The most audacious act of performance and land-based art kicked off the Great Lakes’ cultural calendar weeks before TIFF or the Toronto Biennial of Art got underway this September, when Donald Trump renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America,” and both Google Maps and Apple Maps followed suit. The President’s diktat, which recharted borders and rechristened waters with less effort or forethought than duct taping a banana to the wall, attempted to upstage the Great Lakes’ season of unveilings and premieres with a feat of neo-nationalist conceptualism that stretches 50 miles wide. If you wish to see what qualifies as Lake Ontario today, you’ll have to look south from Ontario; luckily, there’s so much more to see when you look in the other direction.

Toronto’s summer art season wound down with the closing of “Where Walls Meet Sky,” a group exhibition in the Little Portugal neighborhood, here hidden behind the facade of the former St. Anne’s Anglican church on Gladstone Avenue, which burned down in June 2024. The dome of the church collapsed, destroying century-old murals by The Group of Seven, the Canadian landscape artists who in the 1920s conceived their own signature aesthetic of North American impressionism. The front doors have been cemented over to secure the one remaining wall like a headstone, but tucked around the corner 12 artists transformed the plot into a contemporary memorial, even offering secular communion in the form of a working oven built from salvaged bricks, where fresh bread was baked daily.

The church is just down the block from the Gladstone Hotel, the city’s leading art hotel, where every floor, from lobby to loft suite displays original works by more than 40 regional artists, and features multiple exhibition spaces open daily to the public, not unlike 21c Museum Hotels in the U.S. The current roster of resident artists includes the textile artist Alissa McRonald who has spent the summer crafting a series of abstract puppets that weave kitsch aesthetics with theatrical embellishment, while collage artist Brandy Ryan has been collecting ephemera from hotel guests for a new series of works that explore what guests leave behind after making a home at the Gladstone, if only for a night, and then moving on.

Hotels, ephemera, and the touring life feature heavily in the candid snapshots of the former Hole and Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Melissa Auf der Maur, a Montreal native whose heyday with Courtney Love’s ’90s alt rock band steal the show at the Art Gallery of Ontario through June 2027. “My ’90s Rock Photographs” revisits the musician’s spontaneity as posterity, capturing the highs and lows of her career in real time without the benefit of filters or an editing suite at her fingertips. However, that’s not all the AGO has to offer. Besides one of the largest Group of Seven collections in Canada, the museum currently features contemporary Italian whimsy from filmmaker Diego Macron, and “The Impressionist Revolution: Monet to Matisse” on loan from the Dallas Museum of Art. The water lilies here are scaled down, but there are an abundance of smaller works from the full roster of period artists, and enough Bonnards to remind everyone he really liked painting women in the bathroom.

If that’s not your thing, but you still have a kink you want to pass off as high art, walk your way to the Bata Shoe Museum. Before OnlyFans conceived of a subscription model, the Bata Shoe Museum was charging admission for feet pics, while exploring the long-worn history of human footwear. While it’s all very academic, there’s usually something for fetishists afoot, and the current exhibition “Rough & Ready: A History of the Cowboy Boot” features loaners from the queer country singer Orville Peck, and the granddaughter of legendary rhinestone suitmaker Nudie Cohn. The upcoming show, “Brilliant: The Art of Beaded Footwear Around the World” opens this October with a pair of showstopping Dolce & Gabbana platforms custom made for Madonna.

You can break out your dancing shoes this September at the Power Plant, the free admission waterfront contemporary art space will play host to its Power Ball, reintroducing its arts party fundraiser for the first time since before the Covid pandemic. The theme is apt: “The Seven Year Itch.” New exhibitions kick off one month later, when Los Angeles artist Sharon Lockhart debuts “Fogo” documenting a photo and film journey she made across the eastern island over the past four summers. The show will run alongside “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” a multi-artist film program that follows the passage of raw materials into commerce. The centerpiece of Vancouver-born artist Zadie Xa’s multimedia exhibition, “Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything” celebrates the earth with an act of acquired resources, as 600 brass bells suspended from the Power Plant’s ceiling take the shape of a conch shell and sing.

