the four-day festival, BlackStar will also feature a variety of narrative films like Johanné Gómez Terrero’s feature-length Sugar Island (2024), which follows the story of an unwanted pregnancy that thrusts Dominican-Haitian teenager Makenya into the harsh realities of adulthood. Asaph Luccas’s short “LWC (Lazy White Cows)” (2025), another highlight, tells the story of Ster, a young Black student at risk of being “cancelled” after she refers to a White classmate in disparaging terms.

In partnership with the Writers Against the War on Gaza and the West Philadelphia nonprofit Making Worlds Bookstore, the festival will screen Mahmoud Ahmed’s timely 2024 documentary Gazan Tales (غزة التي تطل على البحر). The work, which wrapped production before Israel’s ongoing bombardment and siege of the region, follows the paths of four Palestinian men in the Gaza Strip and offers a comprehensive view of life shaped by constant adaptation to violence and oppression.

BlackStar’s programming will also showcase a diverse roster of experimental works. Among these productions is Cauleen Smith’s trilogy The Volcano Manifesto (2024), which brings together the films “My Caldera” (2022), “Mines to Caves” (2023), and “The Deep West Assembly” (2024) for a psychedelic meditation that personifies geological forms and natural events. 

In addition to its robust roster of new works, the festival will offer a screening of Charles Burnett’s poignant portrait of Black life in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, Killer of Sheep (1978). The filmmaker is also featured in BlackStar’s in-person Spotlight Conversation event series alongside Kahlil Joseph, director of the fictional Afrofuturist drama BLKNWS: TERMS & CONDITIONS (2025).

More information on the programming for this year’s iteration of the BlackStar Film Festival can be found on its website.

Maori Karmael Holmes, Blackstar’s chief executive and artistic officer, emphasized the importance of cinema’s “restorative and liberatory power,” particularly in the present moment.

“Each festival has been very special, but this year’s lineup feels especially epic,” Holmes said in a press release. “I’m looking forward to communing with filmmakers and audiences, sharing a collective laugh or cry.”

It is perhaps a testament to the enduring power of the titular British artist’s oeuvre that, even at a substantial 272 pages, Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures still feels as if it is only scratching the surface of her work and life. Though critically celebrated during her lifetime, Chadwick gradually fell out of the contemporary discourse after her death in 1996; this publication coincides with her first major retrospective exhibition in more than 25 years, originating at the Hepworth Wakefield.

Chadwick was only 42 when she died unexpectedly, yet she had already built a compelling body of work and became one of the first women to be nominated for the Turner Prize. As a teacher, she was an important influence on the Young British Artists of the late 1980s, including her students Tracey Emin, Anya Gallaccio, and Sarah Lucas. Chadwick exhibited consistently throughout her career; her acclaimed 1994 exhibition Effluvia at the Serpentine Galleries broke the institution’s visitor record and brought international recognition, and a 1995 solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art led to invitations for 10 other exhibitions across the world.

Reading Life Pleasures was, for me, a delightful reencounter with works that transgress the boundaries of traditional materials. Chadwick deftly employed the organic and mundane — raw meat, rotting vegetables, pig intestines, human hair, dead fish, bubble bath, and bubbling chocolate — to confound our notions of desire and disgust and challenge the primacy of sight over our other senses. While such material adventurousness no longer shocks, contemporary conversations seem to have developed a collective amnesia for one of its foremost pioneers.

“Her art was mischievously unruly and luxuriously disruptive,” Laura Smith, director of collection and exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield and editor of the book, notes in her survey of Chadwick’s output through the decades. “Her endeavor was to stimulate an individual’s intuitive, involuntary reactions and sensations as a way of destabilizing the conditioned and constructed aspects of contemporary culture around sex, gender, death, beauty, class and power.”

Smith’s essay traces the evolution of Chadwick’s practice, beginning with student exhibitions at Brighton Polytechnic and her 1977 master’s thesis show, In The Kitchen — in which Chadwick and several female classmates performed in the nude, covered partially by handmade sculptures resembling kitchen appliances. She chronicles Chadwick’s first major solo exhibition, Of Mutability at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1986 and what is arguably her most famous work: “Piss Flowers” (1991–92), painted bronze sculptures cast from the mounds of compacted snow onto which Chadwick and her husband, David Notarius, had urinated.

Other contributions in Life Pleasures offer deeper analysis of key aspects of Chadwick’s work or biography. Philomena Epps takes a critical look at the role of desire, sexuality, the fetish object, and the erotic; Maria Christoforidou sheds light on the Hellenic influences in Chadwick’s work (the artist’s mother was a refugee from Athens and Chadwick later bought a small cottage in the Greek Peloponnese); and Katrin Bucher Trantow, Kunsthaus Graz chief curator, focuses on the artist’s use of flowers to disrupt cultural gender norms. While the essays sometimes overlap in the works they discuss, each contains the gift of a new perspective, much like how Chadwick prodded audiences to reconsider social constructs so pervasive as to be invisible. Decades before transgender and nonbinary people would become the targets of mainstream political attacks across the world, Chadwick was not only affirming the fluidity of gender, but also refuting rigid categorization and thinking of any type. 

These commentaries are rounded out by Smith’s conversations with Notarius and Louisa Buck, an arts writer and friend of the artist who explains that Chadwick “was an intellectual Titan, she really had an incredible reach, an extraordinary brain and vast knowledge across science, art, popular culture — and when you were with her, this just bubbled up.”

Brief remembrances by nine of Chadwick’s students, friends, and collaborators provide moving testimony to both her warmth and intellect, while Chadwick’s own poem, “Piss Posy,” written in 1992 as a companion to “Piss Flowers,” offers a glimpse of her delightfully libidinous side. 

The book’s inclusion of several sketches from her journals and contact prints, while illuminating, only stimulates the desire for more — to know more intimately this artist who, as Smith writes, “has been described variously as wicked, raunchy, funny, clever, fierce, brilliant, tough, confronting, provocative, meticulous, a genius, ahead of her time.”

Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures (2025), edited by Laura Smith, is published by Thames and Hudson and available online and through independent booksellers.

ALBANY, New York — Tree roots have long served as a useful metaphor for articulating connections between people, places, and ideas. And yet, it’s a limited structure. In the 1980s, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously offered the rhizome as an alternative, suggesting instead a vast organic network of connections that can wrap into or shoot outward from themselves at any point, refusing the linear and binary bifurcations that tree-like structures imply.

Exploring the exhibition Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms, currently on view at the New York State Museum and organized by Curator of Mycology Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, I was struck by the rich potential that fungi offer as another metaphor to describe the world and our relations within it: with their far-reaching and many-tendriled hyphae or filaments linking them with other organisms, their closely held interdependence on other species, and their extraordinary variety. They also provide a fertile framework for considering the subtle but determined ways that Mary Banning planted herself in the substrate of a field in which she was largely unacknowledged during her lifetime, but that we can better comprehend today, just as our understanding of mushrooms is beginning to expand.

Banning was born in Maryland in 1822, and lived there for the vast majority of her 80 years. As an adolescent, she lost her father, a military officer who served in the Maryland House of Delegates. Around a decade later, her mother and sister became chronically ill, and she took on their care. Despite her family obligations, Banning pursued a growing interest in mycology (the study of fungi), amassing a personal library and herbarium from which to learn. In the late 1860s, she began to observe, describe, and paint in detailed and idiosyncratic watercolors all the fungi of Maryland for a volume that was never published, save the single manuscript she produced herself.

The manuscript pages, with their watercolors and her hand-penned descriptions of each species, make up the primary material on display in Outcasts. These are not the finely wrought illustrations of famous botanical artists like Pierre-Joseph Redouté or Banning’s contemporary Marianne North. Instead, they are diligent and highly evocative studies by a self-taught scientist and artist who was largely kept out of the field because of her gender and lack of degrees. But make no mistake — Banning was engaged in the real work of a mycologist. Not only was she one of the first women to put a name to an entire group, or taxon, of fungus, but a full 23 of the 175 species she records in the manuscript were unknown in the field at the time, and thanks to her three-decade-long epistolary friendship with the eminent mycologist Charles H. Peck, who served for nearly 50 years as the New York State Botanist, some of her findings were published in his 1871 Annual Report.

Notably, the exhibit also reveals that specimens Banning gathered in her fieldwork are in the museum’s mycological collection. It’s an incredibly important repository, not just because it contains over 90,000 species, but also because it holds many historical specimens from the period when figures like Banning and Peck began their work. In other words, scientists today still make use of her research, holding and examining the very same mushrooms that she located, preserved, and packed away for posterity, and building on the taxon she defined.

For me, rather than the anarchic energy of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking, there’s something about the mutuality on which fungi rely, and their wildly divergent forms and mating types, that feels more apropos as a metaphor for the world today. And I can’t help but think that Banning’s life and work bear this idea out in telling ways, as she embedded herself in the fabric of the field, whether or not others could fully grasp her presence at the time.

Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms continues at the New York State Museum (222 Madison Avenue, Albany, New York) through January 4, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian.

Most queer people aren’t privileged with having queer parents, so many of us look to those who came before as role models. In Homage: Queer Lineages on Video, artists draw upon the legacies of folks who opened the doors we now get to walk through. It’s worth a visit for anyone to broaden their horizons of what queerness might mean, and to discover histories often left untold. 

Located at the Wallach Art Gallery, in Columbia University’s new, Renzo Piano-designed Lenfest Center for the Arts, Homage takes advantage of the building’s high ceilings and flexible configurations as compared to the gallery’s former, more cramped quarters. In this exhibition of eight pieces by seven artists, drawn from the Akeroyd Collection, four pairings emerge. Comparing and contrasting them can open a window into the show. 

Works by both Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kang Seung Lee approach nature from a queer, nonlinear perspective. With “For Bruce” (2022), Weerasethakul, a legendary Thai filmmaker, presents an homage to Bruce Baille, whose films superimpose and overlay footage in innovative ways. Weerasethakul’s similarly unorthodox landscapes, inspired by Baille, can become a foil to the unorthodox queer narratives in his own films. For “Garden” (2018), Lee performs rituals in the gardens of the respective homes where English artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman and Korean poet and activist Oh Joon-soo lived. Lee draws on sheepskin parchment at each garden, digs a hole, and then buries the parchment as a form of exchange and kinship with these artists, both of whom died of AIDS. 

Lee shifts his focus to dance with “The Heart of a Hand” (2022), in which Filipino dancer Serafin pays tribute to choreographer Goh Choo San. The latter was born in Singapore, but became a singular presence in the American ballet scene in the 1970s and 1980s before succumbing to AIDS in 1987. Tony Cokes also looks at the ways people express themselves through dance, in this case turning to nightclubs. In “SM BNGRZ 1 + 2” (2021), house music backs a parade of brightly colored words that explain the genre’s origins as an alternative to disco for Chicago’s Black and Brown queer communities.

P. Staff’s “The Foundation” (2015) and Rirkrit’s Tiravanija’s “United (John Giorno reads)” (2008) both examine how we discover queer forebears through the archives we’ve inherited. Staff alternates footage of the Tom of Finland foundation in Los Angeles and its custodians with an experimental theater set to ask questions about who creates, cares for, and stages the archive of such iconic figures. In 2008, Tiravanija collaborated with John Giorno to create a 10-hour video compendium of the latter reading his poems and memoirs, and performing his music. 

Both Carolyn Lazard in “Red” (2021) and Dineo Seshee Bopape in “a love supreme” (2005–6) lead with abstraction to explore identities outside of the White, ableist cisgender patriarchy that structures our society. Bopape licks streaks of chocolate that suggest abstract expressionist brushwork off a transparent pane of glass, owning her eroticism as a queer woman of color. Lazard pays homage to Tony Conrad’s warning about epileptic risks in his strobing film “The Flicker” (1966) by creating flickering red iPhone footage of their thumb, along with a warning screen that says “strobe on.” As noble as the artist’s intentions are to raise questions around access, ableism, and being immunocompromised, the work lacks the impact of the artist’s “A Recipe for Disaster” (2018) or a clear connection with queerness.

These are small quibbles in relation to the overall show, however. What’s truly brilliant about Homage is how curator Rattanamol Singh Johal uses video art’s nonlinearity to present the nonlinear ways that queer people draw on the legacies of those who came before them. In doing so, they create their own definitions of queerness. 

Homage: Queer Lineages on Video continues at the Wallach Art Gallery (615 West 129th Street, 6th Floor, Manhattan) through October 19. The exhibition was curated by Rattanamol Singh Johal.

LOS ANGELES — In 1933, German-Jewish artist, art collector, and art dealer Galka Scheyer commissioned architect Richard Neutra to build her a house in the Hollywood Hills. Scheyer had moved to the United States in 1924 with the goal of promoting European modern art, specifically a group of artists known as the Blue Four: Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Paul Klee. The building would not only serve as her home, but also as a gallery and salon — an “airship,” as she called it — where artists, writers, and intellectuals could gather far above the glittering city below. She had also intended to create an artist residency, tapping architect Gregory Ain to design a second-story bedroom, but she died in 1945 at the age of 56, before it could materialize. 

Eight decades later, her dream is taking shape, with the Galka Scheyer house reborn as the Blue Heights Arts and Culture residency where Temporary Home, a group show curated by artist Beatriz Cortez, offers glimpses of the site’s history and its future transformation.

The house was used as a private residence after Scheyer’s death, and remained so until last summer, when it was put back on the market. Benno Herz, program director at the Thomas Mann House, saw the listing and wrote an article about the property for a German newspaper. His story caught the eye of Max Grimminger, a German art collector, who purchased the home with the intention of preserving it and setting up a nonprofit artist residency. When the devastating wildfires swept through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena in January, they realized the building could serve an immediate need. 

Jay Ezra Nayssan, founder of Del Vaz Projects, suggested they offer the space to artist Beatriz Cortez, who had lost her Altadena apartment in the Eaton Fire. After bouncing between friends’ homes for several weeks, Cortez moved into the house in March, becoming its first unofficial artist-in-residence.

