Early this year, much of the world tuned in to watch Alex Honnold climb the Taipei 101 skyscraper live from Taiwan, but Honnold’s greatest achievement had already been captured on film long ago. Free Solo (2018) documented his effort to become the first person to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan without ropes of any kind, and its shots are far more impressive than anything Netflix would ever produce.

Those wild close-ups come courtesy of the film’s co-director Jimmy Chin. This week he was one of three artists in “What Holds Us,” a this-weekend-only group exhibition in Chelsea presenting the work of Chin, Alex Prager and Jack Davison. (From there, the exhibition will travel to London and Shanghai.) Chin’s contribution features his typically gorgeous shots of mountains, in this case the Bugaboos in southeastern British Columbia. There are sweeping vistas, textured crags and a shot of his climbing partner Conrad Anker gazing at the snow-topped peaks that recalls the Rückenfigur of Caspar David Friedrich and the German Romantics.

“Normally I don’t get the opportunity to go and just make art, just shoot for a show,” Chin, who worked with Apple on the project, told Observer. “It’s a more personal creative idea and vision that I could shoot to. It’s not to cover an editorial story, it’s not for a commercial client. They said, ‘Carte blanche.'” It was an opportunity he had to take, despite being on deadline for a book and a film.

Chin’s contributions came together in just 36 hours spent on the mountain after the airline lost his luggage. He was shooting with an iPhone 18 Pro and the resulting photos, though gorgeous, reflect that bare-bones existentialism. “I’ve always been interested in that intersection of human passion and purpose and meaning, intersecting with these incredible, wild, raw landscapes,” he said. “These places have brought me so much life, and yet have also taken life away from me. Friends.” He does not consider this morbid. “These are the places that make me face my mortality on a consistent basis, and that actually has an impact on my choices. I think we tend to shy away from thinking about it. In a lot of cultures, it’s something that you do examine.”

“These places make me feel so insignificant, in the best way,” he added. It would be hard not to feel minuscule around the towering Bugaboos. After the Rückenfigur photo, a storm moved in with winds gusting at 70 miles per hour. Chin had to hold on not to get blown off the ridge. “But I would rather have this than a clear blue sky. It’s so much of the feeling of these places.”

Alongside the panoramas hang more experimental abstractions. These glacial textures were shot from a helicopter on the way out—the streaked blue-white fields read as brushstrokes. “I’m Chinese and grew up doing calligraphy,” said Chin. “I wanted something striking that you couldn’t wrap your head around, because you just don’t know what it is. There’s so much beauty and creativity in nature that you never really expect. I wanted to isolate it and extract it. These are the pieces that are easy to miss.”

It turns out that all you need to make some great photography is a helicopter, a phone and placidity about your own death.

More in exhibitions

• A Gloucester Show Looks at David Hockney Through the Eyes of a Friend

• The Magic of “Timeless Mucha” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

• The Exhibitions Not to Miss in Seoul

• In Arles, Photography and Art Ease the Transition from Summer into Fall

• Shezad Dawood’s “Skin of Dreams” Looks Forward as Well as Back

• The Continuing Reinvention of Willem de Kooning

It’s foolish to try to explain anything anyone does on Instagram, but this year’s earlier trend of posting pictures of oneself from 2016 struck me as an impulse that originated from a yen for authenticity. The posting of these images seemed to imply that in today’s influencer-centric, A.I.-generated world, our images back then could be more readily believed, because nobody was trying to sell you as many products, and the algorithms were less good at knowing what images could hypnotize us. Also we were younger then, yes, and many of us much more attractive.

But that authenticity impulse informs “John Akomfrah: The Hour of the Dog,” now at the Menil Collection in Houston. The show is essentially one work—a six-channel video installation of 50 minutes and 37 seconds, made in 2025 and co-commissioned by the Menil and the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it entered the collection. Co-curated by Michelle White of the Menil and Cecilia Wichmann of the BMA, the video and show engage with youth-led Civil Rights activism in the American South between 1954 and 1963, the decade of marches, boycotts, sit-ins and voter registration drives that produced the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Akomfrah (b. 1957, Accra) built his film from archives—documentary footage, newsreels, oral histories, photography—and from footage he shot himself on a soundstage. The work plays with authenticity to the point where one cannot tell what is old and new and stops caring.

The hour of the dog, we are told in the beginning of the film, is the “liminal space between day and night” in the Chinese zodiac. Picture, if you will, an image where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gives a speech on an old television while a modern-day actor in a mid-20th-century costume lies on a flat surface surrounded by real artifacts from the Freedom Riders. The camera pans over their clothes and their picket signs as the actor stares ahead with wide eyes. Real archival footage plays on other channels on the surrounding screens. “This is time, familiar and intimate,” a voice intones at regular intervals. “We are taken by it.”

The gallery guide tells us that the quote comes from Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time and cites James Van Der Zee’s photographs of Black funerals in Harlem and West African funerary practice as the sources for these flat scenes, which constitute the majority of the film. The images do have the composed, well-dressed stillness of a body laid out properly, but something about the actors insists on the fact that they’re alive. They’re just immobile, like other aspects of our culture. Akomfrah isn’t trying to make the archival portion of this fresh. You’ve seen it all before: the mug shots of the Freedom Riders arrested for testing integration on interstate routes, Stokely Carmichael, later Kwame Ture, and John Lewis. Of course, there are dogs. At times, the new footage becomes a three-dimensional living photograph depicting people from this era in ruined homes.

An anteroom holds four objects from the Menil’s own holdings, chosen by the artist. There is an African fetish object from the mid-19th to early 20th Century, a dog with a head at each end, but my favorite is a painting that I’ve always loved anyway. René Magritte’s The Dominion of Light (L’empire des lumières) (1954) represents a suburban home in oil, a daylit sky sitting on top of a black street. It is the spiritual twin to the film, in its liminality and painful stasis.

More in exhibitions

• “It’s About Time”: At 86, Gladys Nilsson Gets Her First Major Retrospective

• Centro Botín Champions Marisol’s Drawings and Rethinks Her Legacy

• These Are the Must-See Art Exhibitions in Athens Right Now

• Tran Luong Considers Vietnam’s Reality Through an Imagined Underwater World

• At MICAS, Reggie Burrows Hodges’s Vision of Malta

This week, Tone Hansen takes over as director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Hansen arrives from MUNCH (a.k.a. the Munch Museum) in Oslo, where she has been director since 2022, and before that spent 11 years leading the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. She succeeds Gitte Ørskou, and inherits an enlarged Moderna Museet, with the organization having absorbed ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, along with the Public Art Agency Sweden at the beginning of this year. We caught up with Hansen to hear about meeting Yayoi Kusama in her Tokyo studio, how to use a collection of 100,000 photographs and the tourists who mistake contemporary art for Munch.

Congratulations on your new job! Not to jump to the end of it already, but your tenure is projected to end August 31, 2032. What are your short term goals for the institution? What are some that you’d like to have finished by 2032?

To position Moderna Museet so that we attract audiences from all over the world, but also act as a driving force locally for the big artistic questions, and internationally as a place you must visit if you want to keep up with what is happening in the art world. The expanded mandate that includes art in public space, architecture and design, as well as visual arts, provides great opportunities to discuss the place of aesthetics in our everyday lives and in urban and regional development, and the premises of Moderna Museet are created for large exhibitions and performances. By ’32 we should have established a network of research with major institutions, and the collection is as relevant as ever before.

You trained as an artist at the academies in Oslo and Malmö. What advantage does that background grant you when you’re planning exhibitions?

My education as an artist and curator gives me the advantage of knowledge of practical work and the costs of standing alone as an artist. This perhaps gives me the ability to have greater empathy for both artists and audiences, but I am also very aware of the areas of expertise I depend on others to cover. Respect for the knowledge of others is key for me.

At Henie Onstad, where you were a curator and then director before MUNCH, you collaborated with Moderna Museet on Hilma af Klint, Yayoi Kusama and Marina Abramović, all of whom have become household names since then. What was it like working with them before their recent explosion in popularity? To what do you attribute their rabid fanbase?

I was lucky enough to meet Kusama in her studio in Tokyo in 2015 and met a committed and hard-working artist who got involved in all projects even though her fame had already elevated by then, and I am proud to have been the one who introduced her to a larger audience in Norway. Marina Abramović has a large team around her who ensures the precision needed to successfully recreate her legendary performances, and it was both demanding and educational to set up her Abramović Institute, where you had to put down watches and phones before entering through a cleansing ritual. Suspending time, and being in a room and performing meaningless tasks such as sorting grains of rice, is also a way of building concentration, an exercise we all benefit from going through now and then. I would have loved to sit at the table at one of Hilma af Klint’s collective seances, and her exploration of the spiritual also resonates in artists such as Edvard Munch. When we showed her at Henie Onstad, many were skeptical and didn’t want to consider it art, but the audience loved it regardless of the criticism. I think we attributed some knowledge to a broader audience in Norway and, more than that, helped place Oslo as a destination for culture.

What have been some of your favorite exhibitions at Moderna Museet? Which ones do you think will inform your tenure?

I was going through my books here in Oslo and came across a very special exhibition catalog from 2019, “Mud Muses: A Rant about Technology,” an exhibition by Lars Bang Larsen taking Robert Rauschenberg’s iconic installation Mud Muse from ’69 to ’71 as a starting point for a group exhibition, stating: artistic intelligence before artificial intelligence.

The photography holdings at Moderna Museet encompass roughly 100,000 items. In my columns I’m always banging on about how photos are the dominant medium in our post-literate society. What excites you about such a large and distinguished photography collection?

Photography opens up a larger discussion in our time about truth, A.I. and the role of the artist. Since photography can be created entirely digitally it is also a question of who is making the artwork. Photo also affects us in our everyday lives as our communication has become increasingly image-driven. Photography as art and documentation can train our critical sense, our empathy towards what we do not yet understand. Questions to be continuously asked and developed with contemporary artists.

You have said MUNCH became a museum for Edvard Munch, modernism and contemporary art rather than a single-artist museum. How did you help that institution expand its focus, and what lessons did that process teach you?

It was evident that MUNCH needed a strategy that defined the areas within which the museum should operate, given its scale and location. A three-part program strategy for art, music and performance and a program statement provided direction, along with an international strategy to position the museum in our larger community. Edvard Munch was a champion of artistic freedom, experimentation and individual liberation in his time. One of my first initiatives at the museum was establishing the MUNCH Award to continue this legacy. With this award, we pay tribute to the artist’s role as a critical voice in society. The first two recipients are Rosana Paulino and Samia Halaby. The next recipient will be announced shortly.

I have championed several major solo exhibitions during my time as director. The one in the making is Katharina Grosse, “Black Bed.” Through our close collaboration, we also see the value of spending time together in the process of creating new works.

We have learned that many artists get energy from being in an indirect context with Munch, and working at his studio at Ekely has been a great asset for many artists. Another important focus has been to take a position in an indigenous perspective with a curator as the first in Norway. This affects both how we think about exhibitions and creates new research within our artistic fields.

A 2024 interview asked you to “settle once and for all” the question of whether the figure in The Scream is hearing a scream or screaming himself. You demurred by saying that you preferred the mystery, and reminded us that the figure might well be a woman. What are some other silly questions that people have asked you about this artwork over the years?

According to Munch, it is nature screaming back at you. It is an emotion rather than a figure. I have had to guide tourists every now and then in our contemporary shows mistaking it for being by Edvard Munch.