One week after the Power Ball, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto hosts the opening party for “Things Fall Apart,” the theme of this year’s Toronto Biennial, which is well-timed to focus on “the geographies of the Great Lakes” and “rupture… as a tool of understanding the world.” Nuit Blanche follows on October 3; the all-night contemporary art celebration encompasses the whole of the city with public and performance art from dusk to dawn.

Finally, come December, “Raptors: Fierce and Feathered” will open on December 9, 2026, at the Royal Ontario Museum. The show coincides not just with the 2027 NBA season (for the uninitiated, the Raptors are Toronto’s professional team) but the Christmas season, as dinosaurs have become a hot commodity for the collector class. In the last six years, dinosaur skeletons have set new auction records, with realized prices rising from $30 million to over $50 million, following a July sale at Sotheby’s for a 12.5-foot T-Rex named Gus. Of course, ROM has something for everyone, including the effective altruist class of tech visionaries, who might be more taken with the museum’s current exhibition “Psychedelics: Art. Culture. Science.” which displays both wild mushrooms and the many rock posters they’ve inspired over the second half of the 20th Century. At least until Hole came along.

And should you want to take the long way home to explore what connects rather than divides the U.S. and Canada, cross Ontario’s newly opened Gordie Howe Bridge from Windsor to Detroit—by car, bicycle, or on foot—and you’ll arrive in time for the best of Detroit Design Month, which this year saw the second annual Season Art Fair, a spinoff of Detroit Art Week helmed by Amani Olu, who also owns local art mag storefront Periodicals. Season relocated this year from the newly revitalized Michigan Central in Corktown to The Shepherd in Detroit’s East Village. The Shepherd, which this summer played host to the Mickalene Thomas show “Beneath the Moonlight” is yet another contemporary arts space occupying a former church, this time the century old Romanesque Church of the Annunciation. Its revitalization has been led by Anthony Curtis, a burgeoning real estate developer who along with his wife JJ, are also behind the downtown gallery Library Street Collective and responsible for renaming the surrounding micro-neighborhood “Little Village.”

Unlike some people, the Curtises didn’t achieve their rebrand with only a social media post, but have been actively rescuing the neighborhood block by block for the past several years, restoring dilapidated houses instead of prioritizing new builds, and, on the grounds of The Shepherd, they’ve opened a Tony Hawk-approved skate park, the Charles McGee Memorial Park honoring the late Detroit sculptor, and ALEO, a bed and breakfast and artist residency.

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At the interwar peak of Grant Wood’s career as a painter, the Iowa native stood his models, including himself, as rigid as pitchforks and as tall as corn stalks, having been taken with the posturing and psychological depth imbued in the fastidiousness of Northern Renaissance portraiture—Wood’s American Gothic wouldn’t look so out of place beside a Jan van Eyck. The midwestern modernism of American regionalism, in Wood’s prime, has more in common with depictions of fields and tillermen dating back several centuries prior, than with the darkness lurking among genetically modified crops and used syringes that dot post-Manifest Destiny expanses of Big Ag farmland and the impoverished communities that live amongst it today. And there’s no better contrast between what was and what is, than the inclusion of Pennsyltucky artist Samantha Joy Groff’s Harvest Lady (2026) in “Pasture to Present: Grant Wood’s Corn Room and New Visions of Rural America,” currently on view at Sioux City Art Center, in Sioux City, Iowa. If the look on the face of Grant Wood, in his included 1932 self-portrait, is fraught in its representation of himself as an avatar for rural America and how they’re together perceived by a curious and encroaching modern world, Groff’s portraits draw from a society who contort to hide from passersby even when no one deigns to look up from their phones to acknowledge their surroundings unless they spy fodder for cynical content.

