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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‣ Package thieves are getting smarter:

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

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

‣ Finally, an honest review of the eclipse:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what does this say about Cynthia? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yali Romagoza, Manhattan, New York

Describe an average day in your studio.

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

How does the space affect your work?

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

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

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

What do you love about your studio?

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

What do you wish were different?

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

What is your favorite art material to work with?

The body.

Tyler Kline, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Describe an average day in your studio.

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

How does the space affect your work?

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

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

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

What do you love about your studio?

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

What do you wish were different?

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

What is your favorite local museum?

Taller Puertorriqueño.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

Minerals.

Catherine Benda, Marquette, Michigan

Describe an average day in your studio.

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

How does the space affect your work?

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

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

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

What do you love about your studio?

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

What do you wish were different?

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

What is your favorite local museum?

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

What is your favorite art material to work with?

I am currently working with paper thread and paint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture, Planning, & Design

• Paul Hardin Kapp

Film-Video

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

Film, Video, and New Media Studies

• Jonathan Sterne

Fine Arts

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

Fine Arts Research

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

Photography

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

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

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

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

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

For more information, visit jbrpc.org/arts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simonetta Moro

Welcome, Dr. Moro!

To learn more, visit idsva.edu.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Age and Generation: the Whitney Millennial?

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

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

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

Geography: What Is “American” Anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

Education: School Is Still Worth It

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

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

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

Pronouns: Not Male and Pale Anymore?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information, visit bedfordgallery.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dinh Q. Lê, a multi-media artist whose work challenged global perceptions as well as internal censorship and exploitation in southern Vietnam, passed away of a stroke on April 6 in Ho Chi Minh City at 56 years old, according to a Facebook announcement by his family.

Though he fled Vietnam as a child in the wake of the “American War,” as it’s referred to there, the nation never left his thinking. Informed by his identities as an immigrant in the United States and a gay man, Lê’s work weaves together the irresolvable themes of identity and changeability, rooted in memory, documentation, and lived experiences in Vietnam. “His passion radiated through his artwork and reached people far and wide,” the artist’s sister, Lily Cao, wrote in her Facebook tribute.

The artist was born Lê Quang Đỉnh in the southern Vietnamese town of Hà Tiên in 1968. When war broke out between Vietnam and Cambodia in 1978 and sent the Khmer Rouge into his bordering hometown, his family sought refuge in Thailand and then Los Angeles, where he was raised by his mother alongside six siblings. Lê received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1989, and a Master’s of Fine Arts from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1992. Four years later, he moved back to Vietnam to settle in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2021, Lê regained his Vietnamese citizenship.

Lê first broke through in the mainstream art world with his 1999 work “Mot Coi Di Ve,” which borrows its title from the popular Vietnamese song that fittingly translates as “Spending One’s Life Trying to Return Home.” In the massive quilt-like work, he wove thousands of diasporic family photographs, images of those orphaned and displaced by the war, and written recollections into a loose grid that rippled with gaps, echoing the lacunae of memory and the historical record.

“Mot Coi Di Ve” was a precursor to Lê’s characteristic “photographic weavings” — the technique for which he is perhaps best known and would go on to create throughout his career. These glossy tapestries recall Vietnamese grass-mat weaving, an art form he learned in childhood from his aunt, through layered C-Type prints forming mesmerizing compositions sealed at the edges with linen tape.

Lê was also a noted photographer and video artist. In the three-channel film “The Farmers and the Helicopters” (2006) made in collaboration with Hai Quoc Tran, Le Van Danh, Phu-Nam Thuc Ha, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Lê spliced together clips from films made in the United States during the American War with personal testimonials and recollections from Vietnamese people who experienced the conflict firsthand. It was accompanied by a helicopter hand-built from scrap parts by Tran, a self-taught mechanic, and Le, a farmer.

Beyond his own work, Lê also cultivated, nurtured, and memorialized Vietnamese art as an avid collector. In 2007, he co-founded Sàn Art, an art organization and incubator for experimental Vietnamese art in Ho Chi Minh City that includes a library and educational center, alongside Nguyen, Ha, and artist Tiffany Chung. He curated a 2018 solo show of works by Vietnamese ceramicist and poet Nguyen Quoc Chanh titled Guerrilla Tactics at MoT+++ artists’ space, organized with Sàn Art.

Tributes to the artist online included an Instagram post by Saigon’s Galerie Baq. “Dinh’s generosity and guidance have nurtured countless talents, shaping the future of Vietnamese art,” the gallery wrote. “As we mourn his loss, let us celebrate his legacy and the enduring impact he has had on all who knew him.”

In a 2013 interview with Vietnam–based curator Zoe Butt, who previously worked at Sàn Art, Lê explained the enduring importance of his home country on his sense of self and community. “If you know a history, you own it,” Lê said. “An individual with no knowledge of his or her history is an individual without an identity.” His work embodies this story of reclamation, staking a historical archive for the next generation of artists to weave into their own sense of identity, both individual and collective.

In the weeks leading up to the inauguration of the Ram Mandir (temple of Ram) in Ayodhya on January 22, saffron flags dotted streets, marketplaces, and private balconies across the north Indian city. They were attached to bikes, cars, and auto-rickshaws, and forcibly hoisted onto a church by a group of men chanting Hindu nationalist slogans. Featuring an image of the Hindu god Ram standing with a bow and arrow in front of the outline of the temple, the bright-orange flags, a color associated with the Hindutva movement, are a sign of celebration — the deity’s so-called return to his birthplace. The temple was built on contested land where the 16th-century Babri mosque once stood, before being demolished by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992. The Ram Mandir’s inauguration marked a victory for Hindu nationalists and for the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, spearheaded by right-wing politicians in the late ’80s, to reclaim Ram’s birthplace. 

“When the Ram Janmabhoomi movement picked up, there was this idea that Hindus are victims of historical invaders, and so they needed to have more aggressive, more muscular figures to represent Hinduism,” Indian designer and graphic artist Orijit Sen told Hyperallergic. Lord Ram, the hero of the Hindu epic Ramayana, was transformed from a serenely smiling god into a warrior wielding a bow and arrow and sporting a six-pack. Other Hindu gods have also changed in appearance, from the battle-ready Hanuman to the impossibly muscular Shiva. The qualities associated with them have morphed as well, from softer virtues of devotion and humility to a fiery morality. While the idol inside the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya is of an innocent five-year-old Ram who has returned home, the images on the flags, posters, and banners across the country portray him as a fearsome warrior.

Gone are the curved, graceful figures — the Hindu iconography of the 21st century, often in digitally rendered images, conveys a hypermasculine, aggressive new Hinduism to galvanize people into action. And it has become a chilling extension, and tool, of the Hindu right in India. 

From the 6th-century rock-cutting in the Ellora caves to the miniature paintings from the 19th century, Hindu gods were portrayed as graceful, rounded, serene figures in art and sculpture. Historian and writer Anirudh Kanisetti explained that during the medieval period, artists often cast them as idealized royals to give kings more authority as lieutenants or partners of the gods. They had lithe bodies, heavily bejeweled and wearing the latest fashions. These renderings also reflected distinct cultural understandings of sex, masculinity, and gender, as in the Bhakti poetry praising the beauty and sensuality of the gods. “They are depicted as strong and powerful,” Kanisetti told Hyperallergic, “but always in a way that’s effortless. As though their power emerges from their divinity, rather than from going to the gym.”

Raja Ravi Varma, one of India’s first modern artists, incorporated Western realism into his paintings of the gods in the 1890s. Using human models to illustrate deities, his works were mass-produced, and public spaces were soon filled with calendar art of humanistic gods from the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics. Religious iconography continued to evolve over the next century within pop culture and Hindu gods were depicted in media from Amar Chithra Katha comics and to the popular 1987 Ramayan TV show. 

This evolution can be clearly traced through depictions of Hanuman, a monkey deity. Traditionally portrayed in Pahari paintings from the 17th to 19th centuries as a full-fledged monkey, Hanuman’s only human elements were a crown and a dhoti (long loincloth). He is devoted to Ram and portrayed as docile and playful, usually shown sitting at the feet of Ram and Sita, his wife.

But the version of Hanuman that is now ubiquitous across India is starkly different. The image dubbed “Angry Hanuman” shows a dramatically shadowed, frowning face in saffron and black. Created by 25-year-old graphic designer Karan Acharya in 2015, this scowling sketch of Hanuman went viral within a year. It can be found on the windshields of cars and trucks, flags, t-shirts, watches, and even WhatsApp display photos.

“The ‘Angry Hanuman’ seems to signify a muscular, aggressive Hindutva,” said Kanisetti. “One of the founding myths of Hindutva is that all Hindus were ‘humiliated’ by Muslim invaders, and that this was because Hinduism wasn’t sufficiently aggressive.” 