More interviews

• Ho Tzu Nyen Wants the Gwangju Biennale to Honor the Past, Not Relive It

• Grażyna Kulczyk Has Spent 50 Years Collecting Artists Who Were Difficult to Place

• Anne and Arthur Goldstein Reflect On the Responsibility of the Collector

• Julian Schnabel On Showcasing the Essentials at Château La Coste

• How an Idea Becomes an Institution or Exhibition That Outlives Its Moment

• Marilyn Minter Reflects On Four Decades of Beauty, Grit and Banishing Shame

In the horrible geography and chronology in which I went to college, you could tell much about a person by the posters they hung in their dorms. The jocks would always have their bikini babes, or the one with the members of t.A.T.u. kissing each other, which was said to be a powerful aphrodisiac. We intellectuals turned our nose up at that kind of thing, favoring instead posters for movies directed by the Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino. The art students would inevitably have the work of Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), which always manages to feel timeless, instructive and engaging to the eye.

Explanation for this durability can be found in an exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, “Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line,” which argues that he was an infrastructure project as much as he was a graphic designer. The sturdy line Mucha worked out in Paris in the 1890s became a piece of visual plumbing that generations could tap into when looking to channel attention through certain pipelines. Organized by the Mucha Foundation in Prague in collaboration with the museum, the exhibition gathers nearly 150 objects across 10 sections that track him from art student to the inventor of “le style Mucha” and then out the far side, into psychedelic rock posters, a Grateful Dead album cover and American comic books. A final section handles The Slav Epic, his cycle of 20 monumental paintings of Slavic history, by digital reproduction, which goes to show how durable his style is. It works on screens just as well as it works above an unmade twin bed.

Mucha’s JOB (1896) is an exemplary work. Created two years after the term “New Woman” reportedly entered circulation, it is an advertisement for JOB rolling papers, and its gold zigzag border borrows from Byzantine mosaics. The woman smokes in profile with her eyes closed, and the smoke rises to merge with the tangle of blonde hair swirling around her body. Hair worn loose like this was controversial in its day, as was the wantonness of the cigarette, but it’s arguably a vibe.

If Mucha’s work came to be appropriated by the psychedelic movement, it doesn’t seem to have been something he would have opposed. The Arts: Dance (1898) emerged from the experiments of Albert de Rochas, whom Mucha met at a Theosophical Society meeting and whose hypnosis sessions he hosted in his own studio in an effort to find a scientific basis for ESP and occult phenomena. Mucha thought that straight lines fatigue the eye, whereas alternating straight and curved lines give it rest. It’s tempting to read Dance along those lines, the straight edges standing in for the known world and the curves for everything unseen.

Among my favorite works in the exhibition demonstrating Mucha’s influence has to be the cover of Ninjak (1994) by the great Joe Quesada, the former editor-in-chief of Marvel, here working for Valiant Comics. Ninjak is an obscure character, but this cover sees him standing off-center as a seductive female form emerges through a mandala that Mucha could have drawn himself. Here, the Mucha style is a little too seductive. Though Ninjak is probably the hero in this situation, he comes across as a party pooper, the stiff dude with a sword cramping the style of this woman. It’s only a matter of time before they option him for a movie.

More in exhibitions

• “It’s About Time”: At 86, Gladys Nilsson Gets Her First Major Retrospective

• Centro Botín Champions Marisol’s Drawings and Rethinks Her Legacy

• These Are the Must-See Art Exhibitions in Athens Right Now

• Tran Luong Considers Vietnam’s Reality Through an Imagined Underwater World

• At MICAS, Reggie Burrows Hodges’s Vision of Malta

Last month James Cohan Gallery announced that it would become Norr Cohan, with longtime senior director David Norr assuming sole ownership, though James Cohan will continue working with artists and collectors on a smaller scale. Founded in 1999, the gallery moved from 57th Street to Chelsea, where it built long relationships with artists including Fred Tomaselli, Yinka Shonibare and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, to Walker Street in Tribeca. It now represents about 40 artists. Norr arrived in 2015 from the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, was made a partner in 2018 and a co-owner in 2021, so this is less a handoff than the last step of one that has been underway for years. We caught up with Norr to hear about what a curator brings to the dealer’s side of the table in the current market.

There’s been a lot of dark talk about the primary market lately, but taking over a gallery is a long-term bet. Why are you optimistic?

There are always ups and downs and shifts in market attention. As much as the art world likes to imagine it runs on its own internal logic, it’s deeply connected to the real world, and right now global conflicts, anxiety about A.I. and stress on our democracies have created a lot of uncertainty. But I’d flip that around. The conditions that create that anxiety are the same conditions that make art necessary.

My bias is that art brings meaning, it opens minds and hearts, and it enriches lives. I’m a true believer. Leading with that ethos, with the conviction that art’s value extends far beyond its sale price is what keeps the gallery focused and what keeps me optimistic.

The gallery model bends and adapts. Its lasting strength comes from embracing those fluctuations rather than fearing them. Our charge is to help the artists we work with build long, productive, meaningful careers, and to gather a community of collectors, curators and writers around that work. Careers and communities are patient projects, built over decades rather than quarters.

What’s going to change at the gallery with this transition?

Over the last 11 years, the gallery has grown from 20 artists to 41, moved from Chelsea to Tribeca, and our team has grown alongside that. Change may be the only constant in this business. Through that evolution, our approach has always been to make smart, long-term decisions rooted in our values, and that won’t change.

You came to the gallery in 2015 from the Wexner Center and MOCA Cleveland. What can a former curator do as a dealer that someone who came up on the sales floor cannot, and what did you have to learn from zero?

I never anticipated becoming a gallerist, but I never anticipated becoming a curator, either. I was trained as an artist and then taught, before entering the museum world. My background perhaps stubbornly privileges the relevance of an artist over the price point of their work, and I think that differentiates my approach as a dealer.

One of the things I enjoy most as a gallerist is having longstanding, committed relationships with artists. I have the opportunity to think in decades about an artist’s career. Curators have steamy affairs with artists that last a year or two, but typically do not have the opportunity to engage in long-term thinking about an artist’s trajectory.

You’ve had a front row seat to the development of The Campus. What do you think resonates with people about that project? Are there lessons in it for the New York gallery scene?

The magic of The Campus is the collaboration we’ve built with our peers Bortolami, kaufmann repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps and kurimanzutto. It was a magnificent idea that Andrew Kreps brought to all of us, and I’ve been proud to be part of it from the start. It’s a real asset for every partner gallery, and it keeps opening up forms of community that remain elusive for those of us working on our own.

For this year’s exhibition we invited eight galleries from the U.K., among them Thomas Dane, Emalin, Lisson and Modern Art, with artists as varied as Hurvin Anderson, Sarah Lucas, Tschabalala Self and Keith Haring presented across a 78,000-square-foot former public school. The building remains in its found state, so artists respond to the architecture, and projects unfold room by room as you move through the school. It’s an ambitious undertaking that no single gallery could mount alone.

You live a block from the gallery and have said Tribeca feels more human and welcoming. How does Tribeca avoid becoming what Chelsea became?

We left Chelsea because the owner of our building wanted to develop it into a tower. That never actually happened, and our old space is now a lounge for Lamborghini owners.

Tribeca has a character and a sense of community that really differentiate it from Chelsea. The cast iron facades, the historic architecture, the restaurants, the artistic history, all of it gives the neighborhood a charm and an authenticity that makes people want to live and spend time here. Chelsea was a place you visited. Tribeca is a place where people actually live, and you feel that every time you walk down the street.

You told ARTnews this transition has been “a wonderful exercise to think about growth and positionality.” It sounds like you’re saying declining to expand into other cities has helped the gallery weather this moment. Is that the case?

Expansion has a way of becoming its own justification in this business, and its costs tend to arrive well before the decision begins to pay dividends. We’ve resisted growth for growth’s sake and have tried to remain precise about our scale, focusing on the quality of our program and the service we give to our artists and our clients.

We’ve also continued to invest in New York. And after eight fast-moving years in Tribeca, we’ve been working with the architectural studio Ideas of Order to renovate and expand our exhibition spaces at 48 and 52 Walker Street. The gallery will reopen in early September under its new name: Norr Cohan.

Jim and Jane are some of the most beloved people in the art world on a purely interpersonal level. Why do you think they have so many friends? Did you learn anything from them about that part of the job?

It’s safe to say I would never have entered the commercial world had it not been for Jim and Jane. I met them in 1999, the year Jim opened the gallery. Trenton Doyle Hancock had been my roommate in graduate school at Tyler, and he remains one of my dearest friends. Fred Tomaselli introduced Jim to Trenton’s work after a studio visit, and I met Jim at Trenton’s first show, at the 57th Street space. Jim wore a bowtie in those days, and he was curious about everything. What struck me then was the environment he and Jane had created around Trenton and all of their artists. I knew right away it was something special.

As my career moved into curating, I got to see behind the curtain at a lot of New York galleries, and I learned quickly that they are not all created equal. Jim stayed a friend and a real mentor through those years. We had many candid conversations about art and life and work, and it was that trust, more than anything, that eventually drew me to the business.

What sets Jim and Jane apart is that they built rigor and kindness into the gallery at the same time, and those two qualities are rare partners. Building a business that reflects how you actually want to move through the world is a real achievement, and they never lost sight of what mattered to them while doing it. I’m proud to be part of what they built and proud to carry it forward.

You’ve named Frenchette the best bar in the neighborhood. Where else do you like to hang out, post-openings?

There are so many great spots now. But I spend most of my free time in the neighborhood toggling between Happier Grocery and Rigor Hill Market and taking long walks along the piers on the west side highway, especially at sunset.

More interviews

• Ho Tzu Nyen Wants the Gwangju Biennale to Honor the Past, Not Relive It

• Grażyna Kulczyk Has Spent 50 Years Collecting Artists Who Were Difficult to Place

• Anne and Arthur Goldstein Reflect On the Responsibility of the Collector

• Julian Schnabel On Showcasing the Essentials at Château La Coste

• How an Idea Becomes an Institution or Exhibition That Outlives Its Moment

• Marilyn Minter Reflects On Four Decades of Beauty, Grit and Banishing Shame

It’s curious how little we know about Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. Lawyers for one man who claimed to be Satoshi argued in a Norwegian courtroom that the pseudonym came from the Japanese for “ash,” since he wanted his invention to be the phoenix that rose from the ashes of the current monetary system. Reporters looked into it and found that this particular claimant wasn’t the inventor of Bitcoin. Moreover, they found that satoshi doesn’t mean ash, though it is the default name for the hero in the Japanese version of the original Pokémon game, aka “Ash” in America. That link feels appropriate. If you’re a Millennial there’s no real path to a retirement fund, apart from Bitcoin and Pokémon cards.

A similar gap in technological history is examined by “The Renaissance Engraver at Work,” a new show at the Cleveland Museum of Art that seeks to explore the early days of engraving in Europe. The medium emerged in the mid-1400s and remains somewhat mysterious, as scholars and curators still don’t really know how these early plates were cut or, in some cases, how they were printed. The museum holds some of the oldest and rarest early engravings in existence and for this show examined them using the paper lab’s stereomicroscope and a variety of light sources and magnification, “revealing material and technical details not visible to the naked eye,” which means whatever is visible now carries a whiff of scientific gravitas.

Not that a work called Battle of the Nudes ever risked seeming unimportant. Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s work from the 1470s or 1480s shows a group of naked men in a violent battle, weirder still because each one appears to be a clone of the same man. They’re amid foliage, but all boast rolling hills of muscles so it’s possible this was meant for the study of anatomy. It’s a beautiful abstraction of war without any of the legitimizing influence of a Bible story behind it—a fight to the death between NPCs.