In “Pasture to Present,” curator Christopher Atkins surveys western American art working off much the same map Saul Steinberg illustrated for his most famous New Yorker cover, View of the World from 9th Avenue, from 1976, which depicts all the world west of the Hudson River as a backwoods with its share of lumps. The poster itself wouldn’t be out of place in the show. Nearly all the contemporary works here highlight the fraught state of public and private grass, dirt, snow and sands, though less is made of who occupies them, an ongoing rejection of otherness that even shows as ambitious as this struggle to explore.

There’s Wisconsin artist Tom Uttech’s Mamakadjidgan (2011-12) which depicts layers of postage stamp perfect birds, their generations of seasonal crossings navigating a bucolic landscape—a reminder not all migration patterns through the wild have to be so politically fraught. Minnesota artist Lamar Peterson’s No Time For Weeds (2023) painted in the aftermath of the George Floyd era protests, shows a black man tentatively at ease in his own flourishing garden. It’s also tiered so high, he appears six feet under and pushing up daisies, hidden from the outside noise and in the one place where he can wield a spade without courting danger to himself, and even then the stigma of the tool’s more malicious meaning invades his safe space. When Peterson’s series was first on display at Fredericks & Freiser in 2023, the accompanying text highlighted the politics on display; here it’s erased.

Groff’s works pack in the meaning so it’s unavoidable, even if her subjects appear shrunken. The 32-year-old Yale MFA graduate and art instructor at Kutztown University was born in the Mennonite community of Franconia, only an hour northwest of Philadelphia. She grew up in and out of the faith, but never abandoned the region or its people. Her landscapes are laden with sacred imagery and Christian mysticism. She sometimes casts her outcast figures in the divine light of oncoming headlights—suggesting greater mercy than the disgruntled property owners or drug dealers likely pulling up. One of her grandest pictures, the pieta Fentanyl Jesus (2024) featured three models, including an addict, whose failing bodies, like their once youthful beauty, seem unlikely to last to their Jesus year; if they’re to be saved by more than God, their circumstances require as much urgent attention as a Taylor Farms recall.

“The girl being cradled in the back, I’ve painted her before, and she’s missing half of her teeth and she’s so great to paint because she has meth mouth and she rocks it and it’s hot,” Groff said. “She’s not afraid to be ugly in a painting, and in my work you have to be okay with that.” That model is in the arms of a former addict from the neighborhood, who grew up 10 minutes from Groff, and now works in the harm reduction community.

Groff’s penchant for headlight yellow hues, representing sickness from the inside in Fentanyl Jesus, and from the outside in Late Harvest, further engage with the exhibition’s centerpiece, Wood’s Corn Room murals, hazy in a golden light that evoke the ebb and flow of dust and abundance and how the land endures in between. The murals have their own pride of place separate from contemporary comparisons, immersing viewers in both an environment similar to how they were first displayed in the dining room of the former Martin Hotel in Sioux City, while at the same time evoking the calm of Claude Monet’s Waterlilies or the Rothko chapel.

Wood received the Martin Hotel commission in 1926. Nebraska businessman Eugene Eppley hired the artist to paint a series of murals for hotels across Iowa. By the 1950s, the murals at the Martin had been painted and papered over, rediscovered in the 1970s, gifted to the art center in 2007 following a sale, and restored to their current state following a $75,000 conservation effort last year. The mural was in a fragile state given Wood’s subtractive process in creating the corn stalks by wiping away paint to define its forms.

Groff peels back abundance to let the outside in. Her model in Late Harvest might take shelter in the field, but the abundance rising up around her doesn’t extend as far as it once did. The yellows here skew green in the subject’s pallor; it’s a sickness not limited to herself, but inescapable in the air and soil.

“Even as this person might be sitting in a cornfield, things don’t seem at peace,” Groff said. She was informed by a strange green light entering a Grant Wood work she once saw, that reminded her of a doomsday feeling she felt while driving by a power plant near where this corn was growing. “Even if the nuclear power it produces is quote-unquote safe, there’s impending doom cooked into the environment where I live.”