Even before the meteoric rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in 2014 following the election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the move toward a more contemporary version of Hinduism was already underway. The success of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKON), also known as the Hare Krishna movement, the Art of Living organization, and figures such as Sadhguru shows that younger generations were open to more modern portrayals of their religion. Images of a muscular Shiva smoking weed became an icon of a new, chill version of Hinduism, showing up on posters in cafes, on t-shirts, and as a common tattoo choice. “There’s this image of Indian nationhood that’s being created,” Kanisetti said. “One that is simultaneously traditional, based on an imagined idea of a single Hindu tradition, and one that is contemporary, based on a recent aesthetic of coolness, and it taps into 21st-century anxieties about masculinity and inferiority compared to the West.”

Extremist groups and political parties, including the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have harnessed the potential of social media to shape religious messaging. It’s a successful strategy given the rise of affordable internet and phones in the country, an unemployment crisis, and a fragile democracy in which religious tension is only growing. The imagery that has occupied public spaces in the past few years shows Hindu gods who match the anger and machismo of nationalist groups, frequently led by men. Kanisetti added that they also tap into the insecurities, anger, and fears that some Hindu Indians harbor. On social media, AI-driven retellings of mythological stories offer visuals of a glorious, imagined past, with gods towering over their subjects, muscles rippling and weapons in hand. Commenting on these AI-based visualizations, Kanisetti noted that while they might be unconvincing to many, younger generations might believe in this depiction of India’s “glorious” past. 

“There is a kind of imaginary being created to which these figures belong, and it’s not really an Indian one,” Sen added. “It’s drawing from Hollywood and superhero comics, from Western popular culture. And the reason we’re seeing it, absolutely without a doubt, is because the Hindu right is creating and pushing it.” 

Arvind Rajagopal, Media Studies professor at New York University and author of Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (2009), illuminated the transition from an earlier sense of unchanging values into rapidly changing imagery.

“There is now a constant revision of how gods are portrayed, throwing aside traditional texts, but always claiming continuity with tradition,” Rajagopal told Hyperallergic. “And this is something very different. It’s meant to terrorize.” 

LOS ANGELES — Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s, a vast survey exhibition of silheom misul, or Korean Experimental art made in the 1960s and ‘70s, comes to the Hammer Museum after presentations at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Coined by art historian Kim Mi-kyung in the early 2000s, silheom misul, a movement sandwiched — and largely forgotten — between Korean Informel and dansaekhwa, tells of how artists in Korea navigated a quickly globalizing art world in the midst of rapid political and societal upheaval. However, to consolidate this moment into a neat narrative package does the artists a disservice: The wide range of highly individual material and conceptual concerns on view in this exhibition resist categorization.

Most of the artists in Only the Young were born during or just after the Japanese occupation ended in 1945, and were children during the Korean War (1950–53). After the resulting division of the country, South Korea was governed by the autocratic Rhee Syng-man regime, which was toppled by a student revolution. A subsequent coup d’état of the interim government elevated Park Chung-hee into power, whose authoritarian government brought rapid industrialization to South Korea while simultaneously clamping down on pro-democracy dissidents and protestors. In 1972, Park, inspired by Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, dissolved the National Assembly and declared martial law. He suspended the existing constitution and organized his new government under the Yushin Constitution, which essentially instituted a legal dictatorship. 

Amid this upheaval, artists in Korea were learning about global avant-garde art movements through magazines, lectures, and participation in international biennials. They were searching for a way out of the Arte Povera-meets-Abstract Expressionist impulse of Korean Informel painting, which many artists felt represented institutional, conservative taste. Some responded through painting: They adopted a flatter and almost colder way of handling paint, as in a gorgeous example from Lee Seung-jio’s Nucleus series (1968–74), included in the exhibition. His signature motif of stacked pipe-like forms is a rejection of Informel’s expressive paint handling as well as a reflection on the new shapes and forms that accompanied the rapid industrialization happening around him. In contrast to the muddy hues of Informel, Lee Hyang-mi’s triptych “Color Itself” (c. 1970s) uses highly saturated colors, which drip down from the top of each painting. The thin bands of watered-down paint cross and mix with each other as they travel down the works, adding an element of chance as well as making gravity and the paint itself collaborators in the process of creation. Notably, Lee is one of the exhibition’s few female artists — a reminder of the highly patriarchal and conservative gender roles in Korea at the time.

Others searched for ways to inject traditional Korean objects and ideas into their work. In “Situation” (1967–68), Moon Bok-cheol combines bak, hollowed-out dried gourds traditionally used in Korean homes as bottles, with a more Western style of monochrome painting. Lee Sung-taek, too, incorporated Korean folk and cultural objects, as shown by a room dedicated to his work. An installation of several large sculptures called “Untitled (Sprout)” (1963/2018) are based on and mimic the form of onggi, traditional Korean earthenware vessels. And works like “Tied Stone” (1958) reveal his decades-long fascination with tying, initially inspired by godeuraetdol, small stones that traditionally served as weights in Korean weaving looms used to make sedge mats. 

Most of the artists in this exhibition, however, incorporate their own bodies into their work via performance and performative strategies, influenced by movements like Fluxus. Exploring the limits and reach of their bodies became a way to explore their own identities and roles amid the stifling silencing of free speech that accelerated under Park’s rule. In the photographic series Logic of Hand (1975/2018), Lee Kun-yong forms his hands into various shapes, transforming mundane actions into art. In restricting his art into that small range of movement, the piece also becomes a commentary on the way that authoritarian regimes apply control and limits onto people’s thoughts and movements.

One of the most engaging elements of the exhibition is a large chronological timeline of happenings and performances in Korea between 1967 and 1981 that includes descriptions, preparatory sketches, documentation, and even reenactments. “Happening with Plastic Umbrella and Candle,” one of the first in Korean art, occurred at the Union Exhibition of Young Korean Artists in 1967. Members of the artist groups Mudongin (Zero Group) and Sinjeon dongin circled Kim Young-ja, who sat in a chair holding a plastic umbrella. The participating artists walked in a circle around her, placing candles on it while singing a Korean folk song. Suddenly, they blew out the candles and rushed to destroy the umbrella. Thus, a benevolent and protective object transforms into a recipient of violence, perhaps a commentary on artists’ ambivalence toward supposedly benevolent and protective institutions like a government or national identity.

Kang Kuk-jin, Jung Kang-ja and Chung Chan-seung’s “Transparent Balloons and Nude” (1968), widely considered to be the first feminist art performance in Korea, had viewers affixing transparent balloons to Jung, which were then popped, exposing her semi-naked body. By transforming the image of a female nude into a living, breathing body, Jung holds a mirror to the way that women have been objectified while also reclaiming agency over how her body was viewed.

For his 1973 solo exhibition at Myeongdong Gallery in Seoul, Lee Kang-so set up bar tables and chairs inside the gallery, serving makgeolli (Korean rice wine) and snacks to the strangers and friends who mingled and visited throughout the run of the show. Notably, this exhibition took place less than a year after Park Chung-hee’s declaration of martial law in October 1972, which banned political gatherings and censored the press. “Disappearance, Bar in the Gallery” (1973) can be seen as a way to circumvent these restrictions by providing a space for gatherings under the guise of an art exhibition.

One of my favorite works in the show is “Location” (1976) by Sung Neung-kyung. In this series of photographs, the artist holds an issue of Space (Gonggan) (1966–2017), the only widely available Korean journal devoted to art and architecture at the time, carrying out 10 actions with the magazine, such as placing it on his head or holding it between his legs. The deadpan logic and performance of the actions is hilarious: in one, he awkwardly holds the magazine between his toes while staring blankly down at his feet. This series speaks to the conundrums that many of these artists faced during this turbulent time: Where does an artist belong within a rapidly globalizing and increasingly market-driven art world? What is the role of an artist and what role can art play during an authoritarian regime that is actively silencing and censoring political dissent?

Nearby is a series of self-portraits from 1975 that Sung took in a mirror visible in the center of each frame. As he pivots slightly for each photograph, the changing background creates a panoramic view of the neighborhood with the artist in the center. This world of one-story houses with hanji-paper windows seen surrounding Sung was then quickly disappearing, the political climate rapidly deteriorating, and Korean national identity rapidly shifting. The only constant in these images is the central image of the artist, his camera, and the mirror, as if to say that the only way he could respond to the dizzying changes surrounding him was to emphatically and repeatedly assert his presence. The work is titled simply: “Here.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The author helped organize the symposium, An Encounter with the Korean Avant Garde, at the Hammer Museum, which will take place on April 12th, and will lead a walkthrough of the exhibition for the Hammer Museum on April 9th.

Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s at the Hammer Museum continues until May 12. The exhibition is co-organized by Kyung An, associate curator, Asian art, Guggenheim Museum, and Kang Soojung, senior curator, MMCA. The presentation at the Hammer is organized by Pablo José Ramírez, curator, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant.

“I stand with Bank of America!”