Martin Schongauer’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1475-90) is no less compelling for being well-trod territory. Christ falls on a rocky landscape, almost swallowed by the crowd of uncaring onlookers. This work is likely based on a lost Jan van Eyck painting, but it is in the engraving that we feel the texture of the cruelty. We see the vain intricacies of the soldier’s armor, the complicated weave of someone in a turban negotiating something. Richest of all is the wood grain right at the center of the work, the final moment of peace.

The works in this exhibition sometimes seem to refer to their own creation, as in Hendrick Goltzius’s The Farnesian Hercules, from Three Famous Antique Roman Statues (1592). The male nude seems to be the subject, but then we’re not actually seeing Hercules but a statue of him in the courtyard of the Farnese Palace that had been unearthed from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. In the right corner two contemporary fellows—Goltzius and his stepson—gaze up at the figure, their heads each as large as one of his buttocks. He is comically veiny and if the other nudes had hills of muscle, he has valleys. What can his admirers do but raise their eyebrows?

More in Exhibitions

• “It’s About Time”: At 86, Gladys Nilsson Gets Her First Major Retrospective

• Centro Botín Champions Marisol’s Drawings and Rethinks Her Legacy

• These Are the Must-See Art Exhibitions in Athens Right Now

• Tran Luong Considers Vietnam’s Reality Through an Imagined Underwater World

• At MICAS, Reggie Burrows Hodges’s Vision of Malta

Earlier this summer, Art Basel named Wassan Al-Khudhairi artistic director of the 2027 edition of Art Basel Qatar, the fair’s second outing in Doha. She succeeds Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, who put together a well-received inaugural edition of the fair earlier this year. Al-Khudhairi served as founding director of Qatar’s Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, overseeing its 2010 opening. She has since served as chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, co-artistic director of the ninth Gwangju Biennial and part of the curatorial team for the 2025 Hawaii Triennial. We caught up with her to hear about how Doha has changed since she left, whether a curated fair is still supposed to sell anything and what to eat when you get there.

Congratulations on the new gig! You lived and worked in Doha from 2007 to 2012. What does the city’s art ecosystem look like to you now versus then?

When I first came to Doha, there was already significant cultural ambition, but many of the institutions and networks that are so visible today were still taking shape. What feels different to me now is the depth and layering of the ecosystem. Institutions have matured, new initiatives have emerged, and artists and audiences have developed alongside them.

There is also now a generation that has grown up with museums and cultural institutions as part of the landscape of the city, and I think that matters. I’m interested not simply in the scale of the growth, but in what that accumulated experience makes possible: the conversations, expectations, relationships and forms of knowledge that build over time.

For me, returning to Qatar in this new capacity is also an opportunity to listen. I have a history here through my time as founding director of Mathaf, but the city has changed, the cultural landscape has changed, and I’m coming back with a different role within that wider ecology. So I don’t want to assume I already know it. Part of the work is understanding Doha as it is now.

Mathaf’s opening shows, “Told Untold Retold” among them, are now treated as a turning point for contemporary Arab art. How do you see this material consumed around the world since then?

One of the most important shifts is that artists from the region are increasingly being encountered through multiple histories and conversations rather than through a single category. The work was never one coherent aesthetic, identity or narrative, and there is now greater space internationally to understand individual practices through different lenses. Geography can be part of how we understand a practice without becoming the total explanation for it.

When Mathaf opened, “Told Untold Retold,” curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, was a very ambitious exhibition for which major works of contemporary art were commissioned. It opened alongside “Sajil: A Century of Modern Art,” which I co-curated with Dr. Nada Shabout and Deena Chalabi. Sajil brought together an expansive collection of modern art from the Arab world, and it was important to us that the modern and contemporary were presented alongside one another.

Part of the intention was to resist the idea that contemporary practice had somehow appeared from nowhere. There were histories, debates, experiments, ruptures and continuities that preceded it. Making the collection accessible through exhibitions created opportunities for further research, scholarship and exhibitions that could continue to deepen and complicate those histories.

A great deal of work has taken place since then, at Mathaf and elsewhere. There is still much more to do, but I think the conversation has become more expansive and more nuanced.

You’re stepping into shoes last filled by the great Wael Shawky, the fair’s very first artistic director. What do you think he did right? Where do you see room for growth from his iteration?

Wael established an important foundation for Art Basel Qatar as a curated fair, and the artist-centered nature of that approach is something very important to retain. The emphasis on solo presentations, in particular, created the possibility for audiences to spend sustained time with an artist’s practice rather than encountering individual works in isolation.

I see my role as building on that foundation rather than beginning again. Each edition has the opportunity to develop the format and respond to its particular moment. For 2027, I’m interested in deepening the connections between galleries and artists, between different artistic practices, between the fair and the city, and between the specificity of this place and wider international conversations. That is where I see the possibility for the format to continue evolving while holding onto the clarity of its artist-centered approach.

You’ve said a rigorous curatorial vision and a thriving market aren’t in tension, but this fair seems much more focused on artistic presentation than sales. How important are sales to this fair?

Sales matter because they are part of how galleries sustain their programs and support artists over time. I don’t think we need to pretend that the market is somehow separate from an art fair, nor do I think curatorial rigor and the market have to be treated as opposing forces.

A strong presentation can give a collector a deeper understanding of an artist’s practice. It can create a relationship that extends beyond the purchase of a single work and develops over time between the collector, the gallery and the artist. That kind of sustained engagement can be meaningful artistically and commercially.

So the ambition is not to make the market invisible. It is to make sure that the encounter begins with the art, that there is enough depth and context for people to understand what an artist is doing and why the work matters. I think that can ultimately support the kinds of relationships on which a healthy art ecosystem depends.

Over 600 galleries applied for the first edition, and 87 were selected, with 16 showing with Art Basel for the first time. What are your thoughts around size for this fair? Are you going to try to encourage more first-timers?

I wouldn’t define the right size through a number alone. For me, the starting point is the strength of the proposals and what each gallery and artist can contribute to the edition. At the same time, one of the qualities of this format is its scale. We want visitors to be able to spend real time with presentations rather than feeling that they have to rush through them, so there is no ambition simply to become larger for the sake of growth.

Discovery is very important, and that can absolutely include galleries entering the Art Basel ecosystem for the first time. But I don’t think of being new as a category in itself. What interests me is the practice being presented, the strength of the proposal, and the kinds of relationships that participation might allow to develop over time. The aim is to create an edition in which every presentation feels intentional and where audiences have the time and space to engage with it.

The theme for your edition is “between / بين,” and you’ve said you didn’t want the Arabic to be read as a translation. What’s the distinction for you? How are you talking about this theme with galleries?

When I was developing the title, I was thinking in both Arabic and English rather than arriving at the idea in one language and then simply translating it into the other. That distinction is important to me because “between / بين” is itself concerned with what happens in relation: between languages, meanings, positions and ways of understanding.

I see “between / بين” as an open framework rather than a theme that artists or galleries have to illustrate. “Between” captures something unfixed. It can be understood quite conceptually, as a space of possibility, but it can also be very literal: being between places, languages, generations, identities, histories, media or materials, traditions or moments of transition.

And I’m interested in the possibility that the space between things does not always have to be resolved. It can be somewhere we inhabit, a space for uncertainty, encounter, exchange, even hope.

So in speaking with galleries, I’m not offering a checklist of what “between” should mean. The point is precisely that different artists and practices can enter that conversation in very different ways.

The Special Projects sector is being expanded for 2027. What kind of work do you want in the public spaces of Msheireb for your iteration?

Public space creates a different relationship with an audience because people may encounter a work without having chosen to enter an art fair, or even expecting to encounter art.

In Msheireb, I’m interested in work that responds to the particular spaces and rhythms of the site, rather than simply taking a fair presentation and placing it outdoors. For me, the interesting question is what becomes possible because a work is encountered in that particular place and in relation to the people moving through it.

What’s your favorite thing to eat in Qatar?

Al-Reef Bakery’s zaatar manakeesh.

More interviews

• Ho Tzu Nyen Wants the Gwangju Biennale to Honor the Past, Not Relive It

• Grażyna Kulczyk Has Spent 50 Years Collecting Artists Who Were Difficult to Place

• Anne and Arthur Goldstein Reflect On the Responsibility of the Collector

• Julian Schnabel On Showcasing the Essentials at Château La Coste

• How an Idea Becomes an Institution or Exhibition That Outlives Its Moment

• Marilyn Minter Reflects On Four Decades of Beauty, Grit and Banishing Shame

(Editor’s note: This article was originally published in February of 2026.) In January, New York University announced that Alison Weaver would serve as the next director of its Grey Art Museum. Founded in 1975, the space has offered generations of students the opportunity to realize their more experimental curatorial ideas while staging impressive exhibitions that often use the university’s collection of more than 6,000 artworks. In 2023, the institution moved to a new location with the promise of being “much more visible,” and Observer caught up with Weaver to hear more about the museum’s identity and her plans for its next phase.

This job has you returning to the city after a decade in Houston. What would you say has changed the most since you’ve been gone, in the art world and the city at large?

The question I usually ask when returning to New York is, what hasn’t changed? After CBGB became a luxury clothing store and Odessa became a vegan burger spot, it’s sometimes more remarkable when an institution survives. I think it’s impressive that the Grey is 50 years old and still an integral part of such a vibrant, multifaceted art scene.

How does the Grey Art Museum’s location in the city factor into its identity? It’s funny to be between the Swiss Institute and the Museum of Ice Cream.

I actually love that juxtaposition! The Grey’s location between a nonprofit exhibition space and a for-profit experiential attraction reflects how culture operates today, with scholarship and spectacle in conversation with each other. That said, the neighborhood has long been a site of experimentation, from the Five Spot jazz club and Judson Church to the broader avant-garde art scene. That legacy of risk taking and cross-disciplinary exchange feels aligned with the Grey’s identity and future.

You’re joining the museum after a period of much change. For one thing, it didn’t use to be called a museum and has moved to its new home in Cooper Square. What curatorial and institutional priorities will define this next phase?

The Grey has built a strong reputation for thoughtful, research-driven exhibitions. Continuing that intellectual rigor and curatorial focus will be essential. At the same time, I’m interested in expanding how each project can reach audiences through dynamic public programs and meaningful student engagement. I’m also interested in seeking connections between historic material and contemporary issues, creating more dialogue between exhibitions and living artists. The next phase should feel both rigorous and vibrant.

You’re coming to the Grey Art Museum from the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University. What responsibilities come with a university museum that may not exist for an institution unassociated with a school?

A university affiliation brings extraordinary potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration. At the Moody that meant partnering with colleagues from fields including architecture, engineering, environmental studies and the humanities to expand how exhibitions were conceived, discussed and activated. At NYU, the range of potential partnerships is even broader, including performance studies, music and dance, arts and sciences and media and technology. A university museum is uniquely positioned to serve as the connective tissue between disciplines, engaging artists, students and audiences in unexpected ways.

How have university students changed in the last 10 years?

University students remain smart, curious and generally optimistic, although the macro conditions around them continue to evolve, from the impact of artificial intelligence and the pervasiveness of social media to socioeconomic, political and environmental factors. Facing these challenges will require new levels of creative problem solving, making the arts on campus more vital than ever.

And how can the museum activate its collection in ways that feel urgent and contemporary?