Groff isn’t entirely alone in harvesting the weighty emotions rural Americans carry. One artist not in the show, and who pioneered Groff’s oeuvre of feminist Pennsyltucky regionalism, is Rebecca Morgan, whose upcoming show, “Painting in the Apocalypse,” opens at the Asya Geisberg gallery in Tribeca on September 9. Morgan’s often self-deprecating portraiture channels on the canvas a philosophy Groff puts forth in her social media, including her Instagram handle, @redneckhotwife.

“I’m a deeply private person, I’m not outwardly expressive emotionally, but when I was accepted to Yale I was being told I have to have a website, I should get on social media, and to be the person, the artist I am, out loud, feels really vulnerable. So I made myself public and used this identity to beat people to the punch in assuming the worst of me. And going to graduate school in 2020, post-Trump and pre-Trump, it was so unpopular to be a working-class white lady from my area—you just got shit for looking the way you look.”

Morgan’s work regularly tackles the anxiety of the rural woman coping with being seen, and what it feels like to receive the attention you demand, in pursuit of a successful modern life and part of popular culture. Her paintings long explored class issues with dark humor and satire, and her latest show tackles influencer tradwives who profit off performative provincialism, and buries the airs of the first family who for all their big city posturing, global influence and an equally extensive real estate empire, can’t help but engage with their surroundings like the Beverly Hillbillies of the oligarchy.

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Most people don’t think of Kansas City, Missouri, as a hotbed of mythologizing. But the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is currently showing “Raven Halfmoon: Ride or Die,” which showcases new commissions from the Caddo Nation sculptor known for forcing Indigenous women into the foreground of American history, their ceramic visages glazed in shades of tar, smoke and blood. There, she elevates cowgirls over cowboys as protective totems lording over the prairie. This past August, living legends Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, the latter a tragic hero who succumbed to a siren’s call, opened the steakhouse 1587 Prime, an altar to their past triumphs and obscene display of surreal gluttony, where their faithful can dine on $345 Tomahawks flambéed tableside in a bouquet of herbs, marrow butter and brandy (for an additional $27) like Dido at Carthage. And it’s here that neo-Rococo portraitist Will Cotton found a muse for his latest series of large-scale paintings, “Between Instinct and Reason”—a celebration of the mermaid.

The artist describes the mermaid as the “strongest female character, unimpacted by moral standards and unthreatened by external forces,” a sharp contrast to the daily struggle of Robin Rubash, a trans model and OnlyFans camgirl, who until recently was making ends meet while working from her childhood bedroom.

In The Siren’s Offer (2024), which sold at Galerie Templon in New York this past summer, Rubash’s upturned head and torso serve as the figurehead of a ship arriving at a placid western shore, her upturned tail—a sail—fanning out in the glacial ice blue, white and pink of the transgender flag. She greets the archetype of macho and gay American myth, a faceless Marlboro Man in denim and leather chaps. She offers him a pink frosted cupcake, a signature Cotton confection. He approaches, accepting, but there’s still a gap to bridge between traditional and gay America, and how the trans community will find its feet in that land is something that plays out in Rubash’s everyday life.

“The cowboy is every kind of American frontier myth: the rugged individual, the hero, the outlaw, the person who believes the land is theirs to conquer; the mermaid, on the other hand, belongs to a different mythology; she comes from a realm of fluid identities, shifting bodies and contradictions—alluring and dangerous,” Cotton tells Observer. “I don’t paint with specific political messaging in mind, but I’m always trying to place figures at the edge of something.”

Rubash lives on the edge in Kansas City. She worked on the street before starting an OnlyFans five years ago under her parents’ roof. “But I had to get out of there; they found out how much money I was making and would take it from me, and taxes took the rest, but what I have is enough to make a life in Kansas City,” she says. “And here I’m respected for what I do.”

Here is where she found a rich and welcoming community in the local scene of fellow art school dropouts like the artist Peregrine Honig, whose work focuses on social anxiety and sexual vulnerability. Rubash served as an early muse to Honig, who became her conduit to Cotton. “I was immediately drawn to Robin’s femininity; it’s so painterly,” Honig says. “We became friends very quickly talking about vulnerability and art history, and the history of great artists painting young women in the sex industry. Robin’s like a nymph, and she has this pubescent beauty, but she’s an adult, a grown person who’s also nubile, and in painting her you’re not doing damage to her, she’s sentient—hyper aware—of how she wants to be perceived.”