While researching Scheyer, tracing threads that reach back across time and space, Cortez read about the social milieu she fostered in her home, hosting cultural figures such as John Cage, Bertolt Brecht, Maya Deren, Fritz Lang, and Greta Garbo, many of them German or Austrian émigrés. She thought about her own supportive creative community in LA and its familial histories of migration, and began hosting dinners, cooking feasts of paella or bean soup. Inspired by these connections, Cortez curated Temporary Home, engaging with the house’s history and echoes of displacement and solidarity while adapting Scheyer’s cultural refuge for contemporary times.

The exhibition is open by appointment the last two weekends in July, the final days of Cortez’s stay before the house closes for renovation.

In the center of the living room sits “Ceiba” (2023), a steel sculpture of a ceiba tree — which represents a portal to the underworld in Mayan mythology — created collaboratively by Cortez, Phillip Byrne, and Tatiana Guerrero. Metal parasites sprout from the welded surface of the volcano-like structure, while organic rubber and Mylar forms bubble up from its interior, a representation of multi-species hybridity. Nearby is rafa esparza’s “Xolotl” (2018), an adobe dog that draws on geometric Mesoamerican precedents, its head craning up at the viewer with an air of naturalism. 

Esparza began making xolotl figures in 2018, inspired by his volunteer work a decade earlier with No More Deaths, an organization dedicated to preventing the death of migrants during their treacherous border crossings in the Sonoran Desert. In Aztec mythology, the xolotl is a guide to the afterlife, and esparza drew on these figures to honor those who had passed on. “I pressed as many dogs as I could,” esparza told Hyperallergic, “but I could not counter the insurmountable life lost in the desert.”

Placed on a ridge outside the house, Sarah Espinoza’s “Regalos del Fuego” (2025) overlooks the city. Assembled from ceramics and objects found on the site of her home, which was destroyed in the Eaton Fire, it stands as a memento mori and a reminder of the precarious balance between beauty and devastation that is ever-present in LA.

In the upstairs bedroom, an intimate wall niche houses esparza’s adobe sculpture “Hyperspace: simultaneous τ (stop time)” (2025), which references the monumental Olmec head that was displayed outside the Seagram Building and then at the Mexican Pavilion at the 1965 World’s Fair in New York. Esparza’s version is “caught at the apex of a worm hole,” he said, “time-travelling through space and time,” twisted and disfigured as it is wrenched from its original context. The work also ties into the house’s history: Scheyer had invited Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to visit, but died before they could make the trip. The sculpture is imagined as a gift Rivera might have brought from his vast collection of Mesoamerican art in an alternate timeline.

On the bedroom’s windows, Maria Maea has noted the dates, locations, and descriptions of several Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abductions in her piece “Then They Came” (2025). When ICE began descending on immigrant communities across LA in early June, Scheyer’s house on the hill felt especially disconnected from the reality taking place in the city below.

Cortez worried about the predominantly Latine construction workers and gardeners working on the stately residences she would pass on the windy roads up to her temporary home. “If there’s a raid here, who’s going to come out and document [it]?” she wondered. 

Maea also struggled with how to address the state-sanctioned violence and disappearances. “At times like this, what is the role of an artist? We make things visible,” she told Hyperallergic. Each abduction chronicled in her piece is marked by a long blade of grass, pointing to the actual location of each incident as seen through the window. When the viewer stands in the right spot, the window serves as a map of the city, bringing the stark reality of the crisis below into sharp focus. 

Community and celebration shine through a Marjorie Williams’s photograph recreating ​​Angelica Archipenko’s 1934 image of revelers reflected in the house’s windows, the city lights fanning out behind their silhouettes. Williams’s version features Cortez, Byrne, fellow artist Fidencio Fifield-Perez, and Cortez’s UC Davis graduate students during a recent communal meal. 

“From what I understand of Galka, this is work she would be proud of, smiling upon, that the house is still being used for this level of communication,” Maea said.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), the umbrella institution overseeing the de Young and Legion of Honor museums in the city, laid off 12 workers, citing a 20% drop in museum visitors since the pandemic and “increased operational costs.”

The layoffs affected approximately 3.5% of FAMSF’s total workforce, which comprises roles funded by the city and others supported by a private nonprofit that oversees the museums. Service Employees International Union 1021 (SEIU 1021), the unit representing some FAMSF positions, informed Hyperallergic that four union positions were affected: a public programs coordinator, a museum technician, a data services associate, and a publicist.

“The union stewards were deeply saddened to learn about these layoffs impacting our members and have been working to ensure our colleagues are compensated correctly for their years of service,” a spokesperson for SEIU 1021 said in a statement.

The union said imminent layoffs were not mentioned during recent negotiation meetings, and said pay cuts to leadership positions should be considered in the future instead of layoffs.

A spokesperson for the FAMSF told Hyperallergic that the layoffs did not impact city-funded positions, which include security and maintenance staff, but declined to state which jobs were terminated. The cuts were made “across the organization,” CEO and Director Thomas Campbell said in the statement.

The news comes months after FAMSF proposed a controversial 23% reduction of city-funded positions to meet a slimmed-down operating budget imposed by former Mayor London Breed. In response to a projected $876 million deficit, Breed had asked all city agencies to cut expenses by 15%. As a public institution, FAMSF typically receives 20% to 25% of its funding from the city. For FAMSF, Breed’s suggested cut would have meant a $3.3 million reduction in public funds, which the SEIU 1021 union representing some FAMSF jobs, warned would be “detrimental” to the de Young and Legion of Honor.

However, these budget recommendations were not the reason for FAMSF’s recent cuts, a spokesperson from the organization clarified to Hyperallergic, adding that city appropriations are not being reduced in Fiscal Year 2026.

“San Francisco has experienced a prolonged period of softening tourism, which has led to reduced attendance at our museums,” Campbell said. “We faced a financial gap that could not be closed without this action.”

Daniel Lurie took office in January as the city’s new mayor, replacing Breed, and proposed slight increases to the museums’ funding in his budget signed into law yesterday, July 24. FAMSF’s city appropriations increased by 3% this year, the FAMSF spokesperson said, but will be directed mostly toward utility and insurance costs.

SEIU 1021 opposed FAMSF’s initial plan to cut staff as required by the city, which would have included the elimination of 19 city-funded security guards and reduced operating hours. The cuts would have also predominantly affected workers who are people of color, the institution said.

The Legion of Honor and de Young museums are far from the only institutions to report a post-pandemic squeeze. In May, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art laid off 29 workers, accounting for 7.5% of the institution’s total employees, citing a $5 million deficit worsened by a post-pandemic tourist slump. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum laid off 20 staff members abruptly in April, citing similar pandemic-related constraints. Also in New York, the Brooklyn Museum narrowly avoided further staff cuts thanks to a $2.5 million windfall from the city last month.

New York City-born artist and provocateur Andres Serrano wants the United States Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale to showcase his apparently uncritical display of more than a thousand Trump memorabilia items, including a flattering, warm-hued portrait of the president he took in 2004 as part of his series America.

Serrano, who rose to notoriety in the late ’80s for “Piss Christ” (1987), a photograph of a crucifix that he plunged into a receptacle of his own urine on the National Endowment for the Arts’ dime, submitted his Trump-themed Venice proposal to the US Department of State ahead of its deadline later this month. The artist calls his American flag-saturated vision The Game: All Things Trump, a reference to an underperforming board game released by Milton Bradley Company in 1989.

The Trump administration’s new guidelines for Biennale proposals say that the designs will be evaluated based on criteria including artists’ “ability to showcase American exceptionalism.”

Under the new stipulations, prospective artists wishing to represent the US in the event are prohibited from “promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” and using award funds to support the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides humanitarian aid to Palestinians. The Department of State’s application mandates that Biennale programs assume a “non-political character.”

When Hyperallergic asked Serrano if he believes his work complies with that criteria, he replied via a publicist, “Of course, I’m not political. I don’t judge, I observe.”

Serrano’s pavilion proposal repurposes the name and objects of a 2019 Manhattan exhibition that presented $200,000 worth of Trump relics amassed by the artist, including a diploma from the defunct Trump University, an 11-foot sign spelling “EGO” from the shuttered Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, autographed portraits, and presidential campaign signs. The proposal also includes Serrano’s controversial film about the January 6 Capitol takeover, Insurrection (2022), which critics described as sensational, lacking context, and even pro-Trump.

In response to Hyperallergic‘s question about whether his pavilion design was meant to be ironic, Serrano said, “My work is always open to interpretation, even my ideas are open to interpretation. Artists are not one way or another, they represent different things to different people.”

In 2024, Trump was photographed grinning while holding Serrano’s exhibition book and reportedly added it to his library at Mar-a-Lago. Serrano has described Trump’s apparent endorsement of the book as “comical,” but has also stated in the context of the president that he will “never speak ill of people who’ve posed for [him].” The photographer also took a smiling portrait of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, months before the financier was found dead in his jail cell awaiting trial for charges of trafficking dozens of minors in the early 2000s. His photographs have also portrayed Snoop Dog, hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan, and morgue corpses.

Serrano could have quietly submitted his proposal to the Department of State, but said he decided to publicly promote his mock-up pavilion with a specific goal.

“I decided to publicize it because I’m hoping the President will see it. It makes sense to me that for America’s 250th Celebration, there’s no one better to represent America than the President,” Serrano told Hyperallergic in an email.

Refik Anadol set himself up for failure.

For his latest work, the artist best known for his shapeshifting AI installation at the Museum of Modern Art set out to immortalize a moment of sports legend: Lionel Messi’s 2009 towering header goal for FC Barcelona, which helped clinch its victory against Manchester United in the UEFA Champions League final and secure a historic treble for the Spanish club. In collaboration with Messi himself, who selected the goal as his favorite from over 800 scored throughout his career, Anadol used motion-tracking technology to analyze the athlete’s trajectory, mapping 17 points of Messi’s body in movement and weaving in biometric data like the athlete’s heart rate, breathing, and emotional fluctuations derived from his speech patterns in an interview. Anadol, who utilizes machine learning to produce his immersive abstractions, translated these units of information into an eight-minute installation in which actual footage of the goal and Messi’s recollections collapse onto each other and recede into infinity — a “memory temple,” in the artist’s own words.

It was ambitious. It was unprecedented. It was … underwhelming.

For two weeks in July, “Living Memory: Messi – A Goal in Life” was on public view at Christie’s in New York before selling for $1.8 million in an online auction benefitting the Inter Miami CF Foundation’s philanthropic initiatives. During this period, anyone could see the artwork for free, and as news of its debut gained traction on TikTok and elsewhere, hundreds flocked to Rockefeller Center. When I visited on the morning of Monday, July 21, a Christie’s staffer manning the entrance to the plush second-floor gallery told me they were expecting around 450 people to line up that day.

The piece, housed in a small mirrored room, begins by thrusting us into a dizzying digital landscape resembling what I imagine Anadol thinks the inside of a supercomputer looks like. The audio is staticky, futuristic, and suspenseful, like the soundtrack of an action movie in the scene where the protagonist realizes they are part of something bigger, much bigger. We free-fall into the stadium, whizzing past three-dimensional renderings of Messi’s body in motion and goal sequences in a Bladerunnerey virtual reverie that evokes all the vertigo and adrenaline of a screensaver. The audio is layered with the cheering of crowds and Messi’s own voice describing the moment, the latter largely unintelligible, likely due in part to Messi’s notorious reticence. Words like importante and alegría (“joy”) flicker around us in stereotypical programming typeface. This all turns out to be just an introduction to the actual artwork, which materializes minutes later when a pause of darkness gives way to the recognizable aesthetic of Anadol’s “data sculptures.” Blobs and bubbles with the apparent texture of squishy floam slime bend and stretch like Rorschach pictures seen through a kaleidoscope. Messi’s head melts in slow motion.

“Living Memory” is optically immaculate, and just as soulless. But that might say less about the work itself than about the impossible triangulation of art, sport, and entertainment. By channeling a language as viscerally human as football, Anadol serves up a perfect foil, exposing both the calculated hostility of artificial intelligence and the frigidity of the fine art world.

At Christie’s, I met other football fans who bore blank expressions as they exited the mirrored room. Susan Fisher, a Manhattan resident, learned about the installation on a local news station and had expected to be transported into the match, perhaps with the aid of virtual reality — or at the very least, “to see through Messi’s eyes what it was like,” she said. “And instead, it’s just a lot of … I don’t know, Skittles, moving around.” Her friend Carolina Strauss, a textile artist who was visiting from Argentina, said she had known what to expect, but ultimately found the artwork to be “too much Refik Anadol, too little Messi.”

“One doesn’t see here the way he builds up the goal, the passes. Because that’s what I think Messi is — he’s a group player, he doesn’t play alone,” Strauss added. Indeed, much has been written about the then-Barça midfielder Xavi Hernández’s tremendous pinpoint pass in the 70th minute of the match, expertly finding Messi, who soars so high into the air he loses a boot.

If you’ve been to a football game (or soccer, or better yet, fútbol), you can sympathize with the enormity of what Anadol was tasked with capturing. You’ve tasted the dense air of the stadium, taking in salty gulps of sweat. You’ve let yourself be carried by the waves of chants that roar in and out of earshot, as unified and perpetual as a Greek chorus. You’ve scanned a tiny ball, your gaze unblinking, as players blur across the field, and you’ve felt your pulse race or freeze entirely when anyone inches toward the goal. (There’s a reason a whole bunch of fútbol memes reference defibrillators.) And when your team scores and they collapse to the ground in the purest expression of catharsis, you’ve almost felt the turf scratching under your bare knees, too. You’ve experienced real passion, but also real rage, because the sport brings out our most base, nationalistic instincts.

Surely, Anadol could not have been expected to bottle the essence of live football into a work of art like a fragrance. But that’s actually not how most people experience the sport, which is often and sometimes even best watched on television, in a no-frills local bar, surrounded by the warm, electric bodies of one’s friends and enemies. There are numerous examples of poignant screen-based art inspired by football, from Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parenno’s moving portrait of Zinédine Zidane to the music video for Gotan Project’s La Gloria, featuring dancing by Les Twins.