In a scene sure to be singled out as a damning indictment of both racial betrayal and the predatory tactics of financial behemoths, a young Salvadoran man named Alejandro (Julio Torres) entreats a Latina customer service rep (River L. Ramirez) to delete his ATM overdraft charges. “Please, Estefani,” he pleads from his smartphone. “I know you know how unfair this is ….” After a moment of soulful reflection, she faces him with a cocked pistol, declaring her fealty to her corporate employer above all else.

Fans of Torres’s whimsical comedy — from his HBO special My Favorite Shapes to his stint writing for Saturday Night Live — will find much to love in his directorial debut, Problemista, which takes a fantastical approach to depicting the very real trials of immigration and creative work. An aspiring toymaker who moves to New York with dreams of working for Hasbro, Ale has less than a month to secure a sponsor for a US work visa. His unlikely savior comes in the form of Elizabeth Ascensio (Tilda Swinton), an embittered art critic seeking to preserve the legacy of her lover, Bobby (RZA), whose body was frozen at the same cryo-bank that fired young Ale. “Stop shouting at me!” is Elizabeth’s refrain throughout the film — shouted over everybody else.

Narrated by Isabella Rossellini, the film often visually scans as a mashup of Pan’s Labyrinth and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Memories of swirling minarets from the boyhood garden designed by Ale’s artist mother appear onscreen as a surrealist toys bloom in his mind: a Barbie with her fingers crossed behind her back or a Slinky that refuses to slink. Within this quirky magical world, the rampant inequalities faced by those immigrating to the United States take on proportions that would be preposterous were they not painfully accurate to the experience of millions today.

With his boyish cowlick and bouncy shuffle, Torres boasts a Chaplinesque knack for physical comedy as Ale navigates the visa process. But as much as the film lampoons the byzantine maze of immigration policies, it also throws into stark relief the excessive demands placed on anyone hustling to get by, especially within creative fields. How many might shudder at the insufferable demands of an irrational Boomer boss (who, in Elizabeth’s case, is also a bedraggled Luddite who can’t turn off her iPhone flashlight)? How many might endure the nonsense that is the unpaid arts internship, available to the precious few who can afford to work for free, or must figure out a way, in some of the world’s priciest cities?

When Ale resorts to sex work to score some quick cash, the transaction turns out to be less of a descent than anticipated. The dom who hires him is far more polite and transparent than Elizabeth, tasking audiences to question what might define untenable or demoralizing labor. As artist and sex worker Sophia Giovannitti has argued in Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, “Sex and art, we’re told … ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace,” even though “both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodification of creativity and desire, authenticity and intimacy.”

From Elizabeth’s rusty Rolodex to her Ivy League intern Bingham (James Scully) nabbing a Guggenheim fellowship “for Being Cute,” Problemista skewers the art world’s open nepotism and profit-driven motives. To that end, Elizabeth’s White privilege and blue-blooded cache are certainly part of what enable her abuse of power, but race is ultimately less relevant than class. In Problemista, New Yorkers across races demand an arbitrary deference from those economically lower; to do otherwise would jeopardize their place in the pecking order. 

While Ale braves the financial drain and cumulative degradation of the visa process, Elizabeth bears the humiliation of being an art world has-been. They share a similar penchant for seemingly impossible goals — though with wildly different stakes. Even when strapped to pay for her beloved’s lengthy refrigeration, Elizabeth can rely on property ownership and patrician status to get by, a safety net unavailable not only to Ale but to millions of US creatives struggling to make the rent. 

Despite its zany plot twists and loopy score, the film will prompt, in many, the laughter of unsettling recognition. While Torres’s droll humor can at times distract from the movie’s dire themes, at its best Problemista is a scathing satire in a jester’s cap. 

Problemista is currently in theaters nationwide.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art at Bard Graduate Center is a gently curated exhibition that treats its subject with reverence. It opens with a timeline and examples of Delaunay’s personal branding such as exhibition flyers and logos. It’s a neat way to lay out the show’s narrative, by presenting an artist defining herself. Though the organization is primarily chronological, this introduction shifts away from simple progress and toward deliberate creation. 

We are also introduced to Simultaneism, the aesthetic principle that shaped Delaunay’s work. The artist was fascinated with color theory and the way that contrasting or complementary shades transform in relation to each other. Her desire to put that knowledge to use in art grounds the signature painting style — all dense color and abstract, circling forms — that she and her husband, Robert, shared. 

The exhibition explores the full range of Delaunay’s work, establishing the styles and motifs she used consistently and her collaborations and inspirations. Her early Simultaneist experiments crossed media: for example, a beautiful Cezanne-esque embroidery from 1909 shows her remarkable eye for color and pattern. 

Nearby is a copy of her design and illustration for Blaise Cendrars’s book-length poem La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France. The work, displayed unglued and fully unfolded from its accordion binding, is a giant continuous text through which Delaunay’s pochoir print illustrations roll. Pochoir, a technique in which layers of gouache are applied with stencils, allowed Delaunay to create images that could be reproduced at relatively large scale while still having a handmade quality. The Bard Graduate Center’s fourth floor is set up as a workshop, where artist-in-residence Kitty Maryatt demonstrates the process by recreating panels from La prose. However having more information on pochoir in the actual exhibition would have been helpful, especially on days when Maryatt isn’t present.

To the right of the Simultaneist section is a small room focused on her theater designs. It opens with a painting by Flora Lion of Lubov Tchernicheva as Cleopatra, wearing a costume Delaunay designed; the painting is flanked by two large black and white photographs of Tchernicheva. It’s useful to see the realization of Delaunay’s design to get a sense of how the shapes and gestures of her drawing were translated into actual clothing — and Lion’s painting is an effective representation of the more traditionally figurative art world from which Delaunay’s work stood apart. Juxtaposing Delaunay’s ballet costumes with the weird and experimental pieces she made for Tristan Tzara and other Dada artists reveals how coherent yet flexible her design style was, how she was able to adapt her distinctive use of color and shape to add texture to any given circumstance. These costume sketches bridge what could be oversimplified as her design and artistic practices, though she clearly did not see them as separate. 

These costume sketches also lay the groundwork for the show’s most impressive section, focusing on her company, Maison Sonia, and the textile designs she produced in the 1920s. This room is densely packed with sketches, color cards, fabric samples, wood-printing blocks, and garments, as well as Delaunay’s self-drafted promotional materials. A film clip showing models wearing her garments is remarkable both as an early color film reel and as a rare chance to see these clothes in motion. The comprehensiveness of her vision comes across most clearly here: everything is meticulously considered. The Bard Center’s floor plan allows the narrative to be broken up in a way that highlights the diversity of Delaunay’s output without creating the illusion that this represents the entirety of her career. Instead, it feels like we get to glimpse pockets of her work, and feel her expansive and collaborative production. 

Upstairs, the wartime period is represented mostly by an underwhelming digital display. One room focuses on the revival of her career from the 1950s through the ’70s, a period marked by the licensing of her work, and expended production. While Delaunay’s style always feels fresh, a few objects look a little dated and this section, indirectly connected to her designs, lacks the energy of the earlier galleries. The one section that doesn’t live up to the rest is that of her interior and furniture designs, not because these are weaker, but due to the difficulty of presenting them in this space. We’re given a small reconstruction of one corner of a room, some sketches, and a piece of furniture she may have designed. Short of rebuilding an entire room, it’s hard to evoke the complete, coherent spaces that she envisioned, and this gallery felt like something of an afterthought compared to the rest of the exhibition’s depth. 

In contrast, the sections devoted to her textile and clothing designs are beautifully assembled, and do a wonderful job of demonstrating her process. But in working so hard to highlight the creativity of her designs, the exhibition neglects her other work, and risks once again treating her art and design as separate. Delaunay’s paintings are underrepresented in the show. I know her work well enough to recognize this absence, but I wonder what visitors who are less familiar with her career would take away from this. Robert Delaunay’s “Portuguese Still Life” (1916) is on display as an example of Simultaneist painting, rather than Sonia’s very similar “Portuguese Market,” painted a year earlier (it’s currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, if you’d like to compare them). Still, this is a small treasure of a show, one that showcases Delaunay at her meticulous, creative best.

Sonia Delaunay: Living Art continues at Bard Graduate Center (18 West 86th Street, Upper West Side, Manhattan) through July 7. The exhibition was curated by Laura Microulis, research curator at Bard Graduate Center, and art historian Waleria Dorogova.

When I stand in front of Caravaggio’s “Madonna di Loreto” (c. 1605–6) in Rome’s Basilica of Sant’Agostino, I feel woozy, my cup of joy overflowing. The dramatic chiaroscuro matching the gloom of the church, sliced by sunbeams, makes my heart race. Looking at a work of art often elicits an emotional reaction, big or small. But the question of why this happens, and how these emotional reactions manifest physically, is much harder to pin down. New scientific investigations into the embodied experience of viewing art point us toward more concrete answers, but also more questions.