Their friendship led to Rubash’s participation in Honig’s Ophrys (2021), a recreation of Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1862) with Rubash in the title role. Honig curated a tableau in which Rubash reclined nude among the orchids in Powell Gardens, as invited artists captured the moment between first light and the botanical gardens’ opening hours that morning. Rubash still needed some convincing to pose in front of Cotton, but Honig knew from her own past experience that some people just need an extra push. “This is all a continuum,” Honig explains.

It was a life-drawing class decades earlier that changed the course of Honig’s life and ultimately brought her to Kansas City. As a wayward teenager in San Francisco, Honig found a mentor in the late sculptor Ruth Asawa (whose retrospective at MoMA runs through February 7). Asawa wrote Honig’s letter of recommendation for the Kansas City Art Institute after being impressed by her early drawings, “but she also kicked my ass,” Honig recalls. “When I was 14 or 15, Ruth would take me off-campus to life drawing classes, from the model, like naked, no parental permission, in a room full of adults. I remember I was drawing, fixated on one part of the hand, and she told me ‘You’re not going to come back here if you’re going to do neurotic little drawings, you need to draw the whole figure.’”

Honig stepped up and soon received a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute, where she was impressed by the pedigree of professors like Jim Leedy and Ken and Russell Ferguson, as well as the school’s intense foundation program. At the same time, Kansas City offered cheap studio space, while greater Jackson County remains one of the wealthiest enclaves in the Midwest and is home to some of the country’s top private collectors.

So Honig stayed put. She briefly ran a gallery here, and eight years ago started a semi-regular drawing workshop, Bubbles & Bodies, at a local champagne bar. “Will asked if I was going to be hosting a session while he was in town,” she says. There wasn’t another workshop scheduled, but she made it happen so Rubash and Cotton could connect—despite the fact that Rubash had never participated in true figure modeling before. “I had the lighting, the set-up, the supplies he needed, and then he met her, and it was that dream thing, where I said to Robin, this is it. I know you’re shy, I know you get nervous, but you’re going to be safe, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I had been trying to get her in front of Will forever, and by the end of the class, he had invited her to New York to draw her.”

Cotton was drawn to Rubash’s “uncommon combination of gentleness and authority, the alluring complexity of her eyes, a face that’s soft but not passive.”

“And this was before he knew about her online persona,” Honig adds.

On social media, and in her sex work practice, Rubash has long gone by the moniker Mermaid Hime Princess. “I have always said, before I die, I want to model as a mermaid, be portrayed as a mermaid, because that goes along with my trans identity,” Rubash explains. “I was attracted to mermaids since I was a little boy, and I’ve noticed throughout the years that mermaids do resonate with a lot of trans people, and I believe there’s this beauty, the long hair—you know, kids who were not allowed to transition still grow out their hair. And they don’t have genitalia, they’re just beautiful creatures, and that’s always spoken to me.”

“I didn’t know about that at first,” Cotton says. “I saw her in class; she had a relaxed confidence in her body, the way she held a pose without stiffening. It wasn’t until later, when we sat down to talk, that she mentioned she’d been obsessed with mermaids since childhood. And I remember laughing, because I’d already begun thinking of her for a mermaid painting.”

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More than two hours passed before I surrendered to the plush black turf underfoot, slumping down against the towering penises rooted in a grove between two performances of Sisyphean end zone celebrations. One stage, entitled “Fucking the Ground/Fertility Rites,” featured five weary, wiry naked men joylessly thrusting into grassy hillocks with the intention of fertilizing the barren soil. A field opposite them, “Scaring the Gods to Stop the Rain,” served as a showcase for a melting pot of Balkan maiden-attired gymnasts of all ages, wearing anguished faces ranging from raging Maori war cry to the teary trepidation of a young Amy Adams. All of them repeated their skirt-hiking rite, jumping and collapsing, contorting and thrusting, while exposing their sex, undress rehearsals for an anti-raindance, a stormy showdown with the heavens above.