When Argentina won the World Cup in 2022, I watched Gonzalo Montiel score the winning penalty kick achingly far from my native home, sitting on the sidelines of the mythic Brooklyn watering hole known as Turkey’s Nest. Later, I scrolled enviously through photos and footage of the Buenos Aires streets filled to the brim as millions honked and hollered in blissful revelry. I knew that what they were celebrating was not simply a sports triumph, but a much greater glory. There was one clip I watched over and over: a viral video of Telemundo sportscaster Andrés Cantor, who has covered every World Cup since 1990, finally calling the goal for the country where he was born. His iconic GOOOOOOOOOL echoed and trembled just slightly as his eyes welled, and he couldn’t stop saying it: Champions, we’re world champions! Perhaps Anadol’s gravest error was attempting to harness something too real to code, and unlike Messi, he missed the shot. Or, as Strauss brilliantly put it: “Some goals are better shouted.”

I spent a few weeks abroad this summer, and it was a relief to be away from the United States and its deluge of bad news — but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss San Francisco and its thriving art scene. If you’re similarly playing catch-up, look no further than this list of exhibitions to visit in the coming weeks.

Before summer ends, visit the Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA — even if it isn’t your first time. “To anyone looking to create a rich and ethical life in the arts,” Alex Paik writes in his recent review, “Ruth Asawa showed us the way.” It was one of the best shows of the summer, a long-overdue celebration of one of the most important artists and activists in San Francisco’s history, and so sprawling that you’re bound to see something new each time. Still, there are a handful of other shows to see in the dog days of summer before the fall season kicks off, packed with plenty more local history, as well as contemporary artists working at the intersection of art and activism.

Service Tension

San Francisco Arts Commission, 401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 325, San Francisco, California
Through August 23

Service Tension bristles with the erotic energy of friction between flesh. The group show, at the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Main Gallery, features artists interrogating the complexities of queer sexuality, masculinity, and the body. The viewer assumes the role of the voyeur, implicated in this negotiation of power and positionality that pushes the boundaries of art and sex.

Still Burning, Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Ant Farm’s Media Burn

500 Capp Street, 500 Capp Street, San Francisco, California
Through August 23

On July 4, 1975, the experimental art collective Ant Farm drove a car decorated to look like an airplane into a stack of television sets. The performance, titled “Media Burn,” was a satirical critique of mainstream media and politics. Fifty years later, Still Burning, at 500 Capp Street, delves into the documentation and ephemera surrounding the performance, reminding us that issues around media’s role in politics are as pertinent as ever.

Tiffany Sia: No Place

Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, 328 Lomita Drive, Stanford, California
Through August 24

The term “liminal space” gets thrown around a lot in the art world. I prefer “no place,” artist Tiffany Sia’s term for locations that become forgotten or intangible through their troubled histories. The two films on view in Sia’s modest solo show at the Cantor Arts Center tell the story of her childhood journey through such “no places,” from Cold War-era Shanghai to Hong Kong, finding solidity in her passage.

Beautiful, Bountiful, Boisterous Birds

Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin Street, San Francisco, California
Through September 15

Bird-watching takes on new meaning in this show at the Asian Art Museum. The selection of brush paintings on view in the Tateuchi Japanese Galleries ranges from screen paintings to hanging scrolls, incorporating birds as both decorative and symbolic elements. With many of the birds representing seasonal change, this is the perfect show for a foggy summer day in San Francisco.

10 × 10 for 10: Ten years of

Letterform Archive, 2325 3rd Street Floor 4R, San Francisco, California
Through October 12

Read all about it! Letterform Archive celebrates a decade of preserving the history of typographic design with this exhibition drawn from its collection. Growing from 15,000 to 100,000 objects over the last decade, the Archive boasts no shortage of textual delights, from cuneiform to calligraphy to political posters and much more.

Leilah Babirye: We Have a History

de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, California
Through October 26

Leilah Babirye’s first solo museum show in the United States is a celebration of the LGBTQ+ community and the African craft practices that inspire her. Made from ceramic and carved wood, the sculptures are monuments to Black love. Reinterpreting tradition through a contemporary lens, Babirye shows us how to honor where we came from without losing sight of where we’re going.

Black Gold: Stories Untold

Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, 2 Marina Boulevard, Building C, San Francisco, California
Through November 2

Organized by FOR-SITE at San Francisco’s Fort Point, Black Gold delves into the history of Black California through art. The group show includes 17 contemporary artists, many local to the Bay Area. Featuring several special commissions, such as Trina Michelle Robinson’s “Requiem for Charles Young” (2025), which honors the captain of a company of Black soldiers stationed at San Francisco’s Presidio in 1903, the show traces the stories of Black Californians from the Gold Rush through Reconstruction, highlighting their lasting impact.

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley, California
Through November 30

Featuring over 100 quilts by 80 artists, Routed West is the first exhibition showcasing the major bequest of African-American quilts the Berkeley Art Museum received in 2019. The show reveals the importance of quilt-making to the story of the Second Great Migration, in which Black Americans resettled from Southern states to urban areas in the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1940 to 1970. The quilts on view come from both the South and California, tracing family threads across the country.

Bay Area Then

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco, California
Through January 25, 2026

Who doesn’t love a throwback? The group show Bay Area Then spotlights artists who came of age between the 1980s and early 2000s in and around San Francisco. From artists grappling with the AIDS crisis to the Mission School’s twist on graffiti to the many artist collectives that fueled the community, Bay Area Then offers a glimpse into the past and guidance for the future.

Students on Strike

Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak Street, Oakland, California
Through May 31, 2026

Beginning with the student strikes of 1968–69 at San Francisco State University and drawing a line to the present, Students on Strike at the Oakland Museum of California paints a vivid picture of Bay Area student activism. The show is packed with posters and photographs documenting student dissent and organizing, from the demand for an Ethnic Studies program in the ’60s to opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Leave inspired with new ways to show up in your community.

‣ For the Nation, Kate Wagner writes about how the West finally caught up with Iranian brickwork:

Brickwork has long played an important role in Persian architecture simply because it is the most widely available material, tied intimately with the climate and geological features of the area. Vernacular architecture responds to its surroundings, and Persian architecture is no different. Brick resists the elements, keeps buildings cool, is amenable to building tall, and is well-suited to decorative articulation. Many of the tessellating patterns and geometric forms of Iran’s contemporary architectural language have roots in Persian architecture dating back to the Seljuk period (around the 11th through 13th centuries). According to Mahsa Kharazmi at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, what separates Iranian brickwork from Western masonry is its use of complex geometrical forms, rather than the typical grid. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, critical regionalism, an idea popularized by architecture critic Kenneth Frampton, expressed a desire to counter the “placelessness” that plagued many utilitarian modernist structures by encouraging styles and techniques rooted in local cultural contexts. It’s a Western term, but aptly describes how contemporary Iranian brick architecture reconciles contemporary and historical modes, all drawing from a vernacular sense of space, behavior, and climate.

‣ Reporting for Al Jazeera, Katherine Blouin, Nathan Kalman-Lamb, and Derek Silva reveal how some Canadian universities are deeply involved in Israel’s brutalities in Gaza:

Canada’s flagship school, the University of Toronto (UofT), where one of us teaches and another is an alumnus, is a particularly salient example.

Over the past 12 years, the UofT’s entanglements with Israeli institutions have snowballed, stretching across fields from the humanities to cybersecurity. They also involve Zionist donors (both individuals and groups), many of whom have ties with complicit corporations and Israeli institutions, and have actively interfered with university hiring practices to an extent that has drawn censure from the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

This phenomenon must be understood in the context of the defunding of public higher education, which forces universities to seek private sources of funding and opens up universities to donor interference.

‣ Hindu nationalist groups in the United States have founded their own dubious Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Mukta Joshi explains how in an essay for Jewish Currents:

Over time, these groups’ attempts to raise the alarm about alleged Hinduphobia have translated into policy. In the past few years, HAF has promoted multiple successful resolutions recognizing Hinduphobia at city and state levels. Recently, Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) introduced House Resolution 1131, a first of its kind attempt to get the US Congress to recognize Hinduphobia. Speaking to Jewish Currents in February, Thanedar confirmed that he had engaged with HAF as well as CoHNA in generating the resolution. “I have been observant about the rise of hate against Hindus over the last couple decades,” he said. “That’s why I approached some of the Hindu groups, and we had a very meaningful discussion with their policy people. That resulted in me taking it upon myself to represent them as strongly as I can in the US Congress.”

However, even as HAF’s narrative around rising Hinduphobia has reached lawmakers, independent verification by Jewish Currents found that a full 75% of the 161 incidents that HAF has condemned as Hinduphobia in the United States did not meet the group’s own definition of the term. Twenty of the incidents involved criticisms of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva—the virulently anti-Muslim ideology that dominates Indian politics both in the subcontinent and diaspora—many of them by academics and journalists. An additional 12 allegations of Hinduphobia were leveled at activists aiming to ban caste discrimination in the US, a move that some diaspora Hindus, adherents of the caste supremacist ideology of Hindutva, brand as biased against Hinduism. Furthermore, while 93 incidents highlighted by HAF did appear to be unambiguously fueled by hateful and discriminatory attitudes, 36 of those featured hate directed not at a person’s religious identity but rather their race, immigrant status, or national origin. An additional 29 of the hateful incidents HAF presented as evidence of systemic Hinduphobia consisted of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab language, many occuring in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. (Jewish Currents was unable to find more information about an additional 24 allegedly Hinduphobic incidents in the US that HAF has condemned. Despite the events still being mentioned on its website, HAF declined to provide sources, with spokesperson Mat McDermott writing: “We don’t have the staff resources to go back and do this research for you, about incidents, for some of them, [sic] are more than two decades ago.”)

‣ This week in fascism: The Harvard Educational Review cancels an entire issue on Palestine, fearing Trump. Alice Speri reports for the Guardian:

The authors asked for the legal review to be reconsidered. But less than a month later, the press’s executive director, Jessica Fiorillo, wrote to them that the issue was being pulled altogether. In an email seen by the Guardian, she claimed the manuscripts were “unready for publication”, in part due to a copy editor’s resignation. She also cited an unspecified “failure to adhere to an adequate review process”, a “lack of internal alignment” between the authors, editors and the publisher, and “the lack of a clear and expedient path forward to resolving the myriad issues at play”.

“This difficult situation is exacerbated by very significant lack of agreement about the path forward, including and especially whether to publish such a special issue at this time,” she wrote.

The copy-editing issue wasn’t just a personnel one. The publisher’s letter claimed that the review editors “provided highly restrictive editing guidelines to the copy editor under contract to work on the special issue, limiting her focus to grammar, punctuation, and syntax errors, and directing her to refrain from offering any editorial suggestions to address, in the editors’ words, ‘politically charged’ content”. It claimed that the copy editor resigned in large part because of those restrictions.

Fiorillo added that it would be “entirely appropriate” to subject the work to legal checks for “any libelous or unlawful material” but that no such review had taken place. She added that the cancellation was not “due to censorship of a particular viewpoint nor does it connect to matters of academic freedom”.

‣ In an essay for The Walrus, Eve Lazarus solves a century-old mystery related to a shipwreck considered worse than the Titanic.

More than 200,000 litres of water a second poured into the Empress, causing catastrophic flooding in the engine rooms and lower decks. The furnaces flooded. The power went out.

The ship was thrown into darkness before most of the sleeping passengers could even grasp what was happening. Those who had managed to leave their cabins were left groping around in the pitch dark, trying to find a way out, clawing their way up the tilting stairs. Because they had boarded the ship mere hours earlier, they were unfamiliar with the ship’s layout. In just thirty seconds, the Empress had taken on almost half her own weight in water. After a minute and a half, the boiler rooms were flooded with the equivalent of nine Olympic swimming pools of water.

‣ The FBI has long surveilled activists against Lithium mining in Nevada. Mark Olalde reports for ProPublica:

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have for years worked alongside private mine security to surveil the largely peaceful protesters who oppose the mine, called Thacker Pass, according to more than 2,000 pages of internal law enforcement communications reviewed by ProPublica. Officers and agents have tracked protesters’ social media, while the mining company has gathered video from a camera above a campsite protesters set up on public land near the mine. An FBI joint terrorism task force in Reno met in June 2022 “with a focus on Thacker Pass,” the records also show, and Lithium Americas — the main company behind the mine — hired a former FBI agent specializing in counterterrorism to develop its security plan.

“We’re out there doing ceremony and they’re surveilling us,” Farrell-Smith said.

“They treat us like we’re domestic terrorists,” added Chanda Callao, an organizer with People of Red Mountain.

‣ We can’t look away:

‣ Gaza journalist Motaz Azaiza in a moving encounter with a Brooklyn mural:

‣ Truth be told:

‣ Based on the true story of a deep-sea anglerfish that swam to the surface of the ocean, touching the hearts of millions online:

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

Welcome to the 295th installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, artists work to the sound of electricity buzzing and find community in the Chicago art scene.

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

Michelle Alexander, Chicago, Illinois

How long have you been working in this space?

I signed the lease in November, right around Thanksgiving. Signing the lease and settling into a new space felt like a turning point, both personally and creatively.

Describe an average day in your studio.

There is no strict routine right now. I squeeze in time around everything else in my schedule. I usually work on multiple pieces at once, letting them inform each other, things overlapping and half-finished. I thrive and sometimes crumble in the chaos. I listen to music, podcasts, or watch Netflix. Some days I make a mess. Other days I just stare, feeling stuck but waiting for the courage to try something I have been imagining.

How does the space affect your work?

Whatever is in my line of sight influences me, whether it is unfinished work, scraps, a sound, or a passing thought. In grad school, my studio was windowless and underground. I lost all sense of time. Now, with these beautiful windows and natural light in my new studio, I feel more open. Seeing the sky changes my mood, and I think that is starting to shift the work too.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

Having my studio at Mana Contemporary is a gift. It is full of creatives who understand. There is feedback, community, and a lot of energy. I also feel lucky to be part of the larger Chicago art scene. Grad school helped me to plug into a vibrant, supportive, and diverse artist community.