British art critic and theorist Vernon Lee conducted her own study of sorts of the way we look at art in the early 1900s, which she recorded in her Gallery Diaries, republished in 2018 by David Zwirner Books. She recorded her thoughts and the way her body felt as she repeatedly visited the same galleries and churches between 1901 and 1911. Standing in front of Italian Renaissance painter Alesso Baldovinetti’s “Madonna and Child with Saints” (c. 1454) at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence on December 12, 1902, she wrote: “a sort of raising of my hat and scalp and eyebrows seems necessary to see this picture; otherwise it is swimmy. By the way, the lilac and crimson give me a vivid cool pleasure, like taste.” This delightfully off-kilter description demonstrates just how difficult it is to translate the feeling of looking at art into words, not to mention firm conclusions.

Over the past few years, scientists have returned to that challenge with new technological tools. With funding from the Templeton Religion Trust, scholar Bahador Bahrami and his team at Royal Holloway, University of London, have been developing studies using Pupil Labs eye tracker glasses to analyze how people actually look at a single work of art and interact with galleries displaying multiple works. The glasses create heat maps that track how each person’s eyes traveled over an image and where they lingered longest. Other experiments have put participants in front of screens, rather than allowing them to walk around real galleries. Bahrami told Hyperallergic that the glasses function so well in part because they “do not limit your interaction with the world.” The privacy questions raised by this technology are challenging. Bahrami said that several participants forgot they were wearing the glasses and looked at their phones, giving the researchers access to their private information. He and his team use detailed consent forms to ensure participants are aware of the scope of the glasses and the way their data will be used.

Bahrami said he would be interested in seeing museums begin to archive visitor experiences, recorded via the eye tracker glasses. He explained this idea with Tate Modern in London as an example. “Jackson Pollock’s ‘Summertime: Number 9A’ has been there since 1988. Now, if Tate Modern adopts our system and accumulates experiences, then in 2123 it will be possible to see how people visit a Jackson Pollock across time — whether people of different times are looking at the same artwork in different ways, whether different things became important for people, and what kind of new ways of looking arose.” In other words, if visitors regularly wear eye tracker glasses, there will be a record of the ways they experienced the gallery over time. The idea of building this kind of archive is fascinating, and fundamentally reframes the way curators could conceptualize the role of a museum. No longer solely a repository of objects, institutions could also become a collection of interactions between the public and works of art. 

However, Bahrami’s work does not seek to translate an individual’s physical or emotional responses to art into words. As Vernon Lee demonstrated, this process of articulation is deeply subjective. Other scientists have tried to do so, including Lauri Nummenmaa and Riitta Hari at the University of Turku in Finland. In a 2023 article published in Cognition and Emotion, they detail their study asking participants to rank various named emotions when viewing different works of art, such as “joy,” “anger,” “balance,” and “disgust.” Nummenmaa and Hari also used eye-tracking glasses to analyze how participants perceived artworks shown to them on a screen. The scholars then linked participants’ emotions to self-reported physical sensations and drew conclusions about where in our bodies we feel various reactions to art. The study’s reliance on participants choosing from a selection of words and self-reporting bodily sensations, however, significantly limits its scope. 

More interestingly, a group of scholars at Columbia University published a study in 2020 that focused on perceptions of abstract and figurative art, using works by artists including Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko. The study used construal level theory (CLT), a psychological framework that characterizes differences between abstract and concrete ways of thinking. By asking participants to complete three tasks, like answering questions about planning an exhibition of abstract art versus figurative art, the study determined that “abstract art evokes a more abstract mindset than representational art.” Though perhaps intuitively unsurprising, this conclusion concretizes something that was previously intangible and points toward future research translating subjective, felt reactions to art into data. 

The ineffable experience of art is part of the reason we return to it again and again. Trying to understand it on a cognitive level is compelling, but may always be fundamentally unknowable. The potential uses of the tools such as the eye-tracking glasses are more exciting from a curatorial and access perspective. How can knowledge about the way visitors experience art guide museum staff in making their spaces more engaging and welcoming to the public? How might we think about building a new kind of archive of experience, alongside physical archives? These questions should animate our future explorations of the many ways our bodies react to art, which will continue to fascinate us as much as it did Vernon Lee.

The Orlando Museum of Art (OMA) has received over 300 works by artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Keith Haring, and David Hockney from New York City collectors Dr. James Cottrell and Mr. Joseph Lovett.

The “transformational gift,” as the institution described the donation in an April 4 announcement, comes on the heels of a heated scandal caused by the museum’s 2022 exhibition of previously unseen paintings attributed to Jean Michel Basquiat which turned out to be forgeries. The infamous show, titled Heroes and Monsters, was on display for only four months before the FBI raided the Florida museum and confiscated all 25 works. The fallout was immediate: The institution’s board chair resigned, and OMA fired and sued its director, whom the museum claims was in on the conspiracy.

Cottrell and Lovett’s gift features largely works by LGBTQ+ and NYC-based artists, and includes pieces by Deborah Kass, Kwame Brathwaite, and Robert Mapplethorpe, among other notable 20th-century and contemporary figures. OMA mounted shows centering the Cottrell-Lovett collection in 2004 and 2016, and the collectors have maintained a relationship with the museum over the past two decades.

In a conversation with Hyperallergic, Lovett characterized the scandal as a “bump in the road,” emphasizing the institution’s education programs and crediting the experience of seeing his collection curated and installed at OMA two decades ago with developing his appreciation for acquiring art.

Lovett and Cottrell were in the process of organizing their second exhibition at the museum when the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre happened. Lovett said that he asked the institution to gear the show toward gay identity and homophobia, and the museum overwhelmingly agreed.

“So we think it’s an extraordinary institution,” Lovett said. “We had already been talking about [donating to OMA] for a long time, but then after the scandal, we thought that it would be helpful to the museum.”

Last year, the collectors also promised 200 artworks, largely by artists from NYC’s 1980s downtown scene, to New York University’s revamped Grey Art Gallery.

“We are honored that [Cottrell and Lovett] have entrusted our museum with this wonderful collection, as they have many options,” museum spokesperson Maureen Walsh told Hyperallergic. “It demonstrates Dr. Cottrell and Mr. Lovett’s faith in the museum, its exhibitions, and its educational programs.” 

The Basquiat scandal cast a dark cloud on the OMA’s reputation. In addition to widespread media coverage, the accrediting organization American Alliance of Museums placed the museum on probation. The FBI began investigating the works in Heroes and Monsters shortly after they appeared in 2012 and sent a subpoena to OMA in 2021 demanding records relating to the paintings. Still, the institution forged ahead with the show. 

According to the forgeries’ accompanying tale, the long-lost masterpieces had been relegated to the Los Angeles storage unit of a Hollywood screenwriter, where they sat for decades before surfacing for auction in 2012. A number of inconsistencies arose, including in a testimony by a FedEx designer, who said the logo on a backing sheet of cardboard was not created until six years after Basquiat died. 

After the FBI raid, the museum quickly fired its Director Aaron De Groft, who had been a staunch advocate for the paintings’ authenticity. A year later, OMA sued De Groft, alleging he had planned to take a cut of the profits from the paintings’ eventual sale. The former director vehemently denies these claims and launched a countersuit against OMA late last year.

In the galleries of The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stood just feet away from a room filled with large and magnificent paintings by Aaron Douglas, among the most celebrated and studied painters in the history of 20th-century African-American art. Yet it was a small nearby still life — “Cauliflower and Pumpkin” by Lois Mailou Jones — that stopped me in my tracks. Don’t get me wrong, the Douglas paintings made my heart race in their own way. But there was something uniquely forceful about the way this quiet painting commanded space in the same room as Douglas’s heroic illustrations of Black history. This unlikely proximity is a reminder that the Harlem Renaissance was many things at once, encompassing Douglas’s portrayals of the trials and tribulations endured during and after slavery, but also a Black female artist’s desire and freedom to paint vegetables. 

Curated by Denise Murrell, the exhibition catches its visitors in the throes of this multiplicity. It brings together 160 works of art, many by well-known artists like Douglas, James Van Der Zee, and Archibald Motley, but an almost equal number are by artists who have not received due attention, like Laura Wheeler Waring and William H. Johnson. As the title suggests, its conceit is in part geographic: works like Palmer Hayden’s “Nous Quatre à Paris” (1930) and Nola Hatterman’s portrait “Louis Richard Drenthe” (1930), depicting a Surinamese musician then living in Amsterdam, underline that the Harlem Renaissance was not exclusive to Harlem, but was a globally networked movement of sprawling self-determination energized by the new modalities of Black subjectivity that emerged in the early and mid-20th century. 

But most compelling to me is the way the exhibition deals with this wide geographic scope alongside an equally wide and tangled intellectual scope. The artwork on view ripples with the polyphonic debates and heated questioning that gave the movement its texture. How did Black artists want to represent themselves? What, if anything, is the responsibility of Black artists? Is it — as Mailou Jones’s still life suggests — to their own artistic freedom? Or is “all art propaganda” with embedded political motivations, as W.E.B. Du Bois famously argued in his 1926 address “Criteria of Negro Art”? These tense questions, then nascent, formed the contours of discussions that continue to trouble the waters of Black artistic and intellectual work today, as the visibility of “Black art” has led to renewed questions around what the term means and what its politics are. 