The Grey’s collection is a remarkable resource with a fascinating backstory. It started with the gift of more than 700 works gathered by Minnesota native Abby Weed Grey (1902-1983). She traveled to Iran, India, Japan, Pakistan, Turkey and other destinations in Asia and the Middle East to source objects directly from artists she saw as ‘breaking with the past to cope with the present.’ At the core of her vision was the cross-cultural power of the arts to foster global understanding. Her focus feels increasingly relevant in today’s fractured world. I look forward to working together with artists and experts from diverse fields to highlight these works in relation to critical issues of our time.

Official language calls the Grey a “museum/laboratory.” What does that description mean to you?

To me, a museum/laboratory implies a space where experimentation is central, where exhibitions are not presented as definitive, but are explored, questioned, tested and debated. It implies a degree of intellectual rigor combined with openness to risk. I hope the Grey will continue to embrace that spirit by supporting artists and scholars who ask challenging questions, while inviting audiences to participate in a shared process of inquiry and investigation.

More Arts Interviews

• How Ricardo Gonzalez Ramos Is Championing Latin American Art Through Legacy

• Jonathan Carver Moore Is Rewriting the Gallery Playbook

• Painter Kathleen Gilje’s Journey from Restoration to Reinvention

• Pier Paolo Calzolari On the Quiet Alchemy of Time

• Dean Majd’s “Hard Feelings” Expands the Emotional Register of Masculinity

It takes a lot for an artwork these days to make international headlines, but Florentina Holzinger managed to do it with the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale this past May. The experimental theater director’s SEAWORLD VENICE (2026) became such a smash hit that it became impossible to see at the opening of the biennale after the first press preview day, as lines stretched far into the Giardini. A profile in the New York Times followed and another dropped this week in the New Yorker. When the biennale closes, the piece will go on a world tour. It’s like my father always used to say: never underestimate the power of a naked woman on a jet ski.

The second most talked about pavilion exhibition was “The Ear is the Eye of the Soul,” a sonic prayer organized around Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), presented by the Holy See and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers, with Soundwalk Collective directing the audio. Unlike countries like Austria, the Vatican has no set space for its pavilion and staged this exhibition in the Giardino Mistico dei Carmelitani Scalzi, a walled friars’ orchard pressed against the tracks of Santa Lucia train station.

Though part of a visual art exhibition, this oasis in the bustle and desolation of labyrinthine Venice offers little to look at but the garden. Instead, upon arrival, visitors receive a pair of headsets and a little map that designates geotagged zones of the garden where one can hear compositions by Terry Riley, Laraaji, Jim Jarmusch, Brian Eno, Dev Hynes, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Suzanne Ciani, Patti Smith, FKA Twigs, Kali Malone and other experimental musicians known for their looping dreamy qualities.

For me, the resulting experience was akin to being a character in a film by Terrence Malick. One watches the wind blow the foliage as a gorgeous soundtrack swells. It’s inevitable that you’re going to think about your life, or at least try to untangle the bombardment of other stimuli to which you’d been subjected in the last few days. Malone is a contemporary organist, and her music is given its own young tree to dance around, a clear demonstration of how these ancient forms can still be molded into new shapes.

There are even stumps where you can sit in the sun, if you’d like to listen to a poem, which may or may not be read in your language. As you approach the chapel, you hear Smith reading a monologue as the Virgin Mary, examining the sexual and romantic emotions that lead to motherhood. Hildegard of Bingen was herself an abbess, poet, healer and composer, who believed in the medicinal qualities of music. Though the experimental tracks loop around, they are not generative and were likely not made with so-called artificial intelligence, as Pope Leo XIV has established himself as a leading voice against the technology. The brochure quotes an interview he gave in 2025: “The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what ‘works,’ but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable.”

More from the Venice Biennale

• Su Xiaobai’s Meditative Material Practice Is the Focus of One of the Biennale’s Most Commanding Shows

• Manuel Mathieu’s Venice Biennale Debut Asks How We Carry the Past

• The Venice Biennale’s Most Powerful Pavilions Tune into Shared Consciousness

• The Philippines Pavilion Turns the Country’s Maritime History into an Archive of Universal Longing

• In the Polish Pavilion, “Liquid Tongues” Rewrites Our Hierarchy of the Senses

• Sara Flores On Bringing Shipibo-Konibo Cosmology to Peru’s Venice Pavilion

• 10 Must-See Off-Site Venice Biennale Exhibitions

Galleries have been having a tough time, in the primary art market and in the press. How my colleagues report on their closures with such glee! In defense of these reporters, many of these galleries wrote their own ends by overextending themselves, opening far-flung branches to stage exhibitions that they knew to be retrograde. But in their purest form galleries are a necessary part of the avant-garde. They’re private businesses that take a risk on artists because they believe their voices will resonate with those rare collectors who are able to see the future.

Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was one such collector, and was briefly also a dealer, this period of her life covered for the first time in large-scale exhibition format through “The Making of a Collector,” which I happened to catch in person at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The show is dedicated to Guggenheim’s British years and to Guggenheim Jeune, the gallery she ran at 30 Cork Street from January 1938 to June 1939. Organized by Gražina Subelytė, curator at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, with guest curator Simon Grant, it assembles roughly 100 works—paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, puppets and archival material—many reunited for the first time since they hung at Cork Street, with work by Jean (Hans) Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Yves Tanguy and others.

The gallery boasted 21 exhibitions in 18 months with no commercial success. It did, however, offer Kandinsky his first U.K. solo show, a fact advertised at the entry with Dominant Curve (Courbe dominante) (1936), a triumph of color and movement with that perfect level of overstimulation that one sometimes achieves when playing a video game. A few people at parties told me this was their favorite work in Venice this year and I doubted them, not being a Kandinsky guy. Exiled by the Nazis, Kandinsky created this work of curious perspective in Paris. Guggenheim’s friend and advisor Marcel Duchamp encouraged her to show him.

Her taste had to be her own, however, because how else to explain the puppets by Marie Vassilieff? These waist-high figures date to 1928 but through little more than fabric and cardboard display an inventiveness in facial construction that recalls the much later innovations of Thomas Schütte. How alien and empathetic they are! My favorite is Saint Clare of Assisi, who has a hilarious bug-eyed expression. The show came about in part through Vassilieff’s long friendship with Jean Cocteau, but these are so strange that only a visionary would show them.

She was also a supporter of Moore, whose Reclining Figure (1938, cast 1946) is a cute preview of the monumental works we’d later come to associate with him. As with all great artists, the whole thing is there in metonymic form in everything he does, and this little guy is even smaller than the puppets. Shiny and precious, he could be mistaken for her jewelry, which is shown in a nearby room. He was in good company: the sculpture show Guggenheim mounted in the spring of 1938 gathered 36 works by eight artists, Brancusi and Calder and Arp among them, and before it opened the whole thing was stuck in customs. Imported sculpture was taxable under the Import Duty Act of 1932 unless certified as art, and the director of the Tate declined to certify it. The row was reported widely and debated in Parliament. Guggenheim and the exhibition had record attendance but nothing sold. Guggenheim bought the Moore herself.

More in Exhibitions

• Doug Aitken’s ‘Lightscape’ Turns the American Dream Into a Requiem

• Kai Yoda’s Animist Paintings and the Beast Within

• The Must-See Shows in the Hamptons This Summer

• “Climate Clock” in Oulu Reckons With a Warming World

• Sprüth Magers Celebrates a Decade in Los Angeles With the Artists Who Helped Define a City

The consensus out of this year’s Venice Biennale was that the must-see pavilion was Austria’s, the artist of which was the subject of a profile in this week’s New Yorker, and that the can’t-miss off-site exhibition was “Helter Skelter” at the Fondazione Prada, which paired the work of Richard Prince with Arthur Jafa. I had the opportunity to interview Jafa about it for another publication and asked if he felt intimidated by the way everyone in Venice had taken to calling his exhibition “the real American pavilion.” He waved away the suggestion. He’d heard the tagline, but saw it more as a marketing stunt by his dealer Gavin Brown, something out of Sweet Smell of Success (1957). “It was like a chant,” Jafa said, “like he was casting a spell.”

Brown’s face, and Jafa’s market, sneaks into his video The White Album (2018), which is part of the Venice show and also currently on view as its own exhibition at the Hammer Museum. Jafa’s videos are a dense meal, and well worth their own exhibitions. In fact, if one could fault the Venice exhibition at all, it’s that one runs the risk of being overwhelmed. Following up on his breakthrough hit Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016), The White Album is described in the press materials as “a social critique of whiteness,” which is putting it mildly. The work’s title reminds us that this is the Beatles record on which “Helter Skelter” appears, the song adopted by Charles Manson to refer to the white supremacist race war he hoped to start through his group’s murders.

The film kicks off with a musician who is at least as good as the Beatles, Oneohtrix Point Never, whose 2017 music video for “The Pure And The Damned” features Robert Pattinson stalking a rural neighborhood with a sword until he squares off against a creature from a 1980s horror movie mid-meal. Jafa’s work has been ahead of its time in so many ways, but especially in the way it anticipated the mediums that would become dominant a decade later: the YouTube video essay and the social media deluge of images, which probably scratches the same itch that people used to scratch by channel surfing.

From there Jafa moves to Dylann Roof exiting Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston after his mass murder there. This isn’t funny at all, one of the few moments that doesn’t balance out the darkness with some kind of humor. Later in the film, a pale bearded man pulls a large assault rifle out of his jeans. It’s so comically large that you can’t believe he fit it in there. Then he fumbles reloading his clips in such a stupid way that you almost forget that each one represents a dozen people he hopes to kill.

There are embarrassing front-facing thoughts about race on camera, but related to this, and a little close to home, are the images of a young woman in Gavin Brown’s booth at an art fair. Unlike the racists, she seems very nice and smart, but she’s still going to have to talk about Jafa’s pieces, perhaps even the video in which she appears. His hyperawareness of the casual systems of oppression makes it difficult for anyone to talk, or write, about his work. As ever, you really have to hand it to Gavin Brown, whose solemn face appears in the video as a complicated tribute.

More in Exhibitions

• Doug Aitken’s ‘Lightscape’ Turns the American Dream Into a Requiem

• Kai Yoda’s Animist Paintings and the Beast Within

• The Must-See Shows in the Hamptons This Summer

• “Climate Clock” in Oulu Reckons With a Warming World

• Sprüth Magers Celebrates a Decade in Los Angeles With the Artists Who Helped Define a City

It’s difficult to remember the era of “Cool Britannia” as we observe the country’s steep decline. A British accent will always go a long way with people attracted to men, but there was a period in the 1990s when it could have been argued that the U.K. occupied the avant-garde of music, fashion, film and visual art. “London Swings Again,” proclaimed the cover of a 1997 issue of Vanity Fair. Last month a cover story in the Atlantic explained “How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi.”

But the big names of turn-of-century Britain stand out in “Vexation of Spirit – The Duerckheim Collection x Serralves,” a major new exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto. The show features 90 works by 34 artists, drawn from the collection Christian Count Duerckheim has assembled over four decades. The industrialist has a clear interest in German painting, mixed with sterling examples of work by artists on White Cube’s roster. I had a chance to see this show in person, and walking through the intriguing architecture of Serralves felt like a trip through the sui generis mind of the count, with sterling offerings from Damien Hirst, Gilbert and George, Antony Gormley, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Theaster Gates.