What do you love about your studio?

That it is just mine. A private space where I can experiment, make a mess, fail, and try again without anyone watching until I am ready. My studio is my creative sanctuary.

What do you wish were different?

I wish it were close enough to walk. Some of my best ideas come when I am moving. The commute, especially with large awkward materials, can be draining.

What is your favorite local museum?

The Art Institute of Chicago, especially the Modern Wing. I always return to it. The work hits differently depending on where I am mentally or emotionally.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

Clear Elmer’s glue, fabric, string, and staples. They are raw, direct, and strangely emotional. They feel foundational, simple, familiar, and a little bit primal.

Sa’dia Rehman, Columbus, Ohio

How long have you been working in this space?

One year.

Describe an average day in your studio.

I start my time in the studio with light cleaning, maybe sweeping, organizing my desk. This repetitive task often leads me to a mark on a paper, a dust ball in the corner, a cutout I hadn’t seen in months. My curiosity is piqued, and then I begin. I like working to the sounds around me — my studiomates chatting, the HVAC system humming, electricity buzzing. I like jumping from work to work — keeps me on my toes and guessing.

How does the space affect your work?

Immensely. I’ve been working more on the go. I’m between studios and moving to Minneapolis. So I draw on my iPad and on small sheets of paper that I can carry in a folder. The work grows with the size of my space.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

I was in a studio at Columbus Printed Arts, now called Center for Print and Collaborative Arts. My studio was in a workshop with printmaking, letterpress, and photo and printing capabilities. Artists came in and out of the workshop to make t-shirts, posters, prints. It was fun to meet them all.

What do you love about your studio?

I love the sunlight.

What do you wish were different?

I wish the wood floors were finished. The splinters from the floors are kicked up from my walking and sometimes embed themselves in my ankles, through my socks! It is something that I wish were different but will strangely miss!

What is your favorite local museum?

Columbus Museum of Art.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

Charcoal.

The painter Amy Sherald has rescinded her upcoming exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, DC, citing censorship concerns. The artist told the New York Times that she learned the museum was considering removing her portrait of a transgender Statue of Liberty in line with President Donald Trump’s anti-trans mandates.

“I entered into this collaboration in good faith, believing that the institution shared a commitment to presenting work that reflects the full, complex truth of American life,” the artist wrote in a letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III yesterday, July 23, according to the Times.

“Unfortunately, it has become clear that the conditions no longer support the integrity of the work as conceived,” Sherald said.

In a statement to Hyperallergic, a Smithsonian spokesperson said that the institution “could not come to an agreement with the artist.”

“While we understand Amy’s decision to withdraw her show from the National Portrait Gallery, we are disappointed that Smithsonian audiences will not have an opportunity to experience American Sublime,” the spokesperson added. “We are and continue to be deeply appreciative of her and the integrity of her work.”

Sherald told the Times that she had decided to withdraw her show American Sublime after she was “informed that internal concerns had been raised” regarding the inclusion of her painting “Trans Forming Liberty” (2024), which depicts a pink-haired transgender woman holding a torch of flowers. Earlier this week, Sherald said, Bunch had suggested replacing the work with a video of people responding to the painting’s subject matter and commenting on transgender issues — an idea that the artist refused because it would have given a platform to anti-trans views.

“The video would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility and I was opposed to that being a part of the American Sublime narrative,” Sherald told The Times.

Hyperallergic has reached out to the artist and her representing gallery, Hauser & Wirth, for comment.

Throughout his second term, Trump has waged a ceaseless crusade against trans and gender non-conforming communities. Within hours of his inauguration, the president issued executive orders that mandated essentialist definitions of gender and restricted access to gender-affirming medical care for trans youth. He has since erased trans and queer history from federal websites and refused to recognize Pride Month.

In March, Trump issued an executive order attacking what he called “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, seeking to erase both America’s history of racist violence and any notion of gender identities beyond the binary from the federally funded organization. The mandate gives the vice president the authority to ensure that funds to the Smithsonian “celebrate the achievements of women in the American Women’s History Museum” and “do not recognize men as women in any respect,” denying the existence of transgender and non-binary identities. Trump has also sought to enforce anti-trans guidelines for agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts, prohibiting federal grantmaking organizations from funding projects that “promote gender ideology.”

Following the executive order, Trump claimed he fired the museum’s longtime director Kim Sajet, calling her a “highly partisan person” and a “strong supporter of DEI.” Sajet’s termination, however, remained unclear, as the Smithsonian is an independent, federally backed agency that does not fall under the president’s oversight. Weeks later, Sajet resigned. She was replaced by Bunch with Kevin Gover, who previously worked as the Smithsonian’s under secretary for Museums and Culture.

Featuring some of Sherald’s most well-known works, including portraits of former First Lady Michelle Obama and Louisville medical worker Breonna Taylor, American Sublime was slated to travel to the NPG in September, making it the first solo show of a Black contemporary artist at the institution. The show, spanning nearly 50 paintings from 2007 to the present, is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through August 10.

It is unclear whether American Sublime will travel to an alternative venue following the end of its run at the Whitney Museum. 

Valentina Di Liscia contributed reporting.

Following the bold critical acclaim of her first solo exhibition in New York in 1938, Frida Kahlo set out for her first and only voyage to a war-threatened Europe. French Surrealist André Breton, a friend and collaborator, had invited her to sojourn at home with his wife and daughter in Paris for a few weeks while he launched preparations for Mexique, the French version of the exhibition. However, Breton had not secured a gallery for the show, nor had Kahlo’s paintings’ customs been sorted. Kahlo also caught an infection at Breton’s home that required hospitalization, after which she made arrangements to check into a hotel. “To hell with everything concerning Breton and all this lousy place,” she expressed in a letter to her then-lover, Hungarian-American photographer Nickolas Muray. 

In a stroke of serendipity, Mary Reynolds, American specialist of bindings of Dada and Surrealist publications and partner of Marcel Duchamp, encouraged Kahlo to stay in her home in Paris following her hospital discharge. The book Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds, a companion to an exhibition of the same name at the Art Institute of Chicago, chronicles Kahlo’s short encounter with the world of French Surrealists at Reynolds’s home.

Astutely conceptualized as a “Surrealist Drama in Five Acts,” the book was collaboratively written by exhibition curators Caitlin Haskell, Tamar Kharatishvili, and Alivé Piliado Santana, who explain that “Kahlo’s time at 14 rue Hallé gives us a glimpse into the everyday life that is needed to sustain artists’ work.” While preparing for Mexique, which also included photographs by Manuel Alvarez Bravo and pre-Columbian art at Paris’s Galerie Renou et Colle, Kahlo spent a month communing at Reynolds’s home, a most marvelous meeting space for creatives, generously decorated with unusual materials, objects, and art.

Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris, though aiming to centralize the titular figures’ friendship at the peak of European modern art, is ultimately more about Reynolds and her ingenious artistic book bindings than anything else. The publication includes images of a fascinating selection of art books that Duchamp and Reynolds bound for their closest friends in natural and synthetic materials such as leather, silk, vellum, and animal skins. 

Their interest in organic forms and textures can be seen in a copy of French writer Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi (“King Ubu”), bound in tan goatskin with gold stamping. Another visual standout from the collection is the 1936 Les derniers jours (“The Last Days”) by French poet Raymond Queneau, bound in black calfskin and agate marble with gold stamping by Reynolds. 

The book also introduces several people who were instrumental in Kahlo’s career in Europe and entangled with Reynolds, including artists Constantin Brâncuși and Man Ray, art dealer Pierre Colle, and art collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim. Through individuals, art books, letters, and photographs, it vividly encapsulates the vast intellectual, material, and creative sphere Kahlo engaged with in just a month, even as she rejected Breton’s “Surrealist” label for her work.

The precise moment when and how Kahlo and Reynolds first met remains unknown, but the blossoming of their felicitous friendship demonstrates a profound connection between their lives and art, one that mirrors the emphasis on chance discoveries in Surrealism itself. Amid Kahlo’s letters and paintings, a 1939 typed letter by Reynolds to the artist acts as a testament to the lasting impact of their brief friendship. “The house is still and doesn’t know itself,” she wrote. “Every single thing misses you tremendously.” 

Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds (2025), by Caitlin Haskell, Tamar Kharatishvili, and Alivé Piliado Santana, is published the Art Institute of Chicago, distributed by Yale University Press, and available online or through independent booksellers.

CHICAGO — Do people need art? I know I always have, as something to enjoy, discuss, learn from, be puzzled by, and sometimes create. Obviously, I need food, shelter, and clothing first, but beyond that, art has given me a myriad of ways through which to engage with the world in all its fantastic, boring, unknown, and even horrible aspects. Art has made me fully human. Maybe it’s done the same for you, too.

No community is bereft of artists and art lovers in need of nurturing. But resources are not equitably distributed, among them the money to pay for museum access or ceramics classes, and so Chicago has long been home to social service-oriented arts organizations. The great historic one is Hull-House settlement, which operated from 1889 to 1963, where recent immigrants to the city could access childcare, education, and plentiful art-making opportunities. Among its descendants are After School Matters, which pays thousands of high school teens to learn creative skills via after school and summer programs; Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, or PNAP, whose work includes teaching art and poetry classes at Stateville Prison; and Arts of Life, which runs a trio of professional art studios and a gallery for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities.    

Marking its 10-year anniversary is Red Line Service (RLS), dedicated to providing art opportunities for currently or formerly unhoused people. RLS began as a social-practice experiment by artist Billie McGuinness and curator Rhoda Rosen, who spent one night a week for four months in the winter of 2015 at the CTA Red Line terminus platforms, offering overnight and continuous riders conversation and hot homemade food at a table set with flowers, from midnight to dawn. Since then, Rosen has evolved the organization into one that runs monthly lectures, arts workshops, exhibition tours, wellness hours, studio critiques, and more for an intergenerational, cross-class, multicultural group of artists affected by housing insecurity. Food is nearly always on offer.

Crucially, she is not the only one in charge: Red Line Service is dedicated to what they call “community sovereignty,” meaning experts and philanthropists do not make all the decisions in the hierarchical fashion customary at nonprofits. Red Line artists have a say in everything that the organization accomplishes. What this looks like in practice is that 80% of the Board of Directors have experienced housing insecurity; the programming, event, and fundraising committees are staffed by community members; and all written materials, from grants to wall texts, are likewise reviewed. Importantly, everyone gets paid for the work they do, including being compensated for having their art displayed in exhibitions (RLS is W.A.G.E. certified). Aspirationally, Red Line Service is fundraising for its most ambitious act of administrative solidarity, to abolish the executive director model and replace it with a pair of co-directors, at least one of whom will have known housing insecurity firsthand.

Bonding Thru Experience (BE) celebrates Red Line Service’s first decade. The exhibition is elegantly installed in a bright brick warehouse building, amid the plentiful galleries and studios of Chicago’s artsy Bridgeport neighborhood. It includes dozens of paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures by individual artists, plus an ongoing printmaking project done in conjunction with the Human Rights program at the University of Miami School of Law. After workshops led by the Radical Printshop Project and Process/Process, two Chicago printers with strong sociopolitical outreach programs, a group of Red Line artists produced linocuts and screen prints illustrating fair housing concepts. Advocates working to ratify the UN Human Right to Adequate Housing — the United States is one of the few countries that have so far failed at this — can avail themselves of these images, created from embodied knowledge, for their campaigns.

Among the show’s standouts are a cathartic punch needle rug by Tracey Christmas and a series of dense urban character sketches by Dontay Lockett deserving of an entire graphic novel. Three of Shay Jones’s “Lotsa Pockets” display the crafty ingenuity of their maker, who started fashioning denim aprons from scraps, with loads of pockets and lots of blingy décor, when she was unhoused and had to worry about where to stash her belongings. A pair of enormous pencil drawings by Ravi Arupa astonish with their intricacy, labor, and biomorphic worldbuilding. They are outdone only by his harmonious scrap wood constructions, with their clever configurations and sensitive attention to texture. 

Someone should give every one of these star artists a solo show in a commercial gallery, and someone else should buy that artwork and display it at home. But salability is only one value of art making. So many others are present here — from therapy to advocacy to documentary — as well as plenty that are not really possible to display but that are felt at every Red Line Service program I have ever attended. Many events are open to the general public, though they always cater first and foremost to community members; I’ve been to two exhibits, given one invited art history lecture, and produced one round of community art reviews. What is it that is felt but not displayable? It is the sense of belonging and empowerment that comes from being part of a community where your company and contributions have a place. It is civic life, in elemental form. 

Bonding Thru Experience (BE) continues at 3636 South Iron Street, 4th Floor, Chicago, Illinois, through July 27. The exhibition was curated by Amira Hegazy.

President Trump has withdrawn the United States from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for the second time in the government’s latest blow to global cultural heritage preservation.

In a brief statement posted to the Department of State website on Tuesday, July 22, spokesperson Tammy Bruce said UNESCO’s recognition of Palestine as a member state was contradictory to US foreign policy interests and propagated anti-Israel bias, claims that Director-General of UNESCO Audrey Azoulay rejected in a statement shared with Hyperallergic.

“UNESCO has supported 85 countries in implementing tools and training teachers to educate students about the Holocaust and genocides, and to combat Holocaust denial and hate speech,” Azoulay said. “UNESCO will continue to carry out these missions, despite inevitably reduced resources.”

Azoulay added that UNESCO is the only UN arm directly involved in Holocaust education and combating antisemitism, efforts celebrated by groups like the pro-Israel World Jewish Congress. The US’s withdrawal comes days after the Department of State imposed sanctions on UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.

UNESCO oversees over 1,200 World Heritage sites, including the Taj Mahal in India, Machu Picchu in Peru, and the Milanese church housing “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci, as well as Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and others in the US. Five UNESCO World Heritage sites are located in Palestine, including the birthplace of Jesus in Bethlehem. The organization also works to safeguard heritage assets caught in various crises, such as supporting regional response after the apparent looting at the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum during the country’s ongoing civil war.