From the start, the exhibition engages with these questions, through an introduction to the movement’s leading thinkers and writers. It opens with twinned portraits of Alain Locke and Langston Hughes — both of whom are often named among the most important Harlem Renaissance thinkers. Notably, the portraits were rendered by the German-born artist Winold Reiss, whose recurring presence in the galleries attests to the multi-national and multi-racial history of the Harlem Renaissance. The portraits faces a vitrine of books penned by authors including Hughes and Locke themselves, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson. This sensitivity to the textual pervades the exhibition, and almost every gallery contains similar vitrines that testify to the rich literary layers of the period. 

Murrell’s curating demonstrates how these ideologies and debates were not just theoretical, but permeated the realities of Black life. For example a pensive self-portrait by Samuel Joseph Brown (1941) reifies Du Bois’s term “double-consciousness,” which refers to the idea that Black people always see themselves simultaneously through two sets of eyes: their own gaze and the external, White gaze. The artist is literally doubled as he looks at his mirror reflection, probing his interiority with inquisitive and slightly unsettled eyes.  

Also foregrounded are the negotiations of class and respectability politics that surfaced in everyday life and in discussions among in writers like Hughes, Du Bois, and George Schuyler. For example, a James Van Der Zee photograph of an elegant tea salon at millionaire Madam C.J. Walker’s apartment hang next to Palmer Hayden’s painting “Nous Quatre à Paris,” which once drew ire for what some thought was an embrace of base anti-Black stereotypes — the men in this painting are pictured drinking and playing pool, and have exaggeratedly thick lips and wide noses. In this juxtaposition, we see a war in images, a fraught contest over how Black people would represent themselves after centuries of external definition. This war remains alive and well in today’s post-Obama age, when many are still attached to the aspiration of “Black faces in high places”: we are still (unfortunately) burdened with the question of representation, and many are still (unfortunately) anxious about images of Blackness that — like Hayden’s — don’t appeal to respectability politics.  

Considerations like these can leave us with a somewhat bitter aftertaste today, when many Black artists have catapulted to levels of visibility, power, and wealth that would have been unthinkable to the artists on view in the show. It is an exciting moment. Yet, with Black artists arriving at the supposed apex of success and recognition, open critique of work by Black hands can feel sparse, if not unwelcome. These conversations exist, but we have become far too beholden to an ethic of “rooting for everybody Black,” as popularized by actress Issa Rae. We have, according to this idea, too much to lose for the public, sharp-toothed debates like the ones we see unfolding in this exhibition. Also suspicious is the contemporary art market’s taste for figurative portraiture by legibly Black creators; premium prices on “dignified” representations of our bodies and faces is, in my opinion, too easy a solution to centuries of racist exclusion from the fine art milieu. Harlem Renaissance artists and thinkers labored over ideas so that we could move beyond the same questions of representation and respect.

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through July 28. The exhibition was curated by Denise Murrell.

LONDON — The Wellcome Collection is an unusual place. I mean that sincerely as a compliment. It’s a rare example of a scientific institution doing something genuinely bold and creative with its colonial history. There’s a degree of playfulness to their exhibitions, too, and their current show, The Cult of Beauty, is typically highly polished and prettily displayed. The exhibition’s focus is on the construction and consumption of beauty, its shifting standards “across time and cultures.” It’s a solid concept, mostly well executed. It’s an inevitable consequence of Wellcome’s collection and location that the show’s content skews European, though the curators make attempts to balance it: the first three objects in the collection are a copy of the bust of Nefertiti, a painting of Krishna, and a 16th-century Spanish “Black Madonna.” Opening the exhibition this way sets an expectation of more diverse beauty standards than just White, Eurocentric norms, to which the show doesn’t quite live up. There’s very little explanation of the Black Madonna, and nothing to clarify how this painting actually relates to beauty. 

On a busy day, the space is incredibly crowded. The exhibits mostly run around the rooms’ edges, and shuffling from object to object can feel like being on a conveyor belt. There’s a lot of material to take in, not all of it well explained. In the first room are casts of three sculptures: Venus, representing feminine beauty; Idolino, representing an idealized masculine form; and a small Hermaphroditus, which would embody gender fluidity with its breasts and penis. This Hermaphroditus has been censored — castrated by a previous owner — but the gallery label is strangely coy, so unless you recognize the myth or the sculpture it’s not obvious. There’s also multimedia artist Cassils, posing like a bodybuilder in shiny red lipstick in “Advertisement: Homage to Benglis,” but Linda Benglis’s infamous 1974 Artforum advertisement, in which she wears nothing but a double-ended dildo and cat-eye sunglasses, isn’t displayed, so the reference will be lost on many viewers. 

Wellcome is always at its best when it’s willing to be truly weird. In this case, the “Beauty Sensorium” full of “Renaissance Goo” — recreations of historical cosmetics displayed among grotesquely melting glassware and tiles in a kind of psychedelic apothecary — stands out as a fantastically strange and genuinely creative way to enliven the history of beauty, in all its messiness. This quirky interpretation of serious scholarly research is exactly what I had hoped for from the exhibition, but it makes the adjacent displays of collection holdings like medical corsets and cosmetic packaging all the more flat.

A section on racism and beauty, guest curated by the writer Emma Dabiri, focuses on contemporary and historical colorism and prejudice through objects like the Game of Goose, a bizarrely racist board game that originated around the 15th century where players “ascend” through different nationalities, getting paler as they go. The section’s limited attempt to show how beauty is cultural rather than universal is stymied by the chosen objects. Why use a copy of the “Rose of Versailles” manga to make an argument about blond hair and blue eyes becoming a beauty standard in Japan, when the story is set in 18th-century France and features entirely European characters? It’s interesting to see Josephine Baker’s “Bakerskin,” a darkening face powder sold to White Europeans who wanted to imitate her skin color, especially displayed next to the famously broad foundation shade range of Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, but the show makes no reference to the appropriation of Blackness in so much contemporary beauty, and little about how Baker confronted and subverted the standards of her day.

In trying to sweep across so much time, the show over-generalizes and makes clumsy comparisons: for instance, juxtaposing Kim Kardashian’s Selfie book with an ancient Egyptian mirror is a boringly on-the-nose comment on vanity. Xcessive Aesthetics’ endless scroll of beauty TikToks is exhausting and obvious, as is an installation of makeup looks and slogans by the “beauty disruptor” project Makeupbrutalism. The show feels too trendy at times — the theme is less nuanced than it could be, and committing to the question of how beauty is sold, or how beauty trends change across time and geography, would be more effective than aiming for both and answering neither. But there are gems: It’s always good to see the Museum of Transology’s archive of personal trans histories through objects like lipsticks, packers used by trans men, and surgically removed chest tissue. Narcissister’s sculptural installation of her late mother’s treasured items is a poignant, intimate look at the beauty and belief we inherit, and Shirin Fathi’s photo series The Disobedient Nose is an acerbic take on the history of cosmetic surgery. Overall, this is a show that does little to challenge its audience, but provides an easy romp through the history of beauty. 

The Cult of Beauty continues at the Wellcome Collection (183 Euston Road, London, England) through April 28. The exhibition was curated by Janice Li.

The New York Antiquarian Book Fair is back at the Park Avenue Armory for its 64th edition, bringing with it hundreds of dealers from around the world boasting rare books, maps, illuminated manuscripts, and objects wonderful and strange. Open through Sunday, April 7, the show is a bibliophile’s paradise — and by far the most fun fair at which to eavesdrop, even if you don’t speak French, as many of these patrons seem to.

“I asked if they had anything rare or signed by Ayn Rand,” a visitor in a glittery suit told the exhibitors at Bauman Rare Books, located just to the left of the entrance. “They said no.”

You can feel the book-love in every crevice of this massive fair. Paperback lamps illuminate the ticket pick-up desk. Visitors sign their names in a notebook sourced from Bhutan at the booth of Donald A. Heald Rare Books. There are business card holders made of filigree metal, shaped like foxes, and shaped like, well, books.

On opening night on Thursday, Daniel R. Weinberg of Chicago’s Abraham Lincoln Book Shop celebrated his 80th birthday by showing me a signature of President Lincoln, a photo of Marilyn Monroe posing with an image of him, and rare legal documents. Book dealers Holly Segar and Jeffrey Rovenpor of Caroliniana Rare Books, based in Aiken, South Carolina, showed their suffragette cookbook collection, while Michaela Mitmannsgruber of Austrian gallery Kunsthandel toured me around her extensive collection of first-edition patents, accompanied by adorable maquettes.

At Les Enluminures, which has shops in New York, Chicago, and Paris, I learned that the large, painstakingly hand-drawn first letter found in many illuminated books is sometimes cut out of the tome itself and sold individually — in this case, just a massive, expensive “Q” — as they’re typically more saleable that way.