That final confrontation is one of two climaxes, one fable, one personal, anchoring Marina Abramovic’s latest work, Balkan Erotic Epic. Performance artist Maria Stamenković Herranz is cast in the role of Abramovic’s late unloving mother, decorated Yugoslavia People’s Army officer Danica Rosic. Here, she navigates her daughter’s tortured psyche, manifested as thirteen stages of Balkan folklore rooted in love, marriage, death, sex and power, dated from medieval times through the Cold War and interpreted in film, animation, music, dancing and milk bathing. The four-hour performance continues long after Danica succumbs to the sexual liberation Abramovic impresses upon her mother’s spirit.

I couldn’t check my phone to be sure of what time I finally settled in among the cross-legged and collapsed—ticket holders were required to lock their phones in a pouch before entering the Warehouse at Aviva Studios, where Balkan Erotic Epic premiered in Manchester this October ahead of Frieze London. The North American premiere will take place at New York’s Park Avenue Armory next December.

Support staff had two jobs. One, spot-checking guests to ensure their phones were locked up and two, making sure no audience members encroached on the steps leading to “The Kafana Complex,” an open-plan “pub, restaurant, music venue and public living room,” where avatars of the late Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito’s grieving widow, all of them resembling a caricature of Abramovic if she were drawn by The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson, sat emotionally unmoved and physically paralyzed, clutching their handbags.

There’s no ambiguity about what will eventually take place here before the night is over; the program promises Rosic will find a release she never found in life. “My mother was extremely difficult,” Abramovic told the assembled audience ahead of the performance. “I was forty years old and I asked her, “why do you never kiss me?” She said, “why should I kiss you? I would spoil you.” She wanted to make a warrior of me. She never felt emotions, love, sexual desire. I need to liberate my mother from all this so I can move on after this piece with a different part of my life.”

The problem here, in this show where women whose natural eroticism was trapped across time in ritual, is Abramovic commits her mother to the same fate. No woman here knows liberation and the sexual liberation Abramovic imposes upon her is nonconsensual, an analog Black Mirror moment that brings to mind a new A.I. app that’s made headlines this week—2Wai—which allows for users to record themselves, submitting their voice and body to create a virtual avatar that can be used in the future, per the company’s own example, for a deceased grandmother to speak to their grandchildren. If we wonder what nefarious end these avatars might meet, we only look to Abramovic exposing her mother to endless looping eroticism she chose not to experience in real life.

“No phone,” ushers would shrug when I inquired about the time, before I caught one sporting a wristwatch. She informed me I still had another hour and a half to go before a sudden rainfall started then stopped, after succumbing to the fearsome power of women’s bodies. However, the audience seemed eager to move on. Hundreds of attendees peeled off before the night was over, treating the show as more of a gallery space than a performance space despite Abramovic doing her best ahead of time to assure the conclusion was worth the wait.

“Wait for the rain,” Abramovic said. The night began with the artist occupying a stage in the Aviva lobby, reading the audience into the performance, a cheat sheet for those who didn’t spring for the cost of the program despite the attendees picking bare the gift shop walls of assorted merch—aprons, throw pillows—that didn’t always give the correct impression of a show about Balkan folklore nor embody its intended themes. One bestselling tee shirt featured a program illustration of Abramovic flying on a bridled winged penis, but the show feels devoid of triumph. The show only demonstrates that ritual wears down men and women alike.

“Six pounds for a program is too high a price—it’s not my fault,” Abramovic acknowledged during her pep rally. “I’ll take a look at it, because it’s important for you to see each ritual and what it means. We’re showing thirteen different moments in this space, like thirteen children giving birth at the same time.” And she wasn’t kidding. “A friend told me the other day, you create space that looks like Balkan and smells like Balkan—that’s a big compliment.”