The Department of State claimed in its departure announcement that UNESCO focused on “divisive” objectives, including promoting the broader UN’s adopted Sustainable Development Goals, which include eradicating hunger and poverty and promoting “sustainable industrialization.”

Per UNESCO’s constitution, the US will remain a member through 2026, though the Department of State informed the organization on Tuesday of its intentions. US membership dues account for 8% of UNESCO’s total budget, but since Trump’s first withdrawal in 2017, Azoulay said that private contributions have doubled.

The US stopped funding UNESCO when the organization included the “State of Palestine” as a member state in 2011, as required by a law prohibiting funds from flowing to agencies that grant full membership to Palestine. The US remained a member, however, until Trump’s first presidency, when he also cited supposed anti-Israel bias. It rejoined in 2023 under President Joe Biden, who promised to pay back over $600 million in arrears.

Israel withdrew from UNESCO in 2019. The broader UN has not recognized Palestine as a full member.

“We will continue to work hand in hand with all of our American partners in the private sector, academia and non-profit organizations, and will pursue political dialogue with the US administration and Congress,” Azoulay said in today’s statement.

The month of July brings Upstate Art Weekend (UAW), an annual summer cornucopia of art in the region. Launched in 2020 with 23 organizations, UAW has expanded to include more than 155 participants located across the map, from Nyack in the south and Kinderhook in the north to Roscoe in the west and Wassaic to the east. Celebrating a diversity of art Upstate, the packed program ran from July 17 to 21 with a robust roster of participants, including arts organizations, galleries, museums, residencies, and individual artists, as well as an abundant schedule of programming to complement the weekend. 

As a cheery resident of Upstate New York, I designed an ambitious roadmap to hit up 10 UAW spots daily and speak with artists, gallerists, and visitors in the community, and found additional artsy surprises along the way. With so many participants and places to visit, the chance encounters and connective energies that unfold are what make the yearly UAW event a magical-mystery-tour art experience. 

The adventure started on Friday in the village of Kinderhook with a visit to September gallery to see The Motherlode, a solo show of Nicole Cherubini’s sumptuous sculptural ceramics and 20 years’ worth of documentary-style photographs of her performances. 

“Before UAW, when I opened September nine years ago, there was no map, there was no communication about what was happening,” gallerist Kristen Dodge told me. “UAW has really helped connect the different institutions, galleries, and artists in the area and create a map that people can follow this weekend or later.” Dodge and Cherubini were excitedly preparing for the artist’s performance the next day at The Campus in Hudson. Cherubini commented that she intends for the piece to “encompass all that is going on up here, become a part of it, and to honor the life that I live up here.”

My next stop was Ann Bridget Murphy’s open studio in Catskill, one of the most charming towns around. Murphy warmly welcomed me into her home, and we chatted in her living room-turned-studio, where surrealist-style portraits and eccentric drawings of figures and lone faces holding swords occupied every wall.

She spoke enthusiastically about the Upstate art community, saying, “UAW has gotten so big, it’s spread everywhere, into every corner, and everyone is doing something. You can feel the energy in Catskill today. People are out on the street, it’s good for the businesses, it’s good for the community, and it’s really good for the artists because we all come together and we all get excited about it.” 

The Upstate backroads are a visual feast, and the drive from Catskill to Germantown landed me in a large field to encounter Muskeg, a sprawling installation with over 60 participating artists and works installed throughout the grounds, curated by Jacob Rhodes and Jessica Hargreaves. 

A highlight was seeing Z Behl and Kim Moloney (a collaborative artist-duo known as Baloney) and their site-specific installation WITHDRAWN: Thatcher and Snatcher and Imperial Slop (2025). Working with scrap metal and locally sourced materials, the artists created a monumental sculpture of a boat with accompanying fabric sculptures of pigs in sailor outfits and a misty spray of water, administered from above and softly cascading down in a refreshing gust to make visitors feel as if we were at sea. Rooted in the conceptual framework of The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984), a banned children’s book by British author Raymond Briggs, their allegorical sculpture comments on historical violence and policing, cast-off narratives, and gendered nationalism.

Behl said that UAW naturally highlights complex questions about the region’s art scene and economy.

“Obviously it’s a complicated dynamic when you have an invitation to bring so many tourists together to see work in a place that then can feel very overrun with money that isn’t always here or always moving through the economy, it’s sort of like a false economy,” she explained. “I think that’s a very complicated part of being an artist and working and living as an artist, period, no matter where you are!”

During that same visit to Germantown, I saw Collateral Magic, artist-activist Johannah Herr’s solo show organized by Elijah Wheat Showroom at the experimental gallery Mother-in-Law’s, and spoke with seasoned curator Carolina Wheat-Nielsen. 

“I use UAW to put some of my best, most social-political community-oriented presentations,” said Wheat-Nielsen, who co-founded Elijah Wheat Showroom with her wife Liz Nielsen, naming the space after their late son. She added that Herr’s socially oriented, retro lenticular photographic prints, which include nefarious political figures and other dubious historical moments of so-called “performative magic,” speak directly to the current political environment. “We need to talk about brainwashing, we need to talk about propaganda, we need to talk about the deception of our US government and what is happening.”

With a glorious summer sunset infusing the scene, I finished out Friday at Cut Teeth in Kingston to see the seven-artist exhibition EARTHLY / Otherworldy, which the gallery’s description explains is aimed at “exploring the intersection of the natural and the supernatural.” I chatted with Caroline Burdett, local artist and curator of the show, as a buoyant crowd milled about.

“As someone creating art Upstate in Woodstock, not being in the big city, it can be hard to find opportunities … I know what I want to see out there in the world, and I put it together,” Burdett said. With visible pride, she added, “These artists are putting themselves out there in really brave ways and I wanted to celebrate that.”

The next day, I drove two hours south to Cold Spring for a visit to Magazzino Italian Art, an incredible museum in a magnificent locale. Their recent show, Maria Lai. A Journey To America, included paintings, sculptures, and installations by the late powerhouse artist from Sardinia. I had an energizing and authentic conversation with Adam Sheffer, director of Magazzino, who described UAW as “all-inclusive, and really that’s what art is all about.” 

“This is the best moment for everybody to let loose, have a sense of freedom, connect with nature, connect with art, and get back to reality,” Sheffer said. “Here you get to be in this idyllic landscape with so much variety of art that you can totally immerse yourself, and you can create your own universe for the weekend.” 

I then drove through Cold Spring to see the group show Destination Earth at Ligenza Moore Gallery, with works by Katherine Bradford, Judy Pfaff, and Jeff Shapiro, among others. The flourishing grounds are a quintessential vision of art Upstate, and it was a pleasure to speak with gallery owner and artist Tony Moore, a first-time participant with UAW. 

“I have been thinking about hosting an exhibition [here] for 27 years … if not this year, when?” said Moore. We chatted about his involvement with the community and local support for artists, and he described the accessible beauty of the Ligenza environment as “soul-cleansing.”

Among the most wonderfully outrageous things I encountered all weekend was the site-specific installation “Daniel Giordano: I Knew Your Father When He Had Cojones” (2025) at the Green Lodge in Chatham, where I attended the Saturday evening opening amid a fun-loving crowd. Located in the back of a rural home, this small experimental space is run by curator Owen Barensfeld. For this show, Giordano took over the gallery room and infused it with red lighting and haphazardly burned lines across the ceiling and down the walls, with additional drawings on plastic sheeting and puffy sculptural fabric on the floor, inviting viewers to take off their shoes and get into the piece. 

“Owen is running an alternative project space, and it allowed me to do something I wouldn’t be able to replicate anywhere else,” Giordano told me. “I was able to get really fucking freaky and weird and do something special, burning the walls, making this immersive installation.” The artist described UAW as “a beautiful platform to build ever more community, which is vital.” 

Barensfeld echoed his point, adding, “I wish they didn’t do a pay-scale, but they did.” This year, the basic cost for UAW participation was $495 (up from $400 last year), including an Instagram stories feature, with the top-tier participation cost at $1,050 for a dedicated e-newsletter and website highlight.

On Sunday morning, after a pleasant stay in Chatham, I visited Art Omi in Ghent. Located on 120 acres with a sculpture and architecture park, Art Omi hosts year-round artist residency programs and arts education opportunities. It’s among the most important cultural organizations in the region and often hosts artists who rely on visas to participate in its programs — many of whom are facing challenges this year amid the Trump administration’s crackdowns. 

Flanked by the exhibition Harold Stevenson: Less Than My Routine Fantasy, featuring the late American artist’s large sensual paintings and drawings, I spoke with Senior Curator Sara O’Keeffe about the value of uplifting local artists. 

“The Hudson Valley is filled with so many incredible creatives, and UAW is one of those weekends where so many people come together to look at one another are making,” she said. “We love being part of the event. We also love so many of the local artists who are here all year-round.” She added that Art Omi’s mission is to support artists who haven’t been given their full due: “We want artists to get the flowers in their lifetime.” 

With the weekend closing out but the spirit of creativity still thriving, I blew through Hudson to check out various gallery exhibitions, including The Summer Show at Carrie Haddad Gallery. The seasonally themed works were a perfect backdrop for my upbeat conversation with Jaime Ransome, independent curator and arts professional at the gallery, who said that open studios are one of the major strengths of UAW. 

“Beyond just seeing art in a sterile gallery space, we are also getting to connect with artists on their own turf, in their own spaces,” Ransome said. When I asked her about her current projects, she explained, “I am really focusing right now on connecting feminist artists with spaces and Black artists with spaces. Most places are inclusive enough to recognize that new things need to be brought in.”

Having logged hundreds of miles over my three-day UAW bonanza, my final stop at Shadow Walls in Purling was an utter delight. The exhibition REPAIR, curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre, displayed dynamic artworks around the eclectic old house in a bucolic setting, including elegant porcelain pieces by Anna Cone, artist and founder of the Shadow Walls project. “I think that an unconventional setting makes the art more accessible, and also the fact that it’s in a home, it feels warm and welcoming,” said Cone of the nature of UAW. 

Lemaitre summed up the ethos of UAW as ripe for serendipity and discovery. 

“It’s been incredibly interesting to see the mix of local people who are interested in art but don’t know much about it, and people who come because they want to discover the architecture of the house, but end up discovering challenging art,” she said. “We had more people than I would have ever expected.”

Worldbuilding and building better worlds — these are idealistic notions that can become indulgences in the art world. But, to paraphrase Hyperalleric’s Editor-in-Chief, Hrag Vartanian, in his review of artist Saya Woolfalk’s current survey, when executed well, they can be powerful. All of the artists below have endeavored to build ethical worlds and improve our own. While Woolfalk’s futuristic installations and hybrid creatures toy with the concept of hyperreality, Umber Majeed merges the analog world of the past with forward-facing technologies. On the other hand, Ben Shahn spent his career collaborating and organizing with others to create a world that is more just for all, and for almost half a century, Magali Lara has championed feminism and carved out a space for women in Mexico’s art world and beyond. —Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor

Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body

Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, 142 Franklin Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
Through August 16

“Lara’s sinuous trees, in sync with a mosaic of blue and indigo brushstrokes, are not overtaken by the elements but rather move with them; their roots and branches seemingly shape the world around them through sheer psychical force.” —NH

Read the full review.

Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe

Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, Columbus Circle, Manhattan
Through September 7

“In her aesthetic universe, the artwork moves beyond realism to a more psychological state of being, and she mines pop culture and historical allusions at every turn.” —Hrag Vartanian

Read the full review.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity

Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan
Through October 12

“If we are to learn from his work — as well we should — we must understand that ‘nonconformity’ is not, and cannot be, a solo venture.” —Isabella Segalovich

Read the full review.

Umber Majeed: J😊y Tech

Queens Museum, Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens
Through January 18, 2026

“This one-room exhibition is one of the most technically inventive I’ve seen, and is a fresh and exciting excavation of the fertile physical/digital intersection between diasporic Asian and early internet aesthetics.” —Lisa Yin Zhang

Read the full review.

The For You page, as the popular TikTok comment goes, is getting too local. I, for one, am grateful. Umber Majeed’s exhibition J😊Y TECH draws from the visual vernacular of phone repair stores in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens — their densely packed cacophony of bright colors, screaming fonts, and many languages spilling out into the sidewalks — as an extension of her ongoing Trans-Pakistan research project inspired by her uncle’s now-defunct tourist agency. She builds his real-life business into a digital universe through augmented reality (AR), video, drawings, and ceramics that mine “South Asian digital kitsch,” as the introductory text puts it. Though its execution is a bit uneven, this one-room exhibition is one of the most technically inventive I’ve seen, and is a fresh and exciting excavation of the fertile physical/digital intersection between diasporic Asian and early internet aesthetics. 

Technological nostalgia, particularly around the 1990s and early 2000s, is a persistent visual theme throughout the exhibition even as its own tools are cutting-edge. One of the first works that viewers encounter is “Untitled” (2025), a one-minute single-channel video on a special display that produces a convincing simulation of a three-dimensional box. Objects float mesmerizingly, as if in an aquarium or on a 3D screensaver. These include a hand-drawn red-and-white checkered Apple logo that is something like an emblem for the exhibition; relics of data storage like a CD-ROM and a floppy disk; and a Mughal dome that bops around like a jellyfish. The box itself works almost like a meta data storage device — not one that stores raw bits of information such as matrices, arrays, or graphs, but something more like a repository of collective memory. 

Multiple works in the exhibition contain AR elements, two of which are displayed across from “Untitled.” The drawing “zoom in” (2024) consists of the titular words along with the phrase “THE DIGITAL DIFFERENCE” embedded in the center of a heart, surrounded and engulfed by lines of motion that recall Y2K Futurism. The words take on a double meaning: On the one hand, “zoom” denotes speed and excitement, in line with a tourist agency promising adventure; on the other, it suggests digitally zooming in on something, which emphasizes the distinctly handmade quality of the work. Follow a set of instructions on the wall label and point your phone toward the drawing, though, and the heart beats with serial animations that includes logos, arrows, and a map that references the 1947 partitioning of India, and what would become Pakistan and Bangladesh.