At the Antiquarian Book Fair, any visitor — even one who is clearly not in the market to buy an $80,000 early copy of a Samaritan Text from the Sassoon Collection, like myself — is likely to be drawn into a 15-minute conversation about all manner of things they likely didn’t even know existed. A staffer of A. Parker’s Books in Sarasota showed me a 19th-century picture book that teaches children the sounds animals make. Robert Schoisengeier, of Antiquariat Burgverlag in Vienna, showed off a series of Austrian greeting cards from the same era made by women artisans, as well as botanical books with specimens so detailed you need a magnifying glass to fully appreciate.

It was difficult to get these bookish dealers talking about the fair itself, so smitten were they with their wares.

“A quote about what?” Schoisengeier asked. “Oh. It’s one of the most important antiquarian book fairs in the world. For a European like me, it’s always attractive to come here, meeting customers and clients who won’t easily come to Europe. It’s a good meeting point. There’s a lot of exchange. Is that okay?” 

And, of course, it’s a great place to people-watch. Patti Smith made an appearance at this year’s fair — she’s a regular, apparently, and usually stops by all four days of the show — as did Neil deGrasse Tyson.

There are some not-so-seemly patrons to observe, too. “Guess who I just took a picture with?” a visitor with tight blonde ringlets gushed to her friend on the phone. “Alan Dershowitz.”

“Oh yeah, he’s here, alright,” a gallerist dressed in a dapper yellow plaid suit confirmed. “He was in the booth like 10 minutes ago. I had to leave. You can quote me on that.”

DALLAS, Texas — The tiny greenbug aphids clinging to my outfit matched the logo of the Dallas Art Fair (DAF) — a clean, verdant, lime-green square. The air was thick and warm, but it’s early enough in the season that the croaky birds known as grackles have yet to get loud, giving the bustle around the concrete mid-century Fashion Industry Gallery building an aura of spring awakening, with art as colorful as the outfits filing in and out the swinging glass doors in the city’s downtown.

For eight of its 16 years, the Dallas Art Fair Foundation and Dallas Museum of Art Acquisition Fund has raised significant funding to facilitate acquisitions from the show for the institution’s permanent collection. “Fairs are about that moment in time when everyone can be in the same room,” Kelly Cornell, the fair’s director, told Hyperallergic. But the fair hasn’t been without challenges: In 2020, after the fair was canceled due to pandemic restrictions, 30 gallerists attempted to get their booth payments back and were met with resistance.

It’s said you can’t rush a Dallas collector through a sale, and it’s the Southern style to wait for the preview to pass before closing. Even so, I eavesdropped on a few soft deals while wandering through the enormous space. In fact, I heard plenty — from well-heeled women discussing where they bought their spring season pieds-a-terre to jokes about the eclipse — amid a surprising lack of cowboy hats (although around here, it’s impolite to wear your hat indoors).

Thinking they were leftover dishes, a catering staff member drifted into Alexander Berggruen’s booth and attempted to clean up Stephanie H. Shih’s sculptures, consisting of a porcelain 7-Eleven bag paired with a glassy pouch of Funyuns chips. She stopped in her tracks and retreated while the gallery staff was distracted by a collector.

Paintings, of course, were the overwhelming majority of artwork at DAF, and according to a young gallerist, landscape paintings in particular are selling like hotcakes. Abstraction in dense compositions and vivid color palettes dominated the booths with sprawling depictions of the natural world, with Western aesthetics and cowboys coming in a close second.

Hands down, Wolfgang Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia, only a year into its programming, brought one of the standout painters of the entire fair. Alic Broc’s canvases are feats of assemblage, airbrushed, close-cut perspectives of rust-belt cowboys in tight Wranglers and leather boots, crouching in grass or on Spanish tile. In “Neither-This-Nor-That” (2024), one such figure clutches a rose in memory of his mother.

The work of Maureen O’Leary, presented by New York’s Cristin Tierney Gallery, was another standout. The artist’s use of color to depict scenes from Rome and busy, bursting tablescapes, along with flat tilted perspective, reminded me of Wayne Thiebaud’s underrated city paintings. “Looking Glass” (2024) by Sean Cairns at the booth of the Dallas- and Los Angeles-based gallery 12.26 depicts a sprawling mountain valley in oil and enamel, with glittering distemper and sand to affect a rougher surface.

Meanwhile, McClain Gallery in Houston couldn’t keep the bright, brooding volcano paintings of Brazilian-born, Bozeman-based painter Bruna Massadas on its wall.

“Sonny Boi Summer” (2023), a wall weaving by sixth generation Diné weaver Tyrrell Tapaha, represented by The Valley in Taos, New Mexico, combines Tapaha’s ancestral “sheep to loom” family practice using handspun and vegetal dyed Navajo Churro wool, alpaca, and mohair. Amid chevron stripes and traditional whirling logs is the phrase: “All that for a boy?”

New York-based artist Mary Miss has filed a legal complaint against the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) in Iowa, which announced plans to begin demolishing her land art installation “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” (1996) in the next week. Seeking a temporary restraining order to preserve the work, Miss alleges that the Center both failed to consult her before determining that the installation wasn’t salvageable and allowed the work to deteriorate by not providing adequate care throughout its existence.

Things came to a head last October, when the Center restricted access to areas of the installation in order to conduct “a complete structural review” of the site, which had been degrading over time. Miss was made aware of the closure and review, but was not invited to participate. She connected with DMAC Director Kelly Baum via Zoom about the work and its importance to her artistic career weeks later, and was met with a shock in December when Baum sent her a letter regarding the Center’s decision to demolish the installation entirely.

Baum blamed the “ephemeral” nature of Miss’s installation, which consists of various wooden, metallic, and concrete landscape features that provided different perspectives of the pondside ecology, as well as Iowa’s harsh climate, for the deterioration of the work. She also said that it was not financially feasible to restore the work and that DMAC had put considerable funds toward its maintenance.

The artist went public with Baum’s letter in January through the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), prompting the Center to issue a statement reiterating that the decision was a matter of “public safety.” Miss alleged that DMAC was violating its contract with her that included a pledge to “reasonably protect and maintain the Project against the ravages of time, vandalism and the elements,” and failed to include her in the decision-making process for deaccessioning the work.

Since then, Miss has rallied immense support from dozens of artists and art administrators who have recognized “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” as a seminal work in the artist’s career and in the realm of Land Art.

On April 3, the Center issued its notice that demolition was slated to begin “on or around April 8,” and that the pond and its aquatic life would be drained into the nearby river so that parts of the installation could be removed.

Miss filed her legal complaint on April 4 in an effort to prevent the deaccessioning of her installation, officially alleging that the Center is violating its contract with her and breaching the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) through the forthcoming “destruction of a work of recognized stature, and any intentional or grossly negligent destruction of that work.” Miss is seeking monetary damages from the center over the alleged VARA violation.

The Des Moines Art Center referred Hyperallergic to its previous statements when asked for a comment regarding the complaint.

The artist stated that this issue was forced into the courts due to “the Art Center Board and Director’s lack of consultation, disregard of their contractual obligations, and shameful treatment of the artwork.”

“They have only themselves to blame for this avoidable scandal,” she said.

This summer, curator and art historian Natalia Ángeles Vieyra will be joining the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, as the institution’s first-ever curator of Latinx Art. With her expertise in 19th-century through contemporary Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean art, Vieyra will assist with further developing the NGA’s existing holdings in this area through new acquisitions, scholarship, exhibitions, and public programming.

“I am excited to engage with the rich historic collections at the NGA, and to think about how these collections can be activated through collaborations with contemporary Latinx artists and the Latinx community — both in DC and nationally,” Vieyra told Hyperallergic, noting her specific expertise on 19th-century Puerto Rican painter Francisco Oller, the subject of her dissertation at Temple University.

Vieyra has held fellowships at various museums on the East Coast and has worked as a curatorial assistant at both the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

The term “Latinx” has been the subject of heated discussions in recent years, as scholars across different fields have attempted to define a vast and heterogeneous demographic group of Latin American descent in the United States. Though the new position’s title refers to “Latinx art,” Vieyra will be engaging with works by non-diasporic artists as well. She will be joining a team of seven curators in the NGA’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art to work on the museum’s 20th- and 21st-century collections and shows, and will partner with other departments to further integrate Latinx art and perspectives throughout the institution’s programming.

The NGA embarked on a search for the position after receiving a $500,000 grant from the Getty Foundation in early 2023. The grant is a part of the Advancing Latinx Art in Museums (ALAM) initiative — a combined $5 million funding pool from the Mellon, Ford, Getty, and Terra foundations distributed across 10 institutions to support Latinx art acquisitions and develop permanent curatorial roles specific to Latinx art as well.