The star of the show is The End of Fun (2010) by the Chapman brothers, described to me by the count as “a Guernica (1937) for the 21st Century.” Seen from above, this installation of nine vitrines would take the shape of a swastika, but that’s far from its most offensive element. Inside, these giant glass boxes contain hundreds of scenes of Nazi-era carnage, all created with figurines made for the scale of a train set. Still, I doubt even the most obscure hobbyist store would have one that features zombies, or Ronald McDonald being crucified. Like a video game or a horror movie, the gore is so extreme that you have to laugh, and the humor is intentional. On one vista, a group of Adolf Hitlers explore their love of painting. All offer a take on a nude life model, who, like them, is oblivious to the destruction around her.

That installation marks the end of the show, which begins with a work also for strong stomachs, Hirst’s Father (Divided) (2011–12). This Luing bull in sky-blue formaldehyde has an advantage over other Hirst animal works in that he’s been sliced down the middle, on a vertical axis, so you can walk inside. Hirst never met his biological father, but what about the bigger animal? Luing is the first entirely new British cattle breed in over a century, recognized by the British government in 1965. Inbred and purpose-built, its useless guts reflect Hirst’s fatherland.

Midway through the show sits Kiefer’s Dat Rosa Miel Apibus (2010-11), an epic oil-on-canvas piece the size of a room that incorporates terracotta, salt and lead. The work’s title refers to the Rosicrucian motto “the rose gives honey to the bees.” It’s a colorful phrase for a depiction of a giant grey warehouse with sunflowers of real iron. In the absence of hope, the Duerckheim Collection shows how to find beauty in desolation.

More in exhibitions

• Doug Aitken’s ‘Lightscape’ Turns the American Dream Into a Requiem

• Kai Yoda’s Animist Paintings and the Beast Within

• The Must-See Shows in the Hamptons This Summer

• “Climate Clock” in Oulu Reckons With a Warming World

• Sprüth Magers Celebrates a Decade in Los Angeles With the Artists Who Helped Define a City

Part of my city lives online now, and it’s cold comfort that it doesn’t represent the real version in the slightest. One still has to fight the impulse to trip every monologuing TikToker in the East Village. My favorite kind of video produced by these children is the man on the street interview, which asks fellow recent transplants questions like “What are you wearing?” or “How are you so confident?” It’s pretty cute that they think we’d want any advice from either person, when neither can think of anything better to do in New York than make content.

But audiences have always been interested in the interior lives of urbanites, a territory explored by “Brassaï: The Secret Signs of Paris” at Moderna Museet, the first major Swedish presentation of the artist, aka Gyula Halász (1899-1984). This Transylvanian-born émigré took the name of his hometown, Brassó, and made himself the definitive portraitist of Paris after dark. Curator Anna Tellgren, working with the photographer’s nephew Philippe Ribeyrolles and the Estate Brassaï Succession—which lent nearly the entire show—has gathered more than 160 vintage gelatin silver prints, each developed by Brassaï’s own hand, plus his 1956 short film. The selection tracks his three lifelong subjects: the nocturnal city and its inhabitants, the artists he ran with like Pablo Picasso and the anonymous street graffiti he stalked for a quarter century—long before graffiti became something sought as office decor.

Le Roi Soleil (c. 1950) is a great example of the last body of work, gracing the cover of his book Graffiti (1960). It depicts a carving of an anonymous grotesque hacked into a wall at the Porte de Saint-Ouen, the flea-market gate on the working-class northern rim of Paris. The title is ironic, of course, a reference to the man who once said “l’état c’est moi,” but one sees in this image a majesty presented as different but not inferior to Versailles. The photographer would carry pocket cards to sketch each mark and note its address, so he could return for better light or to track how a carving mutated over years.

He liked to get to know his subjects, and you could see through this interest in masks how he became friends with Picasso, this intimacy on display in Picasso in His Studio, Rue des Grands-Augustins (ca. 1939-40). The artist feels comfortable enough to choke a sculpture under the penetrating lamps of a professional photoshoot that allows us to see its diverse texture and—though this was probably not intended—Picasso’s swagged out drip. And to think that he was initially hired to document only the three-dimensional artworks. His notes from their hangs became Conversations with Picasso (1964), which bore the quote from the artist, “Read this book if you want to understand me.”

Among his better known works is Lovers in a Small Paris Café, Place d’Italie (ca. 1932), a nightlife photo that at first glance has similar claims to transparency. The pair sit in a corner banquette, surrounded by mirrors, so the picture promises a look at every aspect of their embrace. But we can’t actually see either of their faces completely, and the emotion on hers is mysterious. This is a portrait of romance in the abstract, with all its excellent darkness and smoke.

More in exhibitions

• Doug Aitken’s ‘Lightscape’ Turns the American Dream Into a Requiem

• Kai Yoda’s Animist Paintings and the Beast Within

• The Must-See Shows in the Hamptons This Summer

• “Climate Clock” in Oulu Reckons With a Warming World

• Sprüth Magers Celebrates a Decade in Los Angeles With the Artists Who Helped Define a City

“Tony Bechara: An Artist of Many Worlds” opened a few weeks ago at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. The exhibition marks the first retrospective to span the full arc of the Puerto Rican painter’s 60-year career, from his 1970 Blinds series through works made in the final year of his life. Bechara passed away this past April on his 83rd birthday, and was best known for his shimmering grids of hand-painted quarter-inch squares and for his patronage of El Museo del Barrio, where he served as board chair for 18 years. The show, on view through November 1, was co-organized by Parrish executive director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut and associate curator Kaitlin Halloran, and arrives as part of the museum’s programming around the country’s semiquincentennial. We caught up with Ramírez-Montagut to hear about her friendship with the artist, and the dinner parties that made him a fixture of the East End.

Bechara gave the Parrish 19 Reds (2015) not long before his death last April. How did that gift come about?

Tony had already participated in the Parrish’s 2023 exhibition celebrating our 125th anniversary, for which we invited artists with deep ties to the East End, artists like Tony, who spent many of his summers in the Hamptons, to select works from the museum’s collection and place them in dialogue with their own.

Tony thoroughly enjoyed researching our collection and spending time in the vault. During our conversations, I casually remarked that it was a shame he was not represented in the Parrish’s permanent collection and suggested that he consider gifting us a painting so that his work would be represented in perpetuity alongside the artists who have shaped this region. Being that those artists include William Merritt Chase, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Malcolm Morley and many artists that he admired, he was tempted!

Tony loved the Parrish and was genuinely excited about the direction of the museum during my tenure, so he had many reasons to make such a gift. He invited me to his studio to choose a painting, and I selected a large, vibrant, luminous and scintillating work that immediately captivated me. In fact, I hung it in my office for some time before “lending” it to the exhibition.

You’ve noted that it’s often “not helpful when a director is curating,” yet you co-organized this survey with Kaitlin Halloran. What made you want to take it on directly?

When museum directors curate exhibitions, it can, on occasion, overshadow the outstanding work of the museum curators. I am certainly guilty of that myself.

In this case, however, Tony was a dear friend, a role model and a mentor. His passing came as a profound shock. Much of my success at the Parrish is due to his unwavering encouragement, thoughtful advice and willingness to lend a friendly ear. For that reason, I felt I had to play a role in organizing his exhibition.

I invited my colleague, Associate Curator Kaitlin Halloran, to serve as co-curator. Kaitlin is a rising star, and she brought tremendous scholarly rigor, meticulous research and curatorial expertise to the project. I brought my heart; she brought the scholarship. Together, it was the perfect combination.

This is billed as the first comprehensive survey of Bechara’s 60-year career, though his work sits in the Met and the Brooklyn Museum and he chaired El Museo del Barrio for 18 years. Why did it fall to the Parrish to stage his first major survey?

There have been other surveys of Tony’s work, but this is the first retrospective to span the full arc of his artistic career. It includes some of his earliest paintings, such as the Blinds series from 1970, created shortly after his studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and extends through works made during the final year of his life in 2025.

The exhibition traces Tony’s evolution as an artist, following his journey from figuration to abstraction and revealing the moment he discovered the distinctive visual language and artistic vocabulary that would define his remarkable career.

Your training is in architecture, and Bechara built his paintings on an orthogonal grid drawn from Ravenna’s mosaics and the tilework of the Alhambra. How did that background shape your reading of his method?

It is fascinating that once Tony established his method, using the orthogonal grid of ¼-inch by ¼-inch squares as the guiding principle for all his compositions in the early and mid-1970s, he spent the rest of his career exploring the endless possibilities contained within that seemingly rigid structure.

He experimented with an extraordinary range of permutations and variations: from compositions that appeared to feature completely random distributions of color across the canvas, to works incorporating recognizable patterns, to patterns so dispersed that they again seemed almost unpredictable. He also created pixelated, psychedelic swirls and mesmerizing monochromes composed of countless hues and tonal variations, giving the surfaces a shimmering, almost vibrating quality.

The ability to generate an infinite number of compositions from a limited set of parameters is something Tony’s work shares with architecture, as you mention. It is often through forced “restrained sensibility,” Tony called it, that constraints and a defined set of rules push artists and architects to be their most inventive, creative and resourceful.

The press release says Bechara’s abstraction elicits “a dialogue with the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of ‘the pursuit of happiness,'” noting that it is “a language of both self-determination and inclusion.” How does non-representational work engage with these prosaic ideas?

Through his use of the grid, Tony discovered a strategy in which a seemingly strict structure, one that provides order to chaos, could simultaneously allow for difference, variation and randomness to flourish. I find Tony’s compositional approach to be a powerful metaphor for this anniversary. His grid creates a sense of order, or “union,” while also serving as the foundation upon which distinct and disparate colors (or individuals) can emerge, interact and shine. Each individual element maintains its own identity while contributing to a cohesive, harmonious and ultimately inspiring whole.

In his paintings and colorful grids, Tony achieved a deeply personal form of self-expression while also embracing the vast cultural influences gathered throughout his world travels. His work embodies a strategy for the coexistence of past and present and presents compositions in which many different elements can come together, retain their individuality and still function as a unified and harmonious entity. To me, that is ultimately one of the great achievements and aspirations of the United States: creating a framework where many voices, cultures and perspectives can coexist while contributing to a larger, shared whole.

The Parrish focuses on artists of the East End, and the wall text notes Bechara’s long stays in the Hamptons. What was his connection to this region? What did the Hamptons give him?

The summers in the East End are renowned for bringing together some of the most influential thought leaders in the arts, culture and financial worlds. This unique convergence of creative and intellectual energy has made the community an extraordinarily desirable place to be part of. Tony was not only a participant in these circles; he was at the center of many of these gatherings.

The summers in the East End provided Tony with the perfect environment to host his weekly dinners, reminiscent of the salon gatherings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where artists, writers, thinkers and cultural figures came together to exchange ideas. Historically, many artistic movements and intellectual currents were nurtured through these conversations, and Tony understood the power of bringing people together around a table. His dinners became contemporary salons, gatherings where friendships were formed, ideas were shared and a creative community was continuously renewed.

Whatever the Hamptons gave Tony, he returned tenfold through his generosity, his friendships, his hospitality and his unwavering commitment to the arts and to bringing people together. Tony was not simply part of the Hamptons; he was one of the individuals who helped make the Hamptons the vibrant cultural community it is today.

Bechara mapped his “pixels” by hand from the early 1970s, long before the digital connotation existed. How do you present that analog, hand-labored practice as something inventive to be admired, when your current audience now reads every grid as a screen?

It is interesting because visitors are not experiencing these works as simple pixels or digital grids. Tony’s paintings are deceptively complex: they appear to be one thing when viewed from a distance (or on a digital screen) and reveal themselves as something entirely different when encountered up close and in person. In my opinion, there is also a sense of humor embedded in their elements of surprise and unpredictability that is often absent from our digital culture.