J😊Y TECH toys with and occasionally explodes the typical form and boundaries of an exhibition. The bold neon-red frames of the AR works color more analog elements as well, including a dynamic arrow that zig-zags from the ceiling onto the top of the partial wall that divides the exhibition diagonally and down its side, ending on the floor pointing toward the massive vinyl wall work “Timeline” (2024–25). A black and white, red and white, or gray and white grid alternatively invoking the tiled flooring of a small business and a blank digital space (such as in a new Photoshop document) is a key motif of the exhibition — it appears on multiple walls and is reproduced in smaller, more playful form within individual works, such as a vortex sucking in an older-generation iPhone. The motif is intended to bend and fuse the planes of real and digital space just as she digitally builds on her uncle’s real-life travel agency. 

Still, it can sometimes feel like the ideas in this exhibition can supersede their execution. Though she intentionally and effectively privileges those with the language and/or culture she’s targeting — those who read Bangla and Urdu would recognize words in those languages in the aforementioned untitled animation, for instance — some works demand a lot of viewers regardless of their background. While you might recognize the Mughal dome that also floats around the same work if you’re familiar with South Asian culture or art history, you might not know it sat atop the Pakistan pavilion at the 1964–65 World Fair unless you’re listening to the Bloomburg Connects audio description or reading its transcription. Other pieces are inaccessible in spatial ways: Certain drawings, such as “Goes Digital” (2021), are hung inhumanly high, and therefore difficult to see. 

An untitled video work near the end of the exhibition feels most difficult to grasp. It mimics the visual-sonic-informational overload of social media — there’s image-editing, ads, webpages, archival information, iPhone screen recordings, and icons bouncing about the three channels, not to mention a collection of real-life ceramic sculptures. It effectively satirizes the kind of quick-cut brainrot endemic to Youtube essays and TikToks, but to what end? I walked away with a lot of interesting information buzzing around my head — jewelry designer Barbara Anton was commissioned to highlight the natural pink pearl farming industry in what is now Bangladesh as part of the World Fair, and “String of Pearls” is also a term invented by the United States to refer to a network of Chinese military and commercial facilities, for instance — but not the architecture to put it together. 

Majeed’s work also spurred perhaps the deepest and most substantive episode so far in my ongoing struggles with my perception of “good” and “bad” aesthetics, and whether they come from an internalization of problematic hierarchies. I loved “WE CAN FIX IT” (2025), a wonky signboard made of decals on ceramic and wood that bears the title along with faded photos of defunct devices. It felt like a smarter, sharper, and more politically agitative version of the work of Shanzhai Lyric. Rather than simply arguing for the beauty of pedestrian culture, as Shanzhai Lyric does with misspelled English words in Chinese clothing and Majeed does with diasporic South Asian-owned tech repair shops, the work also points toward the potential of these visual languages to unsettle dominant forms. To me, they represent the trickle-up of hyperlocal rather than the trickle-down of corporate culture, the evidence of life carved out from inhospitable terrain. But I also wondered if I responded to the work because I could easily imagine it in a white cube gallery. 

I also wondered if someone who was less familiar with the visual culture of Queens and invested in the related Chinese/Chinese diasporic aesthetic of Shanzhai may have a differing opinion of “WE CAN FIX IT.” And I considered whether a related bias in background (such as my own failed forays in the medium) might shape my feelings about her drawings. Some, such as the AR-activated “Saath Haath” (2024), depicting hands clasped together beneath a horizon line as dark bands connect them above, felt a little juvenile to me in their technical clumsiness, whether intentional or not. But they do make for a great contrast with the slickness of the exhibition’s digital innovation, as well as mesh well with the stuttering visual culture of an early internet, which is endearing and nostalgic. 

J😊Y TECH cuts particularly deep for a generation of Asian Americans who came of age during the 1990s and 2000s, and saw the aesthetics of their diasporic culture meld, sometimes queasily, with that of early digital culture. Majeed’s work might be the first time I’ve really encountered a meaningful exploration of that idea, which brings with it the baggage of all that cultural anxiety, as well as excitement. I can’t wait to see where Majeed — and the rest of the vanguard of this particular niche where first-gen diaspora meets early-gen tech — goes next.

Umber Majeed: J😊Y TECH continues at the Queens Museum (Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens) through January 18, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Lindsey Berfond.

For sale: a 1,046-foot-tall, 77-story building with a footprint of 1,196,958 square feet, constructed in a steel frame and adorned in gray and white brick with reinforced steel accents, constructed 95 years ago. Located at 42nd and Lexington Avenue in New York City, the building, recently on the market, is expected to go cheap because of “faulty elevators, murky water fountains and pests,” according to reports. Realtors note that the nearly century-old structure lacks many of the contemporary amenities that both commercial and residential tenants require. 

You’ve certainly seen this listing before, whether in Margaret Bourke-White’s 1929 construction photographs featured in Time Magazine; portraits by Annie Leibovitz; or in the background of movies, from those of Woody Allen to The Avengers to Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024), in which the character played by Adam Driver teeters on the edge of its iconic spire. The Empire State Building may be more famous, but the Chrysler Building — what its patron called a “monument to me” — is arguably the more recognizable, with its tapered conical spire, its stylized eagle ornaments, its polished chrome the color of hubcaps. The preeminent example of that architectural and design style known as Art Deco, briefly the tallest building in the world before it would be unseated a few months after completion by the Empire State Building down the block, the Chrysler building is to glass and concrete what George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924) is to melody and rhythm; it is to brick and iron what oil and canvas is to the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe; it is to plate glass and aluminum what F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is to sentences and paragraphs. With a spire that punctuates the New York night sky like a steeple above the vital hubbub of the streets below, the automotive company’s iconic headquarters might be the very symbol of the 20th century. 

It has been a century since the term “Art Deco” was coined, a shortened version of the name of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts and Industrial Style, held in Paris in 1925. That the building is on the market — and a steal! — is a telling comment about the status of design and architecture, even of modernity and progress itself. In his classic All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), critic Marshall Berman writes that the 20th century was defined by a “mode of vital experience,” the first time in history whereby innovation seemed to move everything from technology to society at incredible velocity to both exhilarating and disorienting effect. The Chrysler Building’s discount sale represents the dissipation of that feeling into the toxic miasma of our current moment, when dreams of a vital future are endangered. 

Indeed, the decline in popularity of Art Deco in the postwar world, and the way it looks so clearly dated today, speaks to the decline not just in a style, but in the metanarratives that bolstered it, in the grand designs and triumphalist perspectives it traded in. As Robert McGregor of the Art Deco Trust in New Zealand put it, the style marked a faith that there would be “no more poverty, no more ignorance, no more disease,” that it reflected “confidence, vigor and optimism” via “symbols of progress, speed and power.” The narrative of Art Deco’s decline is thus one of eclipse, of the end of naïve beliefs in progress, first obliterated by the dual specters of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, which demonstrated the ultimate soulless logic of industrial technology, and continually negated in our own time, during the fetid late afternoon of the Anthropocene.

Art Deco was the child of the totalizing dreams of earlier interrelated movements of modernity: Arts & Crafts, Beaux-Arts, Art Nouveau, Vienna Secession. It was itself often known by a dozen different designations, from Jazz Moderne to Liberty Style, Odeon Style to Zigzag Moderne. By the 1968 publication of Bevis Hillier’s Art Deco of the 20s and 30s, the label derived from the Paris exhibition half a century before retroactively became the primary term associated with that heterodox style that sleekly valorized technology and abstracted nature. It drew from cultures as varied as Gothic Europe, East Asia, and the Mayans, not to mention avant-garde movements ranging from Cubism to Primitivism to Constructivism to De Stijl, to render a novel visual look. What must always be remembered about Art Deco, however — as a movement, style, mode, genre, what-have-you — is that it was an aesthetic birthed not from academies or manifestos, but from tangible material realities, a product of what was then cutting-edge technology. Before Hilliers could identify it, Art Deco had risen out of reinforced concrete and rebar, plate glass and aluminum — an industrial aesthetic as organically emergent as can be imagined. 

The extraordinary thing, as Hillier notes, is that “so rigorously formulated a style should have imposed itself so universally — on hairdressers’ shops, handbags, shoes, lamp-posts and letter-boxes, as well as on hotels, cinemas, and liners.” Indeed, Art Deco, for its diversity and often contradictions, is nonetheless an immediately recognizable style defined by sleekness and syncretism, velocity and vitality. And, as Hillier observed, it was once everywhere: the stylized sunrays that crown the Chrysler Building; the dim-lit, cavernous lobby of Moscow’s Mayakovskaya Station; the Rococo resplendence of Amsterdam’s Tuschinski Theatre; the alabaster phallic monolith of Los Angeles City Hall. It was in theaters, post offices, and schools; in textiles, metalworks, fashion, glassworks, decorative arts, sculpture, and painting. Not just in New York, but in Los Angeles and Chicago, Tokyo and Bangkok, Paris and Berlin, Tulsa and Miami. It was, Hillier writes, “the last of the total styles,” one that fused a utopian progressivism with an ecumenical taste, futurism with a certain melancholic pathos. Indeed, nothing has quite supplanted the psychic space Art Deco once held, whether it’s the anemic International Style or totalitarian Brutalism. 

In the French context, Art Deco was able to ascend to the heights expressed by the 1925 exhibition in part because it reflected a shift in the status of decorative artists. With the establishment of the National School of Decorative Arts in 1875, the French government elevated them from the status of mere artisans or craftsmen. In the Anglophone world, where there was no equivalent state imprimatur, there was the emergence of the Arts & Crafts movement, which similarly valorized that which was once considered mere ornament or utilitarian device. Everything from chairs to wallpaper, forks to cabinets, could embody the exalted status of art. This is crucial in Art Deco, in which design attains the heights of art while art is imbued with the democratic ethos of design. 

Adepts in Art Deco produced utilitarian objects: the clean-carved, red-cushioned chairs with a geometric design produced in 1912 by Maurice Dufrêne and Paul Follot, and the stunning green-and-yellow-fabric recliner with its curving circular pattern evocative of Chinese design, made by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann in 1914, both exhibited at the Musee d’Orsay; the bottled strength of New York Central’s 20th Century Limited locomotive, with its futuristic, curved design in gleaming black; the unadorned, elegant black dress, designed by Jean Patou, that extenuated American dancer Desiree Lubovska’s slender frame. Art Deco’s tautological embrace of decoration, of design, was a variation on the Arts & Crafts movement’s similar affection for the plastic arts, but without the sylvan, rusticated associations of a William Morris or a Charles Rennie Mackintosh. By contrast, Art Deco was steadfastly urban, progressive, and technological. 

If Art Deco allowed art to descend from the heights to the mere realm of design, then it also allowed the opposite. Painters and sculptors consciously borrowed elements of Art Deco into their own compositions. See, for instance, Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka, who translated the idiom from stone to canvas. Her 1930 “Sainte Thérèse d’Avila,” held by the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, applies a smooth, abstracted, rectilinear style to the orgasmic expression of Bernini’s famed Baroque sculpture; the closed eyes and agape mouth of the ecstatic figure framed in a nun’s habit seems more architecture than textile. “Young Woman in Green,” painted between 1927 and 1930 and now exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, presents a beautiful, blonde woman draped in a green dress that clings to her form; she’s been translated into an assemblage of geometric relationships, spheres and columns, which does nothing to detract from how obviously stunning she is. 

True to the egalitarian ethos of Art Deco, it was often a feature in proletarian art, from Mexican communist muralist Diego Rivera’s since-destroyed Rockefeller Center lobby painting “Man at the Crossroads” from 1933, which infamously included Vladimir Lenin, to becoming virtually the house style of artists employed by the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA). American WPA painters adorned everything from federal office buildings to regional post offices in that unmistakable visual language. Then there are the monumental examples, from the massive, mountain-top “Christ the Redeemer” of 1931 in Rio de Janeiro, who holds his arms out in cruciform benediction, to the vaguely ominous personification of industry in the “Guardians of Traffic” on Cleveland’s Hope Memorial Bridge constructed only a year later, two examples of how Art Deco made a faith out of industrial progress.

Architecture, however, is where Art Deco is most recognized. As just a short list: the American Radiator Building overlooking New York’s Bryant Park, the emblazoned and glowing Rockefeller Plaza a few blocks away, the Byzantine grand lobby of Detroit’s Guardian Building. Most arrestingly, it is marked by an attention to detail that has been all but erased in subsequent architectural styles bedeviled by pernicious minimalism. An Art Deco skyscraper, in its ornamentations and its moldings, bears more similarity to a Gothic cathedral than it does the average 5-over-1 Chipotle brutalist boxes that are continually rising over American cities in our current moment. The shining and sleek eagle gargoyles peering out from the corners of the Chrysler Building, the winged metal angel named “Spirit of Light” splayed atop Syracuse’s Niagara Mohawk Building (1932), the sculpture of a hard-bodied laborer wrestling with a horse entitled “Man Controlling Trade” (1938) in front of Washington, DC’s Federal Trade Commission Building — all examples of Art Deco’s diversity in aesthetic unity. 

Still, even if the downfall of Art Deco represents the dissipation of its ideals, which were at its best democratic, a strain of triumphalist supremacy nonetheless runs through such work that at its worst could appear borderline dystopian. Skyscrapers, after all, have at least been co-opted to symbolize capitalist triumphism. “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world,” writes Berman, “and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”

Look no further than the frieze at Rockefeller Center, which stylizes a white-bearded deity with a compass, appearing nothing so much like an Art Deco version of William Blake’s Urizen, who exclaims, “Wisdom and Knowledge Shall be the Stability of Thy Times.” An ironic declaration, not least of all because it inverts Blake’s warning about rationalism and positivism — in the Romantic poet’s prophetic writings, it is precisely that commitment to knowledge over feeling, the hubris of the individual over the good of the many, that threatens our destruction. The translation of those favorite Art Deco motifs, such as palm fronds and flowers, peacocks and butterflies, into angular, trapezoidal, and geometric abstractions was a triumph of the mechanical over the organic, but also a demonstration of the technocratic philosophy that has brought us to this point. If Art Deco was an expression of capitalist faith in technological progress, then the unfettered excess of that same system is what pushes us to the precipice, as we anticipate the rising waters eventually flooding down 42nd and Lexington, the warm waves of the Atlantic lapping at the Chrysler Building’s edifice.