A group of anti-Zionist Jewish artists is withdrawing artwork they submitted for the forthcoming California Jewish Open at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco, citing the institution’s “inability to meet artists’ demands, including transparency around funding and a commitment to BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions].” In a statement on Thursday, April 4, California Jewish Artists for Palestine added that the CJM “has been a target of the BDS Movement for having received funding directly from the State of Israel as well as private zionist philanthropists.”

The statement was signed by 11 artists, including seven whose work had originally been accepted into the exhibition and four whose work had not: Micah Bazant, Liat Berdugo, Jules Cowan, Rebekah Erev, Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt, Steph Kudisch, Kate Laster, Ava Sayaka Rosen, Sophia Sobko, Arielle Tonkin, and Irina Zadov.

The California Jewish Open is an open-call exhibition featuring 47 Jewish-identifying artists living in the state and organized around the prompt of how “Jewish culture, identity, and community [can] foster, reimagine, hold, or discover connection.” In a press release on Thursday, the museum acknowledged the artists who withdrew from the show and said the space on the walls where their artwork was to hang would be left blank, in a gesture to “both honor the perspective that would have been shared through these works, and to authentically reflect the struggle for dialogue that is illustrated by the artists’ decisions to withdraw.”

“While several artworks referencing “Free Palestine” were accepted into the exhibition, the artists were told by Senior Curator Heidi Rabben in a March 22 email that their work would be “presented in proximity to artwork(s) by other Jewish artists which may convey views and beliefs that conflict with [their] own,” leaving open the possibility of “curatorial both sides-ism.”

The group also expressed concern over a stipulation preventing them from modifying or removing their artwork, a condition they think may be linked to a recent incident in which artists altered their work with messages of Palestinian solidarity in the Bay Area Now 9 triennial at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The group demanded the ability to modify or remove their works and control over curatorial framing of their pieces, as well as transparency in funding and “a full divestment from Israeli governmental and pro-Zionist foundation funding.”

Among these funders is the Helen Diller Family Foundation, which has been criticized in the past for its grants to Canary Mission, a group accused of doxxing anti-Zionist students, and to the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which was labeled an anti-Muslim extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2022.

In response to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment, CJM Executive Director Kerry King said that “the Contemporary Jewish Museum had a transparent dialogue with this group of artists, but ultimately was not able to meet all of the conditions outlined.” She added that the contract was “typical” and that its terms predated the protest at Yerba Buena, and that funding sources are publicly listed for each exhibition. (The artists, however, noted several “anonymous donors” in the highest donation brackets.)

“We cannot tie an artist’s decision to participate to potential funding to support the exhibition and programming that may be secured closer to the opening,” King told Hyperallergic. In response to the artists’ condition that their wall text could appear as they proposed unedited, she told the artists that she wanted to “be transparent” about what the museum could and could not do.

“The CJM was not putting forth that anti-Zionism was antisemitism, but was requesting to work with the artists to jointly develop language that would clearly articulate their intention in a way that was clear and legible to the Museum’s many audiences,” she continued.

Regarding divestment from Israeli governmental funding, the museum told the artists that “this condition cannot be met.” A spokesperson told Hyperallergic that “the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest has provided small amounts of funding for exhibitions and talks,” adding that the CJM has not received any funding from the Consulate General or any Israeli organizations since 2021.

“It is our connection to Jewishness: activism, diaspora, and the spirit of adaptation that brings us here,” wrote one of the artists, Kate Laster, in the group letter.

“As Jews, we refuse to allow any justification, any weaponization of our generational trauma, or to give our consent to normalize apartheid,” Laster continued. “There is power in refusal — it’s a form of honoring rebellion and imagining what cultural arts ecosystems could be like beyond Zionism.”

Editor’s Note, 4/8/2024, 1:23pm: An earlier version of this article misstated that information shared with the artists over email was included in their contract. This has been corrected.

I have been an artist for more than 30 years. I have taught at New York University and Columbia University and was a visiting critic at Yale University. Principally, I’m a photographer. My work tackles womanhood, motherhood, race, colonialism, and feminism. My art is held in multiple museum collections and I was recently the subject of a solo presentation at the Princeton University Art Museum, where curator Klaudia Ofwona Draber wrote: 

“Who is Yo Mama? She is your mother. She is the Virgin Mary. She is Jesus. She is Rajé. She is ‘Chillin with Liberty’ (1998). She is Queen Nanny of the Maroons, and the ‘Mother of Us All’ (2004). She is Renée Cox. She embodies the artist’s alter egos. She empowers.” 

As a Black woman, I know what it is like to have every part of your anatomy and being questioned. My work “Yo Mama’s Last Supper” (1996) engendered racial abuse when Mayor Rudy Guiliani demanded its removal from the Brooklyn Museum in 2001. This incited others to question me as a Black female artist portraying herself in a biblical image. I never gave in to such racially charged statements and responded by saying, “I have a right to reinterpret ‘The Last Supper’ as Leonardo Da Vinci created ‘The Last Supper’ with people who look like him. The hoopla and the fury are because I’m a Black female. It’s about me having nothing to hide.” I’m a Black female who chose to be at the center of that table. We all know what happened to Guiliani; it took two brave Black women he slandered to bring him down. 

Writing from experience, people of color are often seized upon, especially when mistakes are made. That happened to London-based art dealer and activist Amar Singh, who was recently smeared by Graydon Carter’s publication Air Mail. I have recently been working with Singh and Black curator Destinee Ross Sutton on including my work in Sutton’s show Unapologetic WomXn during the 2024 Venice Biennale. Singh has been tireless in his support. When the Venice show closes in November, this will pave the way to my solo show at Singh’s gallery, which he is reopening in London later this year. 

Air Mail’s article, published last October, is 12,000 words of pure dung not worthy of artist Chris Ofili to weave upon one of his canvases. The piece focuses on Singh’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend, who has admitted to cheating, gaslighting, and lying to him during their relationship. Singh exploded over the phone in a vitriolic tirade upon her confessions. He said in a public statement posted to his Instagram in January: “Verbal abuse is wrong. I am profoundly sorry for my behaviour.” The ex-girlfriend later told Karen Ocamb of the LGBTQ+ publication the Los Angeles Blade, “All good that he has done and the kind person he is should not be overpowered by a few minutes of responsiveness to my actions.”  

What happened to Singh is a mix of racism and tabloid journalism, in my opinion, but it is also systematically indicative of how Black and Brown men and women are disregarded. Singh also faced questions over his heritage and education. The allegations that he lied about helping charities and museums are utterly false. Questioning the background of people of color was a driving force of colonialists who would argue such people could not run their own countries or minds, especially the British imperialists who worked so hard to colonize Singh’s ancestors and mine. I’ve known Singh since 2016; we met when he was only 26. For all that time, he has been passionate about art and human rights, fighting against LGBTQ+ conversion therapy in India and the human trafficking of women and children. He has already proven he’s the real deal.

Queen Nanny was a warrior who fought against colonial forces, protecting Jamaican people against those who wanted to enslave them due to the color of their skin. That is why I become her in my work. That work does not stop when I put the camera down. The people Nanny protected wouldn’t have needed protection if they were White, and neither would Singh.

In my work “The Yo Mama” (1993), I am pictured fully naked holding my son. It is a work that signifies the power of a woman but also the power of a mother. A mother protects. Breonna Taylor could have been my daughter. Amar Singh could be my son. Singh made a mistake over the phone in his personal life, but the attempted erasure of his work which has positively impacted many is grounded in a racial current that sails against the idea that a 34-year-old Brown man could have helped so many people and succeeded in the White-dominated art world. So, should I trust my art dealer? Yo Mama sure does!

On view now at the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Idris Khan: Repeat After Me marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Born in 1978, Idris Khan explores the lyrical, symbolic, and physical meanings of repetition. His works span media, from photography and video to painting and sculpture, and focus on gestures of repetition as a means of physically marking time, memory, loss, transformation, and ultimately, transcendence.

Showcasing major works covering every facet of Khan’s career, Idris Khan: Repeat After Me traces his investigations across time and media, and inaugurates a never-before-seen body of paintings he created expressly for the presentation at the Milwaukee Art Museum. In these works, he synthesizes his earliest concerns with photographic reproduction while delving into the integral role of color in iconic masterworks of art history and our memories of them.

The exhibition opens with Khan’s first forays into photography, which focused on digital accumulation and combined collections of images into single photographic prints. In his next phase of work, he expanded on these conceptually rigorous investigations and physically stamped layers of his own words onto canvas, glass, and paper. These paintings teem with words, symbols, and musical notes, placing the verbal and lyrical side by side.

Khan’s most recent explorations turn to the language of color and its ability to contain and release a world of memories, associations, and emotions. He combines jewel-like colors with delicately stained sheet music, layered on top of rich, stamped surfaces; the musical marks and fugues of pigment create a shimmering harmony — a colorful, sonic rhythm.

The exhibition is curated by Marcelle Polednik, PhD, Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

For more information, visit mam.org.