When approached closely, the paintings transform into tactile, sensory and sensual experiences. The obsessive mark-making, through which one can feel the texture and presence of every single tiny square, reflects an extraordinary dedication of time, discipline and intimate labor. Combined with the optical illusions these countless gestures create, this meticulous process results in a deeply moving experience for the viewer.

Ultimately, digital pixels and screens cannot create the “fields of moods or temperatures” that Tony was exploring. Beyond the visual experience of each individual work, visitors are able to grasp the artist’s larger vision and personal journey, which is what makes this exhibition so powerful. This is what we have witnessed in our visitors’ responses: a genuine emotional connection not only to the work itself, but also to the creative process and to the life journey of the artist.

By presenting the complete arc of Tony’s artistic journey, the works, the process and the life behind them, we are able to reframe the exhibition experience for today’s digital-native audiences. We remind visitors that art is not simply an image to be viewed, but an encounter: a relationship with materiality, human creativity and the unique story embedded within every work.

There is still nothing in the world that compares to the experience of standing before a great painting—the possibility of transcendence that can emerge through these pictorial portals, such as the ones Tony created throughout his extraordinary career.

More interviews

• Curator Samantha Katz’s Festival Blueprint for the Post-Spectatorship Era

• Marilyn Minter Reflects On Four Decades of Beauty, Grit and Banishing Shame

• The Future Perfect’s Laura Young Makes the Case for Design as the Next Collecting Frontier

• With the Taipei Biennial Ahead, Cecilia Alemani Reflects On What Makes an Exhibition Feel Alive

Late last month David Kordansky Gallery opened “An American Beauty: Grateful Dead 1965-1995,” on view at its New York space at 520 W. 20th Street through August 7. Curated by the father-and-daughter team of Jay and Ricki Blakesberg, it gathers 20 large-scale prints and more than a dozen smaller ones by 11 photographers who shot the band from the Haight-Ashbury days through the Jerry Garcia years. The New York iteration opens five months after the death of Bob Weir, which sets a different and elegiac tone for the work. We caught up with the Blakesbergs to hear about the manager who became one of the band’s earliest photographers, the slide of Neal Cassady that started the archive and the jail-cell portrait Weir had never seen.

“Between the Dark and Light” opened at the Haight Street Art Center in July 2023, timed to Dead & Company’s three-night farewell at Oracle Park. David Kordansky came through the exhibition without introducing himself, then approached you that night at the concert. How did a five-day fan show become a David Kordansky book and exhibition?

Jay: Dave saw the exhibition at the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco and it really moved him. He sought me out after that and reached out, but I had no idea who he was or what his gallery was. I just said sure, let’s talk, not expecting to ever hear from him again.

After our first conversation and a little research, I realized who Dave was and how important David Kordansky Gallery is. I could also see how much he loved the Grateful Dead. Once we built a rapport, we started discussing the idea of a catalogue/book based on the original exhibition.

The next iteration of the exhibition was in Las Vegas during the Sphere run with Dead & Company. When we did that show, Dave saw even more photos than what was in the SF exhibit and kept asking, “Are these gonna be in the book?” I said absolutely, and it kept growing.

After those two exhibitions, we had a meeting in L.A. where Dave brought up the idea of doing a show at his Los Angeles gallery, which we ended up doing in June 2025. We are so thankful to Dave for seeing the uniqueness and beauty in these photographs and giving us a platform to put them out for so many more people to enjoy.

The 2024 version sat inside the “Dead Forever Experience” at Sphere in Las Vegas. That version was a two-story fan space with merch, Mickey Hart’s artworks and David Lemieux’s tape collection. It saw more than 65,000 visitors. In New York, there are 20 large-scale prints and two-dozen-plus smaller ones, in editions of three. How do you decide what goes into each iteration of this show? Is it hard to decide what’s cut?

Jay: Ricki took the lead in curating both the L.A. and NYC shows and worked very closely with Dave, where they share a very similar aesthetic. Dave’s aesthetic for his exhibitions is often “less is more,” and when Ricki and I started to curate the exhibit, we knew we had to do a really tight edit. We looked for imagery that was really strong, but also helped tell the story of this band and their career arc from 1966 until 1995, when Jerry Garcia passed away.

Nearly every 1967 image in the show is Ron Rakow’s, the band’s one-time manager: the 710 Ashbury portraits of Pigpen and Weir, Potrero Hill, Golden Gate Park. The book widens his run to Owsley Stanley, Neal Cassady and the first-album sessions. How did the manager become the band’s primary early photographer?

Jay: Ron Rakow was an amateur photographer who took it very seriously. He had a camera and knew how to use it. Rakow always had his camera on him and was capturing intimate moments of the band on and off the stage. Because of his access, Rakow was constantly photographing the band, and publications would often use his work. Since Rakow would send his slides and negatives in to be used, a common outcome was not getting them back. Because of this, a large number of his photos were never returned to him, so there are still a huge number of images that were lost to time.

One thing to note: in these early days, bands often didn’t have their own photographer, but rather relied on the people surrounding them who captured the in-between moments. Rakow did this so beautifully. His images help tell the early story of this band, from when they were truly just kids. The other photographer who was around in the early days with a camera was Rosie McGee. She was Phil Lesh’s girlfriend, and also worked for the band at various times in the early 1970s. She is part of the current exhibition as well as the one in Los Angeles.

You’ve said you found treasure troves of never-before-seen photographs in bankers boxes and shoeboxes hidden for decades, with close to 200 unpublished shots in the book version of this exhibition. Do you have a favorite photo that you’ve surfaced, and how much is still out there?

Jay: Ricki and I feel so lucky to work so closely with so many special and iconic archives. Ron Rakow’s archive is one of the first large archives I “discovered.” My pal and sometimes co-book publisher Josh Baron was interviewing Ron for a potential book project and Rakow mentioned his photographs. Josh connected me to Rakow and it turns out there was an amazing collection of negatives and slides sitting in a storage room in SoCal. After a lot of back and forth, I was finally able to see the archive in person and take it home with me to San Francisco.

After five hours of driving, I got home late in the evening and immediately launched into looking at the slides. I took out a three-ring binder labeled “710 Ashbury 1967.” One of the first slides I saw was of the legendary Neal Cassady, in color, in focus, sitting in the living room of 710 Ashbury. I started to cry! I couldn’t believe I was being transported to 710 Ashbury through this never-before-seen photo. I often think of that photo as the start of this Retro Photo Archive journey.

Most images carry a credit line for Retro Photo Archive, the operation you and Ricki oversee. What is it? How do you feel about stewarding these photographs?

Jay: Retro Photo Archive was founded by my daughter Ricki and me in 2021. Our ethos from the start was to help underrepresented photographers get their work in front of more eyes and be paid what they deserve. We want this work to be preserved, and ALSO—this is important—stay in the name of the photographer for many, many decades! It means so much to us to be able to preserve, properly digitize and bring these important pieces of history into the world. We feel incredibly lucky that David Kordansky has given these photographers a voice in such an established gallery. Opportunities like this are rare, and we’re grateful for it.

Ricki and I share very similar taste in photography. We love the look and feel of film, so Retro Photo Archive works exclusively with photographs shot on film. We find archives that are long forgotten or dormant and bring them back to life.

Ricki, you co-curated this with your father. What do you bring to editing this material that he doesn’t, and where did the two of you disagree about which pictures made the cut?

Ricki: I feel incredibly lucky to be working alongside my dad and collaborating on so many projects. We have such a great working relationship because we don’t always agree with each other, and I think that’s what makes for a strong collection of photographs, both in this show and in our overall archive.

I see things differently than my dad might as a photographer, especially when it comes to his own work. He might overlook a photograph I find incredibly unique and strong. One of my favorite shots of his, also featured in the show, is a moment of a car passing the Warfield in San Francisco in 1980. The car passes a marquee ahead of a Dead run reading “They aren’t the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do it.” My dad and I always talk about how archival photography can transport someone to a certain time period, and what makes that photo clear is that it is not from the modern day. This photograph captures the nostalgia of that era through the scene around it (the cars, the clothes, etc.) while the emotions stay true.

A lot of times I have to convince my dad to put an image he created out there, because he shot the image and has his own perception of how it fits into his archive, which might have been different 40 years ago when he made the image vs. today. I believe I have made him look differently at his own work and appreciate the beauty in images that he maybe once thought were not his strongest. Over the years of working together, we’ve learned so much from each other, and he’s come to see how his outlook might differ from someone with a newer eye, from this generation. That’s why we work so well together.

Stuart Krimko’s essay in the book version, “Spirit Photography,” reads this work as images shot through with darkness and loss, and names Keith Godchaux and Brent Mydland as its two lost figures. The show opened in June, five months after Weir’s death. Is this exhibition partly an act of mourning?

Jay: We were already talking about this New York show before we lost Bobby. After he was gone, our main goal became honoring his legacy, honoring the legacy of this band, and having this exhibition be part of the entire, ongoing cultural zeitgeist of the Grateful Dead moving forward. We always wanted to honor the importance of this band, and since Bobby’s passing, the show holds even more weight in this ongoing adventure called Grateful Dead!

These are decades-old photographs, printed now as archival giclée prints in editions of three, dated like “1967 / 2026.” It’s fascinating that we’re now in an art market where documentary images made for no market become collectible objects. How do you set an edition on a picture never made to be precious?

Ricki: While these photographs weren’t necessarily captured to be hung in a gallery, the value of the subjects and the history they hold now carries a different meaning, given how much the world has changed. I also think we’re living in an era of nostalgia more than ever, and these archives bring people back to a time and place in their life, which has its own level of value. Additionally, because of constant digital intake, I think we’re losing the notion of living in the present that so many of these photographs were able to catch, or the intimate access to musicians that photographers no longer have in the same way. That scarcity makes the photographs more desirable and special, especially within something like the Grateful Dead world, where many of these images have never been seen before.

Elizabeth Sunflower’s photograph puts a barely-adult Bob Weir in a San Francisco jail cell, October 2, 1967. Krimko describes it as “goofy, sheepish, barely post-adolescent Bobby Weir getting busted.” What’s the story behind that image, and why give it a wall?

Jay: When the Grateful Dead got busted at their house at 710 Ashbury on October 2, 1967, it made headlines in San Francisco. It was on TV. It was written about in Rolling Stone. Over the decades, a handful of photographs have shown up again and again documenting that moment.

After we acquired Elizabeth Sunflower’s archive, I was going through everything and came across two rolls of unlabeled film. When I saw them, I knew I’d found something really unique. I got to give Bobby Weir and his family a tour of the exhibition in Las Vegas in 2024, and when Bobby saw that photograph, he pointed at it and said, “Wow, there’s a photograph of me I’ve never seen before.” So even Bobby was paying attention to all the photos that have been seen over and over again, and I think he was pretty impressed by it, as was I. I have a great photo of Bobby standing next to that print from that Vegas exhibition tour.

One of the large prints is “Deadhead at the Oakland Auditorium,” a single fan, not the band. The press materials frame these images as a communion that happened before cellphones. What do the crowd and fan pictures carry that the band photos can’t?

Jay: Deadheads are certainly not like any other rock band’s fans. Their story is just as intriguing, interesting and adventurous as the band’s story. Having a handful of images of Deadheads in this exhibit shows how important that aspect of the Grateful Dead experience is, and was. The Deadheads helped make the Grateful Dead who they are. And I am one of them!