Amid rollbacks in federal arts funding and sweeping layoffs at cultural institutions across the United States, visitor attendance appears to remain on a steady incline at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Manhattan museum announced yesterday, July 21, that more than 5.7 million attendees visited its two locations — The Met Fifth Ave and The Cloisters — during the 2025 fiscal year, which ended on June 30. While the visitor rates do not surpass The Met’s 2019 attendance record of over 7 million guests, the data indicates a 5% increase in turnout from last year, when the institution welcomed 5.5 million people.

The figures also included a new peak in single-day attendance at the museum since 2017, courtesy of the public reopening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing on May 31. The sole event brought in 33,700 people, according to an attendance report. The museum also cited ongoing shows, like Sargent and Paris and Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, for its strong turnout; the two exhibitions each brought in more than 427,000 and 291,000 guests, respectively.

The newly released statistics show that The Met is continuing to bounce back from dips in attendance attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, the museum was the first institution in New York City to close to the public indefinitely to prevent the spread of the virus. The museum has since raised admission prices by $5 for out-of-state adults, although its “pay-what-you-wish” policy has remained in place for New York state residents and tri-state region students.

According to the institution, attendance from New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey represented a 109% recovery rate since the pandemic. Local attendance accounted for 62% of all visitors, whereas domestic out-of-state attendees made up just under a quarter. 

International attendance, however, continued to lag at the museum. A Met spokesperson told Hyperallergic that global visitors accounted for 15% of its total attendance for the past fiscal year. This is slightly lower than last year, when foreign guests accounted for 16% of its total visitorship, about half of what it was before the pandemic.

As we all vie for a distraction from the world’s woes, an alleged affair exposed via the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert has become the meme of the summer.

Over the past week, the internet has been reveling in poking fun at a viral clip from the band’s sold-out gig at Gillette Stadium outside Boston. The footage, taken during the concert’s “kiss cam segment,” seems to have unshrouded a possible extramarital rendezvous between Andy Byron, the chief executive officer of New York-based data firm Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the head of the company’s HR department — at least based on the couple’s embarrassed reaction when the camera panned over to them. Immediately, Cabot covers her face and turns around; Byron simply ducks down out of the frame.

“Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” lead singer Chris Martin said uneasily into the microphone.

Two days after the incident, Astronomer announced Byron had been placed on leave, and one day later, he had “tendered his resignation.” Cabot, who sits on the company’s board of directors, has also removed her LinkedIn profile. Coldplay has now begun issuing friendly warnings to concertgoers about the Jumbotron.

Sure, it’s a reminder that we live in a constant surveillance state, but it’s also chef’s kiss-level meme fodder, yielding everything from recreations of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) and new interpretations of Greek antiquity to a resurgence of years-old viral moments. People are comparing the caught canoodlers to other scandalous pairings, from Fleetwood Mac lead vocalists Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham to … yes, Vice President JD Vance and his couch. 

Many online jokes center on the relationship between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and President Donald Trump, which has been under intensifying scrutiny amid his administration’s alleged mismanagement of the so-called Epstein files. Others have focused on speculations that Katie Miller, the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, is having a romance with billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk after she followed Musk’s departure from the White House.

Others have drawn connections between the incident and other meme-ified events involving the downfall of wealthy corporate executives, from the suspicious string of orca yacht attacks in 2023 to the catastrophic implosion of the OceanGate submersible.

Thankfully, it’s not all so morbid. There’s plenty of light-hearted jokes drawing comparisons to Tony Soprano’s ceaseless infidelity, Carrie Bradshaw’s annoying romance with Mr. Big, and an imagined romance between Elmo and Miss Piggy — proving that “Coldplaygate” really lends itself to anything. One labor group from the United Kingdom even seized the moment as an opportunity to spread their union message.

The moment, which has been immortalized in everything from crochet art to painting, has also become a popular reenactment across sports stadiums and even spawned a free computer game called Coldplay Canoodlers. The point-and-click game created by songwriter Jonathan Mann invites users to search the stadium’s 65,000 audience members for Cabot and Byron. Because, as we can all probably agree, Where’s Waldo? is way too wholesome for 2025.

Below, we’ve rounded up some of the best of this unexpected but extremely delightful viral treat. Bon appétit!

A day after Independence Day in the United States, the world’s richest man announced on X that he would form a new political party called the America Party. A follow-up from Elon Musk revealed that he intended to break up the current “uniparty” system through the use of an Ancient Greek military tactic, “a variant of how Epaminondas shattered the myth of Spartan invincibility at Leuctra: extremely concentrated force at a precise location on the battlefield.” The wording was vague, but it followed Musk’s performative pattern of invoking the Greco-Roman world. From his references to ancient leaders like the Roman dictator Sulla to tweets in Latin without an English translation, Musk frequently draws on the ancient world as a way of telegraphing a conservative intellect. And yet, the technocrat’s reference to Epaminondas makes one wonder whether he may have missed the irony of alluding to a battle wherein it was queer soldiers who helped achieve victory.

Since the 19th century, the famed Theban military unit known as the Sacred Band has been an icon for gay rights. In the fourth century BCE, Epaminondas of Samos was a general for the city of Thebes in the central Greek region of Boeotia. By 371 BCE, he became a Boeotarch, one of the leading Boeotian federal officials in the newly established democracy. As a diplomat, he attempted to broker peace with the bellicose Spartans to the south, but ultimately, Boeotia and Sparta clashed at the Battle of Leuctra that same year. During the battle, the Thebans famously deployed the Sacred Band of Thebes to help clinch victory. The elite unit of 300 foot soldiers from the city, originally formed around 379 BCE, consisted of pairs of lover-warriors who marched into battle together. At the battle of Leuctra, the one that Musk referenced, they were led by a famed general named Pelopidas. 

The strength of the unit emanated in part from their deep attachment to each other. The Thebans were not the only Greek culture to use this approach: There was same-sex love in a number of Greek military units beyond the Sacred Band, from Achilles’ and Patroclus’ likely relationship in the Trojan War to the use of same-sex couples paired together in battlelines for the Greek city of Elis. Musk and many other conservatives, like Steve Bannon, often omit the role of sexuality in ancient military successes when extolling the virtues of Greek warriors. 

But why did Thebes promote same-sex love explicitly? James Romm, the leading expert on the unit and author of The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers Fighting to Save Greek Freedom (2021), told me that the strength of the Sacred Band “came from the determination of lovers to excel in the eyes of their partners and to protect their partners from harm.” The Thebans encouraged relationships between male soldiers to use love as a means of cementing military protection. One of the founders of the Sacred Band allegedly remarked that “the only general that can never be beaten is Eros,” Romm said, suggesting that “romantic love is the strongest motivation that could be harnessed on the battlefield.” In other words, bravery in battle could be encouraged through both love of one’s homeland and love for one’s boyfriend. 

If Musk is aware of how much the Battle of Leuctra relied on the Sacred Band — and thus people we would today identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community — he did not signal it, and his recent track record has shown that he continues not to be an ally to the community. The scion frequently donates to politicians hostile to LGBTQ+ rights both here and abroad and has allowed hateful and abusive speech on X since his acquisition of the social media site in 2022, mocked pronouns, and tweeted transphobic messages against trans persons, including his own daughter. 

Musk’s allusion to Thebes might be a tacit jab at his rival, Steve Bannon, who frequently expresses his adoration for the Spartans and the Peloponnesian War. Thebes is well known for the Sacred Band, but it is also famous for being the power that finally toppled the Spartans. Following Musk’s announcement of a third party, Bannon took the bait and attacked Musk on the “War Room” podcast by calling him a buffoon and a mook. Whether the references to Thebes were an implicit jab at Bannon’s love of Sparta or not, Musk often engages in pseudo-intellectual but misguided flexes that cast him as a savant and erudite nerd. And yet the technocrat is well-known to misunderstand the meaning and context of the literature he claims to read.

Musk’s references to antiquity often seem to be more about cherry-picking than misconstruing, and his AI is only perpetuating this selective bias. He trained his “un-woke” AI bot, Grok, on texts that turned it into a Nazi. This process of using selective texts for AI training creates an echo chamber of omission and prejudice. Conservative focus on military might over queerness would, to my mind, most likely result in the existence of historical queerness being more frequently omitted or occluded if AI is trained only on right-wing media. AI simply mimics, perpetuates, and then attempts to normalize the biases of the texts it is built upon. 

In his performative mentions of the Greco-Roman world, Musk leans heavily on the prestige of the classical “tradition,” a constructed notion often celebrated in conservative circles. This affection for “classics” is embodied in initiatives like the Christian-backed, conservative alternative to the SAT and ACT, the Classic Learning Test (CLT), which purports to draw on “classic texts,” from Aristotle to Shakespeare, to combat “wokeness.” But there are glaring omissions once again: The list of ancient texts for the CLT excludes the work of the lesbian poet Sappho, along with any analysis of the prevalence and acceptance of same-sex love in antiquity. This May, Republican Senator Jim Banks introduced a bill to promote the CLT at military academies and federally operated schools. The bill, which has not passed the Senate but has been referred to the Committee on Armed Services, would encourage the use of the CLT at institutions like West Point and the Naval Academy, further enmeshing the teaching of antiquity and the concept of military valor. 

Like the CLT, the curation of Greco-Roman antiquity filtered through movies, pop culture, and books often downplays or omits the queerness throughout the Ancient Greek world. In the movie Troy (2004), there are no homoerotic elements to the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus (they were cousins!), while there was backlash to Netflix’s Troy: Fall of a City (2018) due to the use of a Black actor as Achilles, as well as the steamy threesome between Achilles, Patroclus, and Briseis. The sanitized, straight version of antiquity often presented to the public omits the long history of gay and trans figures throughout the premodern Mediterranean, deletions or modifications that authors like Roland Betancourt, Madeline Miller, and Sarah Nooter have sought to return to the ancient world. In Nooter’s new How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality, the University of Chicago Classics professor uses snippets from dozens of ancient authors to underscore “what the Greeks knew long ago — that the erotic and queer are a source of life and a cause for celebration.”

What is the ultimate damage of a classical tradition that LGBTQ+ people are excised from? “Tradition” can serve as a means of reinforcing a conservative construction of masculinity. Powerful men like Musk or Mark Zuckerberg often reference the ancient leaders of the past as examples of their preferred type of right-wing masculinity: straight. But Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill put it eloquently when he noted that references to Greco-Roman antiquity are often more about presenting oneself as the culmination of a tradition than presenting an accurate vision of that past. Such tradition deploys a “historically privileged continuity: a line, an ancestry, a promise.” Like Musk himself, the invocations of these traditions are often self-serving. 

The Sacred Band came to an end in 338 BCE at the Battle of Chaeronea, after Philip II of Macedon and his son, Alexander, and their troops triumphed over Thebes. Plutarch notes the awe with which Philip looked at the fallen members of the Sacred Band on the battlefield thereafter. In 1880, nearly 300 skeletons were discovered in a mass burial beneath the soil. As Romm argues, this is likely the final resting place of the Sacred Band of Thebes. 

From the late 19th century onward, the Sacred Band and their burial at Chaeronea served as an artistic touchstone for gay artists and organizers. Not long after the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 shook gay communities in Europe and abroad, the poet, writer, and gay activist George Cecil Ives proposed to begin an underground group called the Order of Chaeronea, one of the earliest known gay rights societies. They had rings made for their group and banded together to fight legislation prohibiting homosexuality, among many other causes. Later, queer illustrators and writers like Laurence Housman (brother of classicist and poet A.E. Housman) joined Ives and the order, eventually co-founding another gay rights group, the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. From 1909 on, Housman also played a pivotal part in organizing men to support women’s suffrage and creating the artist workshop known as the Suffrage Atelier. 

Ancient Greece was a touchstone for these early activists. In The Sacred Band, Romm notes that Ives called members of the Order of Chaeronea “Hellenists.” This was “his term for those who found inspiration in Greek male erôs [love].” To gay communities of the past and present, the Battle of Leuctra and the Sacred Band represent much more than just a military tactic. And the lessons that the military unit provides continue to this day. As Romm remarks, because male homosexuality is frequently connected “with softness or effeminacy,” gay and trans persons are often slandered as embodying qualities in opposition to military prowess. However, “the Sacred Band, and the Greeks generally,” Romm argues, “demonstrate the opposite case.” For many activists from Victorian England to today, this unit exemplifies the abilities of queer soldiers who drew on their love of one another as an undeniable strength. If Musk had known even a fraction of this history of the Sacred Band, he perhaps would have realized that his plans for a new political party are rather magnificently “woke” indeed. 

What makes a prophet? Whether or not we believe that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had a direct line to God, many tend to think of them as individual people with radical and revolutionary ideas, standing proud and alone amid the decadence and conformity around them. But according to theologian Walter Brueggemann, the prophets did not work alone. They were simply the mouthpieces for the communities in which they lived, worked, cried, celebrated, and organized. Whether in spiritual texts or on the frontline of protests for human rights today, it is not from lone geniuses, but from “prophetic communities” that we have received the ideas that have shattered and reshaped the world. 

I imagine that the curators of Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity, currently on view at the Jewish Museum, would agree with me that this legendary leftist Jewish artist was a prophetic figure. But we would likely disagree about what that means. This rare exhibition succeeds in showing Shahn’s breadth and versatility, both in terms of his choice of medium and the huge range of subjects he took on. But despite acknowledging his decades of work as part of organized groups fighting for their vision of a racially and economically just world, the exhibit frames Shahn as a lone crusader against oppression — admirable but generally unobtrusive. He is made digestible, predictable, safe. 