‣ Setting the record straight on overwhelmingly White male architectural history, writer Prinita Thevarajah delves into the work of three women of color who left an indelible mark on the field for Architectural Digest:

Despite its sensitive, community-oriented approach, De Silva’s work has been popularly overshadowed by Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa, lauded as the pioneer of “tropical modernism.” According to Welandawe, the scarcity in the naming and claiming of De Silva’s impact is rooted in a “fear that if you claim she was the giant of modernist architecture in Sri Lanka, it will diminish the work of Bawa.” Revealing the explicit and subtle conditions of society, patriarchal values are reflected in access to and conversations around built environments.

What many don’t know is that De Silva’s definition of a modern, regional, tropical aesthetic predated Bawa’s. Bawa, in fact, was informed heavily by De Silva, even going to the extent of hiring her studio assistant, Ulrik Plesner. “Simply no one was studying her work at the time,” Welandawe says while reflecting on the lost archive of De Silva’s work. Many of her original drawings and plans have not been preserved. In fact, some of her constructions, including the Senanayake Flats, are in a dilapidated state. Instead, a romanticized and imagined legacy in the romantic fiction Plastic Emotions by Shirome Pinto tells of an affair De Silva had with close friend Le Corbusier.

‣ The Department of Homeland Security (immediately no) has been developing a comic book series to combat disinformation. What could possibly go wrong? Ken Klippenstein has the ins and outs of the story for the Intercept:

Writing in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Thomas Gaulkin said that “the Resilience Series … conjures a certain jingoism peculiar to government publications that can mimic the very threat being addressed.” 

All of which raises the question as to what role the Department of Homeland Security should play in adjudicating “media literacy,” as the series webpage says. 

Both “Real Fake” and “Bug Bytes” were written by Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent who works as a contributor to MSNBC and is affiliated with Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, and Farid Haque, an education technology entrepreneur who is CEO of London-based Erly Stage Studios and was previously CEO of StartUp Britain, a campaign launched by then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. 

Watts, who writes and speaks about Russian influence campaigns, has testified to Congress on the matter and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks, including the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Clearly knowledgeable, his own writings can sometimes veer into hyperbole — a potent reminder that even experts on disinformation are not infallible.

‣ Amid all the buzz around the upcoming solar eclipse, a group of incarcerated people in New York are suing for the right to witness the rare event on the grounds of religious freedom. Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and Justine McDaniel report for the Washington Post:

Those incarcerated at the Woodbourne Correctional Facility in New York say they should be allowed to view it, too. They filed the suit Friday, after DOCCS acting commissioner Daniel F. Martuscello III last month announced plans to lock prisoners in their housing units from 2 to 5 p.m. on April 8 and prohibit them from watching the eclipse in the yard, citing safety concerns.

“Religious freedom is at the heart of not only our constitution, but our shared humanity,” Madeline Byrd, one of the attorneys representing the inmates, said in a statement. “This historic eclipse is religiously significant to people of many different faiths, and we are fighting for everyone’s right to observe it.”

‣ How was the oldest synagogue in New York’s Borough Park neighborhood demolished last month without a permit? Adam Daly writes for the Brooklyn Paper about the 122-year-old Chevra Anshei Lubawitz and the public outcry in the wake of its dismantling:

Jewish Future Alliance President Yaacov Behrman told Brooklyn Paper that the Jewish community in Borough Park owes much of its existence to the Chevra Anshei Lubawitz.

“The synagogue was definitely not just destroyed. It was desecrated the way it was ripped down,” said Berhman.

First constructed in 1906-07 for Temple Beth El, a congregation of Eastern European origin, it was sold in 1922 to Chevra Anshei Lubawitz, one of the earliest Brooklyn congregations to affiliate with the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, according to a report submitted by architectural historian Anthony W. Robins to the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2019. However, landmark status was never granted.

‣ An academic paper launched contemporary AI? People actually read those? In WIRED, Steven Levy has the unlikely story of how eight Google employees converged to draft a scientific article that became “the most consequential tech breakthrough in recent history”:

Approaching its seventh anniversary, the “Attention” paper has attained legendary status. The authors started with a thriving and improving technology—a variety of AI called neural networks—and made it into something else: a digital system so powerful that its output can feel like the product of an alien intelligence. Called transformers, this architecture is the not-so-secret sauce behind all those mind-blowing AI products, including ChatGPT and graphic generators such as Dall-E and Midjourney. Shazeer now jokes that if he knew how famous the paper would become, he “might have worried more about the author order.” All eight of the signers are now microcelebrities. “I have people asking me for selfies—because I’m on a paper!” says Llion Jones, who is (randomly, of course) name number five.

“Without transformers I don’t think we’d be here now,” says Geoffrey Hinton, who is not one of the authors but is perhaps the world’s most prominent AI scientist. He’s referring to the ground-shifting times we live in, as OpenAI and other companies build systems that rival and in some cases surpass human output.

‣ Earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would kick Al Jazeera out of the country. He called the news agency a “terror channel,” stating that it “harmed Israel’s security, actively participated in the October 7 massacre, and incited against Israeli soldiers.” But Al Jazeera is one of the few outlets still reporting on the ground in Gaza. Below, watch the outlet’s in-depth investigation of October 7, which bypasses and corrects many of the misconceptions we’ve seen platformed by other media publications:

‣ In case you needed another horror story to question the ethics of the nonprofit world:

‣ TikTok takes on a rhetorical point — can White people experience racism? — and a media studies professor takes the opportunity to answer a different question. How are White people affected by racism?:

‣ Sometimes it’s cathartic to watch people with too much time on their hands:

‣ Where have all the good cultural appropriators gone and where are all the Gwen Stefanis?

‣ Tag your work bestie:

‣ And speaking of besties …

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

The last of two contemporary arts spaces in the Gaza Strip was completely destroyed in March during Israel’s second military incursion on the Al-Shifa Hospital. Shababeek (Arabic for “windows”) for Contemporary Art, a nonprofit arts education center and gallery space in Gaza City that opened in 2009, stood just a few feet away from the medical complex and was left completely decimated after Israeli forces finally retreated.

Palestinian artist and Shababeek’s co-founder Shareef Sarhan explained that with limited funding from international sponsors and excessive limitations from Israeli border controls, the organization administered artist grants, hosted residencies and exhibitions, taught university students how to use and explore different contemporary media, and structured public art programming across Gaza.

“In the last five years, Shababeek’s artist community grew to about 250 people,” Sarhan told Hyperallergic, speaking in Arabic through interpreter Rhoda Kanaaneh, who teaches anthropology at Fordham University.

Between 2006 and 2012, tight restrictions on bringing art materials into Gaza left artists to either work with unconventional alternatives or wait for friends from outside to bring supplies in through diplomatic convoys. Though import restrictions have loosened in the last decade, it’s been equally difficult to get traditional artwork out of Gaza, and artists have turned to social media to share their work.

“Gaza’s artists have been trying to access channels to let the world know that through art, we’re able to produce love, hope, freedom, and peace,” Sarhan said.

“Installation, photography, performance, digital and video art, design — these are contemporary mediums that translate well online and therefore work around the siege, and they are also important to learn about in order to keep up with the rest of the art world.”

As the only two contemporary art hubs in Gaza, Shababeek frequently collaborated with its predecessor, Eltiqa Gallery in downtown Gaza City, to nurture artists during what Sarhan called “a severe neglect” of the creative sector. Eltiqa Gallery was destroyed last December by an Israeli airstrike.

Sarhan and his immediate family were in Istanbul before Hamas’s attack on October 7, and have been forced to watch the decimation of Gaza from the outside. He told Hyperallergic that after experiencing multiple wars while living in Gaza, this was his first time away during such a catastrophic event.

Shababeek incurred major damages to its third floor between November and January, but Israel’s relentless attack on Al-Shifa Hospital leveled the entire building in the last two weeks, destroying 30 years of Sarhan’s artwork as well as the archives of the organization’s fellow co-founders, Majed Shala and Basel El Maqousi, who is currently sheltering in a tent in Rafah.

“Sometimes when I see the photos, I can’t believe that I’ve lost everything — even the little brush that I’ve used for 10 years,” Sarhan said. “I’ve been thinking all along that I want to return to Gaza as soon as possible, but after losing Shababeek, I’m not in a rush anymore.”

Sarhan noted that a majority of his artist community has been displaced and referred back to El Maqousi, who had to rebuild his home twice since 2008 before it was destroyed a final time in 2023. Sarhan explained that El Maqousi converted Shababeek into a shelter for some time, distracting his nephews and nieces with art sessions before everyone had been evacuated to Khan Younis and then Rafah.

“Basel has turned his tent in Rafah into ‘Little Shababeek,’ doing art workshops with children to help them unload from themselves and change their moods, and hosting workshops with women and girls as well,” Sarhan continued, underscoring that “Shababeek is an idea, not a place,” and that the loss of the space has put the focus back on the artists who made it.

“That’s why I continue to say that through art we can change the meaning of life for people,” Sarhan said.