More interviews

• Curator Samantha Katz’s Festival Blueprint for the Post-Spectatorship Era

• Marilyn Minter Reflects On Four Decades of Beauty, Grit and Banishing Shame

• The Future Perfect’s Laura Young Makes the Case for Design as the Next Collecting Frontier

• With the Taipei Biennial Ahead, Cecilia Alemani Reflects On What Makes an Exhibition Feel Alive

Though Björk’s music has always been beyond reproach, her relationship with the art world has been more complicated. Yes, we all loved that she popped up at the opening of the Venice Biennale this year for a DJ set during which she was dressed like a Labubu, but her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015 was probably the institution’s worst reviewed show of all time. Jason Farago called it a “fiasco,” Jerry Saltz called it “a discombobulated mess,” and Roberta Smith called it “ludicrously infantilizing and tedious.” And all that hate was in turn collected by the ordinarily groovy New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, who said the museum came “off ridiculous in the way of a wannabe groupie.”

But Venice proved that we will never tire of seeing Björk crop up in an art context. “Echolalia” and “Metamorphlings” are two concurrent exhibitions that opened earlier this summer at the National Gallery of Iceland for the Reykjavík Arts Festival, and take over all four of the museum’s galleries with the collaborative universe of Björk and James Merry, her longtime co-creative director. Merry’s show marks the first museum retrospective of his career, with over 80 masks and ritual objects spanning embroidery, metalwork, jewelry and 3D printing, made for Björk but also for Tilda Swinton and Iris van Herpen. Björk’s half comprises three immersive installations based around music: a preview of her forthcoming album and two elegies from the era of the album Fossora (2022), Ancestress and Sorrowful Soil. These honor her late mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, and are in Reykjavík restaged at theatrical scale. An attached one-day rave, also called Echolalia, will coincide with the August 12 solar eclipse in Hafnarfjörður and celebrate the 40th anniversary of the label Björk co-founded, Smekkleysa (“Bad Taste”).

In the catalogue, Merry says he finds it amusing that he’s sometimes identified as “Björk’s mask-maker,” because “it was always just like this little side quest that I would do at night.” Moth (2015) emerged from an all-nighter while the two were living together preparing for that ill-fated MoMA show and the first live performance of Vulnicura (2015), her album documenting her breakup from Matthew Barney. Björk had left moth specimens in the kitchen and Merry used these to render a dramatic curved form. Like much of Barney’s work, it demonstrates the influence of sci-fi and S&M, but there’s no mistaking the piece as emerging from her universe. Look close and you see the symmetry of the pearl emergences, the order in the chaos.

Björk always lets you find her bass notes. A divorce is good, but what about the bigger ending? Her resin Seðja Spoon (2021) emerged from a period when her mother, grandmother and grandfather passed away. Björk sat at her grandfather’s deathbed and on his last day was handed “this ugly plastic spoon-thing” to give him glycerin to ease his breathing. She asked Merry to design a more beautiful death spoon. He took inspiration from the Icelandic tungljurt plant (aka “moonwort”), as well as the mouths of baby birds. It appears in the film for Ancestress, a strange little shiny purple orchid boasting a little bowl that can carry sap. In the museum, Ancestress is staged as a ritualistic procession in a remote Icelandic valley. Björk’s son Sindri Eldon sings in the chorus and one can see how the spoon represents all these themes in a single object. Life is not zero sum but passed from one entity to another.

The collaborations between Merry and Björk can be seen in this light as well: the energy of one person being translated into new forms. The song Sorrowful Soil becomes in these exhibitions a nine-part polyphonic choral requiem presented as a spatial sound installation with 30 speakers, each transmitting a single voice from the Hamrahlíð Choir under Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir—the conductor who directed Björk in the same choir when she was but a 16-year-old member of the Icelandic post-punk band Tappi Tíkarrass (“Cork The Bitch’s Arse”). Björk is not someone who lacks creativity but thrives on direction and collaboration. “She gets four-hundred eggs,” she sings in Sorrowful Soil, “But only two or three nests.” This exhibition surveys a few of those nests.

More exhibition reviews

• “Climate Clock” in Oulu Reckons With a Warming World
• Sprüth Magers Celebrates a Decade in Los Angeles With the Artists Who Helped Define a City
• The Future-Facing Museum Exhibitions Not to Miss in Basel
• One Fine Show: “Zurbarán” at the National Gallery in London
• At Marianne Boesky, Sanford Biggers Rewrites the Rules of Material Storytelling

When Andy Warhol first branched into silkscreen painting, the technology was mostly in use for signage. He’d already hand-painted Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and had been thinking about the signs outside supermarkets that might advertise these were on sale. His first silkscreens, however, were of currency. In his epic biography Warhol, Blake Gopnik points out that this might have been inspired by an old professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology who “talked about the American dollar bill, with its Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, as a work of art we all carry in our pockets.”

“Deep Cuts: Block Printing Across Cultures,” a new exhibition at LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion, attempts to make a similar argument about one of the oldest and most democratic ways of making a picture. Curator Erin Maynes has pulled more than 200 objects, most from the museum’s own collection, and arranged them not by the usual geography or century but by four things a block can do: transmit, pattern, process and express. These four goals let the medium range wide, from a Japanese prayer scroll printed around 764 to wall-sized contemporary woodcuts. Throw in some Albrecht Dürer, Indian chintz and a German Expressionist Brücke Manifesto (1906) so rare that only five survive, and you’ll see that this exhibition demonstrates the breadth that emerges from a medium that’s so cheap to produce.

The resulting work tends to please in an instinctual way. Take Carl Otto Czeschka’s Textile Fragment, “Waldidyll” (Forest Idyll) (1910-11), a block-printed piece of linen that shows two crouching deer in an overgrown forest scene. The Jugendstil style treats the forest as pure ornament, cutting through a savagery of black. One feels the medium in the mirrored nature of the design, and the fact that the curling leaves take up every inch of the design—blank space is a waste of the block! A 1916 photograph shows Gustav Klimt wearing a robe made of this fabric at an artists’ festival and one does see how he’d vibe with this Dan Flashes-level of intricacy.

That work was about “pattern,” and in “process” we have The Press (1934) by Paul Landacre. Process indeed runs through and through in this work, for the press depicted was found rusted in the ghost town of Bodie in 1929 and restored by Landacre, who insisted the hand press beat power presses because of the pressure he felt in the pull of the lever. It’s hard to argue with the results. His wood engraving features profound textures, almost as if he needs to feel this great machine because it is otherwise so mysterious to him.

Alison Saar’s High Cotton II (2018) demonstrates that after so many years the medium still rewards innovation. The title refers to the best of times, the lucky era, but takes on a different meaning for the woman depicted. How better to demonstrate this disconnection than the wild variations between the fluffy, antique texture of the cotton and the strained tension within her skin?

More exhibition reviews

• “Climate Clock” in Oulu Reckons With a Warming World

• Sprüth Magers Celebrates a Decade in Los Angeles With the Artists Who Helped Define a City

• The Future-Facing Museum Exhibitions Not to Miss in Basel

• One Fine Show: “Zurbarán” at the National Gallery in London

• At Marianne Boesky, Sanford Biggers Rewrites the Rules of Material Storytelling

This month, Anderson Ranch Arts Center will officially name Marilyn Minter its 2026 International Artist Honoree, a distinction it reserves for “globally recognized artists who demonstrate the highest level of artistic achievement and whose careers have fundamentally influenced contemporary art.” Minter checks those boxes. For more than four decades she has made lush, photorealistic paintings of glamour and grit, turning her lens on figures like Monica Lewinsky, Pamela Anderson, and Miley Cyrus, mixing grit with glamour, and doing the hard work of bringing sex into American society. The nonprofit Anderson Ranch will present the honor during its Ranch Week celebration in July, alongside a gala and a screening of Pretty Dirty (2025), the new documentary tracing Minter’s life and career. The week includes a talk between Minter and Lisa Phillips, former director of the New Museum. We caught up with Minter to hear more about her relationship to Aspen.

Let’s start right with Aspen. One of your first dealers was there, Baldwin Gallery, before you even had a New York gallery. How did that happen?

One of my first dealers, before I even had a New York dealer, was Baldwin Gallery. I showed with Baldwin even before SFMOMA, when I didn’t have a New York gallery, and Harley Baldwin was a total believer. He saw my work at a fair early on, then came to my studio and offered me a show. It was heaven, and he sold a lot of it. He had a significant following, and it was basically the only gallery in town. This was the early aughts. Harley was such a great guy. I had my show, and then at Thanksgiving he got sick, he had to leave, and he died about three months later. His husband, Edwards, took over the gallery, and he was the one who had actually turned Harley into an art lover.

Aspen is a luxury town, all fashion flagships and second homes. Why do you think your work landed there so fast, before collectors elsewhere caught up?

In Aspen they have Dior, they have branches of all the big houses. The only way I could figure out why they liked it, even though the images were disturbing, is that they’re well done. I make them beautiful. And I was working with the world of fashion and glamour, which the art world has nothing but contempt for. It’s one of the biggest industries in the world, an engine of the culture. Like everything it has two sides: it creates body dysmorphia, and it gives people enormous pleasure. My whole job was to get rid of shame. All my work is about dragging it into the light. So they responded to that. People always responded to my work, because there’s so much hatred for popular culture, and I never understood why. I’m just taking tropes from the culture and pushing them a little further.

What strikes me is that the glamour and the grit in your work were practically neighbors in Aspen, your gallery and the Dior store on the same block. Did that proximity actually feed the work?

Because of Harley, I could get all those products. Dior, the houses on that block. He would say, give Marilyn these shoes, give Marilyn jewelry. I kept it all, and I still use it all the time. That’s how I supported myself, doing commercial jobs. I would shoot really expensive shoes in water for New York Magazine, and then I would shoot the exact same shoes in mud, and then clean them all off, because I had a day in between. I piggybacked every time I got a commercial job.

Do you ever see your paintings hanging in the ski chalets out there?

No, never. But I have collectors who buy provocative art from everybody. I’m just one of the artists they buy. They buy Andres Serrano, too. I think they collect things that look beautiful. They’re more into beauty than content. That’s why they collect me. The content they’re not so sure about.

Colorado is a purple state, and you’re not exactly quiet about your politics. Do you ever worry that a collector might find out about your activism and decide not to buy?

No. I know collectors who are Republicans. They follow me on Instagram, and they own my work. If they’re real collectors, they know art breaks rules. I have had maybe one person not like something I did and put it up at auction. That was more like revenge.

At the Ranch on July 14 you’re in conversation with Lisa Phillips, who ran the New Museum. There’s a photo of the two of you from decades ago in the documentary Pretty Dirty. How far back do you go?

I met her in Washington, D.C., for a Colab project. Colab was a movement in the 80s that took over abandoned buildings to put on shows. She wasn’t at the Whitney yet, she was just down there looking at the work at an alternative space. We have been friends for 40, 45 years, something like that. She knew me back when I was on a collaboration team with Christof Kohlhofer. She’s the most effective person I know.

For someone whose work is steeped in fashion and glamour, are you a fashion person yourself?

No, it’s too time-consuming. I live across the street from Marni and next door to Dries Van Noten, so I just go in and get something for whatever the occasion is. But no one would ever call me a fashionista. I once got invited to a party and didn’t realize it was a pre-Met Ball party. I was dressed all wrong. I didn’t know the Met Ball was that Monday, and the party was that Saturday.