It may not look that way at first. The show begins with his painting titled “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti” (1931–32) set against a blood-red wall. Three judges gaze down at the coffins containing the graying bodies of the two famous Italian anarchists, likely falsely accused of murder. Their faces are smug, mildly irritated, even bored. At once realistic and slightly distorted, Shahn’s thick, wavering lines retain his trademark scratchy texture and vibrant hues. Next to the painting is the quote from Shahn that supplies the show’s title: 

Nonconformity is the basic pre-condition of art, as it is the basic pre-condition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people. The degree of nonconformity present — and tolerated — in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health.

The rooms that follow display a delightful sample of Shahn’s work: posters he created while directing the Graphic Arts Division at the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and participating in the antifascist efforts of the Office of War Information (OWI); photos he took for the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA) showing the plight and strength of American farmers during the Dust Bowl; and political cartoons for the Progressive Party poking fun at politicians. These are presented alongside an impressive swath of his paintings, from surreal dreamscapes memorializing the horrors of the Holocaust to flame-engulfed monsters that raise alarm about the dangers of nuclear warfare to bittersweet reflections on the beauty of everyday life. The final gallery shows his late-in-life foray into Hebrew lettering, including illustrations of classic Jewish texts, which at once offer tender comfort to their viewers and invoke the cosmic eternity of God’s power. 

But we get barely a glimmer of one of Shahn’s most resplendent eras: the New Deal murals. The exhibit includes just one small painting, a study for a mural entitled “The Great State of Wisconsin,” with no context, or explanation that the mural proposal was rejected (it is unclear why).

Only in the catalog do we learn that the artist worked alongside Diego Rivera, who said Shahn’s works “possess the necessary qualities, accessibility, and power to make them important to the proletariat.” Specifically, Shahn worked in 1933 on Rivera’s “ill-fated” Rockefeller Center mural “Man at a Crossroads,” destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller when he found out it contained a portrait of Vladimir Lenin. But the catalog couches even this explicitly Marxist moment as just another step in Shahn’s career, describing him learning “composition and fresco technique” and witnessing the “breakdown of the professional working relationship between artists and patrons of opposing political ideologies.” It reads more like a resume than a historic moment in corporate America’s appeasement of fascist forces in the year Hitler came to power. 

A study for Shahn’s “The Meaning of Social Security” shows a single farmer, leaning on his machinery during a short break from his work. It is a beautiful painting — the man, content with the fruits of his labor, smiles subtly, framed by the soft leaves of an orange tree. But by singling out this study, the show effectively separates this man from his community. Here, the farmer is valued not for his solidarity with his fellow workers, but only for what he can produce alone. 

Over and over in this exhibition, in ways that often seem contrary to Shahn’s apparent intent, the individual is privileged over the community. Gone are the receding crowds of immigrants and the long lines of workers that exude a sense of power. In giving these masterworks only a brief mention, we not only lose a sense of Shahn’s development as an artist, from the smooth contours of a New Deal muralist to the coarse fields of color, sharp angles, and wily humor that defines his work, but we also lose a sense of the tradition out of which he grew. Shahn appears to be pigeonholed into a kind of socially acceptable Cold War liberalism. (The catalog even implies that one of his paintings supported the new Israeli state, when he said nothing of the sort. He rarely commented on Israel’s existence, a powerful statement in its own right.) Like the subjects of his artwork, Shahn, too, gets removed from his communal and organizational context. He is simply a “nonconformist.” 

Presented this way, it is difficult to understand Shahn’s rise and fall. Though often forgotten today, he was one of the most sought-after artists of the mid-20th century. He illustrated for CBS, Time, Fortune, and Harper’s, had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, and even represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. His fall from grace, left mostly a mystery in this exhibit, is explained by critic Ariella Budick in the Financial Times: the FBI “placed him under surveillance, CBS added his name to a blacklist, and, in 1959, he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.” Receiving a “chilly treatment” from “collectors and ideologues” who preferred outwardly apolitical Abstract Expressionism, he “became increasingly marginalised, his slow fade-out only briefly interrupted by the raft of obituaries and posthumous praise that appeared on his death in 1969.” 

The catalog bafflingly claims that “Shahn’s figurative realism and social content served as a symbol of U.S. freedom in the early Cold War—as much as abstract art did,” when the truth was that Abstract Expressionism was actively promoted by the wealthy and powerful, including the CIA, to stamp out political art like Shahn’s. The artist himself minced no words: “If Social Realism seeks to impress upon art a rigid aesthetic of subject matter and point of view, there also exists another opposite camp which seeks with equal rigidity to exile from art all meaning—to keep it free from any content whatsoever. That is the camp of Pedantism.” 

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity offers those without prior knowledge of leftist Jewish art a rare gift: a large-scale retrospective of one of the greatest suppressed artists of the 20th century. But they will leave the Jewish Museum with an incomplete and skewed understanding of his legacy. They might assume that he was a singular figure with a completely unique perspective, rather than a particularly gifted luminary within a rich and continuing line of fellow Jewish political artists, from the well-known, like El Lissitsky, to the little discussed, like Selma Freeman. Many of these artists were influenced by Jewish folk stories and aesthetics (the likes of which were practiced by Shahn’s own anti-Czarist and woodcarving father), which translated splendidly into political cartoons, posters, and murals that called for justice for working people around the world. It is to this prophetic community, transcending time and national barriers, that Ben Shahn properly belongs. If we are to learn from his work — as well we should — we must understand that “nonconformity” is not, and cannot be, a solo venture. 

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity continues at the Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through October 12. The exhibition was organized by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and adapted by the Jewish Museum, and curated by Laura Katzman in collaboration with Stephen Brown.

The first thing that came to mind when I looked at Magali Lara’s 1990 “Y entonces escuché el fuego” (“And then I heard the fire”) was the art of J.M.W. Turner. The painting, part of the artist’s survey Stitched to the Body at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, is a turbulent landscape where nature bends itself into oceanic waves. A flash of searing orange exhaled from a tree trunk into the blue sky reminded me of Turner’s “The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834” (1835). But upon a second glance, the untamed vision of one of Mexico’s pioneering feminist artists refused to be beholden to the canon of White, male European art. Lara’s sinuous trees, in sync with a mosaic of blue and indigo brushstrokes, are not overtaken by the elements but rather move with them; their roots and branches seemingly shape the world around them through sheer psychical force.

This and a handful of other abstracted landscapes from the 1990s open the show — the artist’s largest New York survey to date, with more than 50 works spanning 1977 to 1995. These pieces won’t prepare viewers new to Lara for the disarming intimacy to come, but they establish the emotional landscapes underlying her physical ones.

The next gallery steps back to the late 1970s when Lara, then in her early 20s, began making art books and collages. Works from her Frida series (1978) incorporating text and degraded photocopies pay homage to Kahlo as a fountainhead for Mexican women artists, while lipstick prints in her De lo amoroso, personal, confidencial, etcétera series (1982) signify a femininity that is at once cheeky and disruptive.

Arranged in a grid in the same gallery are collages from her Ventanas series (1977–78) that act as windows into private spaces. Some are fully abstract; three on view incorporate or suggest stitching, which could allude to fabric drapes or sewn skin, conflating the domestic sphere with the body. Others include text, and still others feature photocopied images of a woman — the artist. A piece that pairs her picture with that of a chair layers the voyeuristic effect of looking at Lara and into a living space with the experience of peering into art history: The chair is an icon of early modernism from 1898–99 by German designer Richard Riemerschmid, evoking the historical domains of men in the art or design studio and women in the home. An especially charged image shows the eyes of a woman peering back at the viewer through blinds. 

It didn’t occur to me that the paintings on view were all unpeopled until I reached “Naturaleza muerta” (“Still life”) from the 1986 series La infiel (“The unfaithful”). The work, dominated by bold red and yellow, depicts a vase holding roses near a slithering snake and a pair of high-heeled shoes; hanging above all else, in the top right quarter, are what look like the dangling legs and feet of a woman. The reference to still lifes artificially aestheticizes the image, consigning the devastating (and gendered) drama of being to the annals of art history. 

The entire show builds on the intensity of embodying the maxim “the personal is political,” but Lara’s colorful paintings of banal interiors — specifically, bathrooms and kitchens — hit with the most visceral impact. The undulant clawfoot bathtub in “Intimidad” (1984), with its creatural spout, seems ready to plod away from the green wall, jarringly juxtaposed with a flat lilac-purple background in an undefined space. The stocky toilet and springy toilet paper roll in “Escusado” (1984) appear to converse with a drain hovering in a yellow void, all three objects projecting an uncanny sentience. Another work, “Luego lo lavo” (1984), fills in the same space with laundry on a clothesline and the text for which the show is named, “Llevo mi destino cosido al cuerpo, luego lo lavo” (“I wear my destiny stitched to the body, then I wash it”). With this statement, the artist takes on prescribed women’s roles only to slough them off. Transforming “wash” from a chore to a means of liberation, she takes back her domestic space from all the hopes, expectations, and histories that haunt it.

Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body continues at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (142 Franklin Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through August 16. The exhibition was organized by ISLAA’s curatorial team.

In Caryl Churchill’s short play Imp, which ran at the Public Theater through May 25, an older British woman is soothed by the belief that she has an imp, or a mischievous spirit, trapped in a corked bottle. That belief gives her comfort, as her life in her armchair is a sedentary and plain one, or so it seems, while those around her are moving all about: jogging to combat depression, traveling the world in search of adventures, or pursuing love. The chair-bound woman, named Dot, seems to feel that this imaginary spirit gives her power, and when it is inadvertently released by her cousin, she is devastated. 

In Saya Woolfalk’s current survey at the Museum of Arts and Design, Empathic Universe, you can witness the inverse. The artist has freely uncorked her spirit, filling two floors with her art for her first-ever museum retrospective. It is a brash, immersive universe that reflects on what she has called “hyperreal” work, using a term coined by sociologist Jean Baudrillard to explain the conceptual fusion of the real and imaginary. As Woolfalk has explained in the past, “the things that I’m making are more real than reality — they’re almost hyperreal.” Here, her uncorking of this hybridized energy is infectious; it permeates everything we see, while prodding us to question what we imagine the future might look like. The artistic jubilance is palpable.

Empathic Universe invites us to wander through decades of her worldmaking, a term that emerged with full force in the art community at the turn of this century. It has since been overused to the point of jargon, but Woolfalk demonstrates its power when executed with care. Each work allows for the bleeding of boundaries of all kinds, as furry costumes spark youthful glee and colorful patterns evoke joyful states of being. She was influenced by college years spent in Florence, where she witnessed the Renaissance love of blending architecture, design, and art. That interdisciplinary worldbuilding is in turn invigorated by her core passion for craft because it is, according to the artist, “the way the underrepresented represent themselves.”

In her “Chimera” installation from her 2009–13 series The Empathics, we see the artist at her strongest. She combines video with sculpture and uses the languages of history, craft, and even contemporary art display to manufacture a scene that gently fans out in jewel-like color, much like a peacock’s tail. It suggests a ceremonial act with its formalized arrangements that appear to conceal a secret hierarchy or perhaps a sense of belonging to something greater. 

Everywhere you turn, you encounter her curious tactile creations that merge the playful techno-optimism of mecha with mascot culture, DIY fan culture, and the transformative energy of theater. Overall, Woolfalk uses visual codes that are easily accessible and understood, but she maintains, as curator Alexandra Schwartz explains in her catalog essay, “the proverbial tension between utopia and dystopia.” What connects her visions are theoretical frameworks that never veer far from childhood pleasure, and prompt associations that feel endless in their relevance, particularly around notions of safety, touch, and identity.

At the core of Woolfalk’s art is an understanding of European colonization and the way Euro-American art viewers are conditioned to see nature and landscape, not to mention how we obscure the foundations of the natural world. In numerous museum projects, including at the Newark Museum of Art, the Currier Museum of Art, and the Montclair Art Museum, she’s been in direct dialogue with older, more traditional painting in the Euro-American tradition. Whether it is the Hudson River School or a Dutch Golden Age painter like Rembrandt, she acknowledges how global dynamics and histories have impacted the built world around us. In the case of the Hudson River School, she points out how imperialists forged the painted landscape in their image and “exported these speculations globally as an empire-building strategy.” In one of the museum installations, “Utopia Conjuring Chamber, Greene County, New York, circa 2012” (2012), Woolfalk reimagines Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” (1632). While Rembrandt’s scene represented a new era of science and discovery, Woolfalk has added layers of a consciousness that flowers in unusual and vibrant ways. In her aesthetic universe, the artwork moves beyond realism to a more psychological state of being, and she mines pop culture and historical allusions at every turn.

The artist has long explained, “I think of my practice as building a scaffolding for transformative experiences to happen. The installations are liminal spaces for people to have these experiences.” Each of these works looks ready to be activated by movement — they scream “move me” or “use me” —  but they stand on their own as complete works even without the promise of anything beyond the frame.

These ideas and the theoretical frameworks she toys with are what make her work particularly poignant, as they echo the institutional realities of cultural presentation and how they’re plumbed by contemporary art. She has even incorporated pseudo-institutions into her artistic practice (the nonprofit Institute of Empathy and a for-profit, ChimaTEK) as a way to illuminate the allegories of capitalism and how they propagate in contemporary art. What’s clear is that Woolfalk is far ahead of many of her peers, as she strips away at the notions of purity and identity to reveal a more complex existence that is sure to be more in tune with the future than anything that has come before. 

An essay about toys by philosopher and critic Roland Barthes is a touchstone for Woolfalk. In it, the author writes, “The fact that French toys literally prefigure the world of adult functions obviously cannot but prepare the child to accept them all …. Toys here reveal the list of all the things the adult does not find unusual: war, bureaucracy, ugliness, Martians, etc.” With those words in mind, Woolfalk’s gloriously vibrant retrospective gives us the impression that she wants us to join her in play, if only to unlearn our worlds and reorganize them into something that can flower into a more inclusive and wondrous future none of us can imagine alone.

Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe continues the Museum of Arts and Design (2 Columbus Circle, Columbus Circle, Manhattan) through September 7. The exhibition was curated by Alexandra Schwartz.