More Arts Interviews

• Phillips’s CEO Martin Wilson On What the House’s $507 Million Spring Reveals About the Market

• With the Taipei Biennial Ahead, Cecilia Alemani Reflects On What Makes an Exhibition Feel Alive

• Philippe Vergne Arrives at the Bass in Miami Ready to Curate Again

• Stefanie Hessler’s Vision for Swiss Institute’s New Permanent Bowery Home

• Firelei Báez Creates Portals to an Imaginative Future Beyond Collapse

The epic feeling that runs through the oeuvre of Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962) invites one to make superlative statements about his reputation. It’s clear that he’s among the most significant artists of his generation, and he may be the most beloved. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t rave about his exhibition “Liminal” at the Punta della Dogana two years ago in Venice. Maybe this was because it could be enjoyed by anyone, in any state of mind. I stumbled into its darkness after a boozy poolside lunch at Hotel Cipriani. My eyes took a while to adjust, but upon entry I was struck by a featureless sci-fi mask in gold that appeared to be hanging on the wall. I shot right to it for examination only to feel a light touch on my chest. In fact there was a person in all black wearing this mask, and I was too close to her. From the mask emerged a garbled admonishment in some non-language that sounded like an aggressive droid in Star Wars.

This was Idiom (2024) and it’s featured in “Pierre Huyghe” at the artist’s recently opened show at Fondation Beyeler. His first solo exhibition in a Swiss museum, it arrives as the successor to “Liminal,” with new additions like an artificial breathing organ called Apnea that sets the rhythm for the whole building, a murmuring robotic worm and an A.I.-generated gate, all threaded among the Venice veterans. Curated by Mouna Mekouar, curator at large at the Beyeler, and Anne Stenne, who curated the Venice show, with one non-Huyghe interloper: Max Ernst’s The Witch (1941), on loan from the Princeton University Art Museum.

Magic does seem to be a necessary element of his surrealist practice. The Idiom masks are golden resin, helmets worn over the face that house sensors, speakers and LED lights, but the experience of them is mysterious and transcendental. They are affected by “subtle signals—some beyond human perception,” according to the Beyeler. The Venice catalogue claimed the masks would over time form “a community,” “an entity without body,” speaking “an unprecedented form of language.” A more didactic artist would say this piece is about how social media is the new Tower of Babel, but to be near them is to consider them as more evolved entities than ourselves.

Evolution is a concern in Human Mask (2014), which I rewatched recently at the New Museum. In this a macaque wears a schoolgirl’s uniform and a Noh-style mask as she explores an abandoned restaurant in some kind of post-apocalypse. When I first encountered this in Venice I found myself wondering how he’d managed to find such realistic monkey arms for his child actor. The uncanny sensation is so strong, the evocation of a Japanese horror film so strong, that my mind could not accept the simpler solution, which was that I was looking at a monkey not a human.

For further experiences with the uncanny there’s Cambrian Explosion 19 (2013), in which a volcanic rock floats in an aquarium. They not only feel both alive and dead, but ancient and futuristic at the same time. In a moment when writers love to praise a cultural object’s relevance for our time, Huyghe makes art that implies our current moment is maybe a little too stupid to be engaged with, unless through several layers of substances, technology and irony. I’ll drink to that.

More exhibition reviews

• “Climate Clock” in Oulu Reckons With a Warming World

• Sprüth Magers Celebrates a Decade in Los Angeles With the Artists Who Helped Define a City

• The Future-Facing Museum Exhibitions Not to Miss in Basel

• One Fine Show: “Zurbarán” at the National Gallery in London

• At Marianne Boesky, Sanford Biggers Rewrites the Rules of Material Storytelling

A few weeks ago, we learned that Cecilia Alemani will serve as the next curator of the Taipei Biennial, one of Asia’s longest-running and most closely watched recurring shows. Alemani, the Italian-born, New York-based director of High Line Art, is best known for “The Milk of Dreams,” her acclaimed 2022 Venice Biennale, which drew more than 800,000 visitors and was the first edition in Venice’s history to feature a majority women artists. More recently, she organized the sprawling SITE Santa Fe International. The 15th Taipei Biennial, organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and opening in 2027, will be her first exhibition in Asia. We caught up with her to hear about her early research into Taiwan, the year in biennials and the giant pigeon New Yorkers fought to keep.

The Venice Biennale you curated was one of the most celebrated ever. May I ask your impression of this year’s?

“In Minor Keys” is a truly exciting exhibition that brought together many voices I wasn’t previously familiar with, and that alone made it a remarkable discovery. I found myself moved to explore the work of artists like Seyni Awa Camara, Annalee Davis, Hala Schoukair, Yo-e Ryou and Ayrson Heraclito, for instance. The overall atmosphere was ebullient and generative; it reminded me of the energy one encountered at biennials in the 1990s, a kind of polyphony of voices that felt genuinely plural rather than programmatic. I admire Koyo’s team for realizing her vision with such care and conviction. Some of my most memorable moments were Mohammed Z. Rahaman’s installation—a hypnotic accumulation of small objects that seemed to dissolve the boundary between personal mythology and collective memory; Alice Maher’s work, which has long drawn on folklore, the body, and the darker registers of the natural world; Alvaro Barrington’s truck, an exuberant stage for encounters, Temitayo Ogunbiyi’s exquisitely delicate drawings; and Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film that moved between documentary intimacy and something approaching myth.

I had the privilege of seeing your SITE Santa Fe last year and was blown away by how local it was, incorporating everything from Native American sculpture to the travel diaries of Willa Cather. How do you dig into a region? Have you begun to research Taipei in a similar manner?

Santa Fe and New Mexico are singular places, both geographically, as in-between and border territories, and socially, as regions that have been historically inhabited and continue to be shaped, by resilient Hispanic, Native and so-called “Anglo” communities. Coming from the outside, I wanted to honor these dimensions through an exhibition that could tell those layered stories via the lived experiences of a cast of individuals—present and past, real and fictional—who would serve as both inspiration and driving force for the journeys of contemporary artists. It was also an opportunity to celebrate the extraordinary literary and poetry scene that thrives in New Mexico by inviting writers to animate this cast of characters that anchored the exhibition. For Taipei, I am at the very beginning of my research—but I always try to ensure that an exhibition has a meaningful connection to the cultures and sites that host it, whether through theme, through the artists themselves or through some specific cultural current that characterizes the society in question. Taiwan is a place with an incredibly rich and complex cultural identity, and I want to do that justice.

What are the challenges and opportunities of curating in Taipei?

I am thrilled to be curating my first exhibition in Asia and in Taiwan specifically. I have visited several past editions of the Taipei Biennial and spent time in the city exploring its extraordinary offerings: its museums, its neighborhoods, its energy. My greatest challenge, but also my greatest opportunity, is to make an exhibition that feels urgently relevant to this moment—one that celebrates the remarkable local art scene while engaging with the cultural, social and political conditions of the present. That balance between rootedness and contemporaneity is where I believe exhibitions become truly alive.

At the High Line, you’ve talked about loving the accidental audience, the commuters and truckers and skeptics who didn’t come for art, and you’ve said the encounter in a museum is more prescriptive. A biennial crowd walks in already primed to look. Do you have a preferred mode of working?

I would push back on that a little. I think many of the people who attend biennials—in Venice, and I’m certain in Taipei as well—are “regular” people: curious individuals, families, schoolchildren and young students encountering contemporary art for the first time. We in the art world tend to experience these major exhibitions during their opening weeks, when the professional circuit descends for a concentrated few days of celebration. But these are exhibitions that remain on view for months and serve the local community in profound and lasting ways. Some of those encounters can be genuinely life-changing, and as a curator, I always hold multiple audiences in mind simultaneously… the art world, yes, but also the person who wandered in off the street not entirely sure what to expect. That person matters enormously to me.

“The Milk of Dreams” was the first Venice Biennale with a majority of women artists, and at the time, you were careful to say it wasn’t a show about women artists. Four years on, it feels like an emphasis on identity has become the default for big international exhibitions. Why did you choose a subtler messaging for your Venice?

Because I wanted to make a show driven by a thematic journey—the body, metamorphosis, transformation, enchantment—that happened to feature a majority of women and gender non-conforming artists. It was not an exhibition about women, nor a historical survey of feminist practice in the vein of “WACK!” or “Radical Women.” What I wanted to demonstrate was that you could make a rigorous, compelling and diverse exhibition—one that might gently shake the foundations of the system—without reducing it to a thesis statement about gender or identity. Some of the artists included would have embraced the feminist label wholeheartedly; others have spent their entire careers resisting being categorized as ‘women artists’ rather than simply as artists. And ultimately, there’s something revealing in the question itself. For decades, the Venice Biennale featured overwhelming majorities of male artists, and no one ever thought to ask ‘Is this a show about male artists?’ The fact that the question only arises when the gender balance shifts tells you everything about the default assumptions still embedded in the field.

One of the three threads of “The Milk of Dreams” was how the body is changing under new technology, the cyborg, the post-human. You were deep in such ideas long before the arrival of artificial intelligence, which constitutes an external brain for most working professionals these days. To what do you attribute this prescience?

I think it was largely born of the pandemic. I curated the entirety of “The Milk of Dreams” under the conditions of the COVID-19 crisis. I couldn’t travel, couldn’t visit artists in their studios, couldn’t do any of the things that ordinarily form the fabric of curatorial practice. Everything was mediated through a screen. And in a strange way, those conversations, conducted over Zoom, Skype, Google Meet and the proliferating new platforms we all suddenly found ourselves on, deeply informed the exhibition. Right before the pandemic, we were living through a moment in which technology seemed to promise the possibility of eternal life or radical self-improvement, while at the same time, the specter of total automation loomed over entire economies and ways of being. During the pandemic, technology kept us connected—families sustained entirely through devices—and yet simultaneously held us apart, separated by an invisible digital membrane. That deeply polarizing atmosphere, that sense of technology as both salvation and estrangement, became one of the animating tensions of the show.

More than 5,000 people turned out in pigeon costumes for a National Pigeon Appreciation Day built around Iván Argote’s giant pigeon on the High Line’s Spur, and 7,000 later signed a petition to keep it from being taken down. To what do you attribute this sculpture’s resonance with New Yorkers?

Iván’s sculpture Dinosaur was immediately adopted by New Yorkers, which was both moving and a little astonishing to witness. People have very strong, and often very polarized, feelings about pigeons: you either adore them or you cannot stand them. But what made this work so powerful was how many people identified with it. The pigeon is in many ways the unofficial symbol of New York, but there also exists a passionate, dedicated community of pigeon lovers for whom this sculpture became something like a civic totem… a monument in the cityscape that finally acknowledged them. People showed up in full pigeon costume, with live birds carried in their bags; an entire subculture surfaced and gathered, drawn to the High Line as an open, welcoming public space without the institutional weight or potential intimidation of a museum. And I think that is precisely what public art should accomplish: create a space where people feel genuinely welcomed, where they can congregate, debate and—crucially—see themselves reflected in the art we commission for these spaces.

What should your fans expect from Taipei?

An open mind, a genuine desire to listen and a real commitment to being transformed by the place. I’m excited to learn, to be surprised, and to make something together.

More Arts Interviews

• In the Icelandic Pavilion, Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir’s Mythmaking Takes Its Most Fluid Form

• Curator Kate Kraczon Arrives at the Montclair Art Museum Ready to Get Radical

• When Great Collections Come to Market, Dane Jensen Makes Sure Nothing Is Left on the Table

• Edmondo and Michele di Robilant Chart a Course for Robilant with Old Masters and New Names