Balkan Erotic Epic won’t always be staged like this however, nor was it intended to be, according to Aviva Studios’ artistic director John McGrath. “[Marina] came to the press night for Free Your Mind,” he told Observer, referring to Manchester native son Danny Boyle’s 2023 modern dance interpretation of The Matrix, which opened Aviva Studios’ inaugural season. “But she’d been looking at the venue even earlier. We’d been in conversation since she visited during the 2019 Manchester International Festival and it was in 2022 or 2023 that she shared Balkan Erotic Epic as a broad idea.”

At that time, McGrath said, Abramovic imagined a seated show. She had just completed The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas on opera stages and considered continuing to explore that format. But after hosting a spring 2023 workshop in Manchester, the scenes evolved, exiting Aviva’s theater for its Warehouse space. In the future, a sequential stage version is planned for Barcelona, while performances in Germany and in New York will receive the multi-stage Manchester production.

Those performances will likely have one site-specific element that defines them. Here, performance artist Elke Luyten plays a Flemish anthropologist outfitted in a white lab coat. She silently holds court in erection alley before intermittently sharing her own takes on “Balkan Magic” while seemingly ad-libbing takes on Manchester’s weather, environment and population.

“She doesn’t understand shit about Balkan and she is confused,” Abramovic said of the character, comic relief breaking up the trauma of a nearby grieving bride tasked to marry a dead groom, a mourning dance at times set to opera and instruments that proves the most emotionally and physically taxing of the thirteen performances.

Luyten’s performance meanwhile had the effect of an alarm clock blaring news radio, interrupting Abramovic’s dream with a reminder of when and where we are. She’s trying to wake up Abramovic—a bit player here, coming and going from the pub stage at her leisure—to the reality her mother is dead and this self-flagellating dream of closer intimacy with her mother is long beyond her reach. At the same time, Luyten doubles as a high art Krusty the Klown, ending her insights with the introduction of erotic cartoons.

“The only way to show certain rituals we couldn’t show any other way is animation,” Abramovic explained. “There is no other way to show in our present time with all the restrictions we have in our society.” It’s a statement that comes across as lazy and dishonest.

Animations included recipes for love potions and sexual healing (e.g., the 14th C. Bosnian ritual, “Wedding Day Protection,” in which a man makes three holes in a bridge and penetrates them to ensure he won’t be impotent on his wedding day). It’s an act no more scandalous to recreate than the naked men fertilizing the soil feet away from me. If others come closer to the definition of pornography, that doesn’t preclude the possibility of capturing performers on film. Balkan Erotic Epic also includes a cinematic component, including a wall-length choir of nude men maintaining various states of erection while singing.

The 12th C. Macedonian ritual “Child Delivery” involves a man crossing his erect penis over his wife’s breasts to ease the pain of her childbirth, while a 15th C. Serbian “Love Potion” involves a recipe consisting of hairs extracted from forehead, eyebrow, armpit, nipple and vagina then mixed with menstrual blood and the prick of a woman’s ring finger. A 15th C. Kosovan act of “War Strategy” involves undressing and masturbating before enemy soldiers.

“Everything was created in Manchester, filmed in Manchester, shown in Manchester and one thing about Manchester that’s very important—you’re the bravest, you show new things you can’t show anywhere else in the world. I don’t know if we will finish in prison or in daylight,” Abramovic said with some exaggeration.

Maybe she didn’t know where to look. Balkan Erotic Epic proved the highlight of Frieze London was in Manchester, but the roles are reversed this weekend, when London’s Barbican Centre hosts Dirty Weekend, an adults-only weekend of sexual liberation and community outreach, all-gender speed dating and fashion workshops, in conjunction with their new fashion exhibition “Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion,” which runs through January 25, 2026. The looks on display, from Alexander McQueen to Michaela Stark, focus on aesthetics impacted by the natural grime of earth and our own bodies. You can even make your own tee shirt.

When I first saw the animations in Balkan Erotic Epic, I immediately thought it a missed opportunity for Abramovic to partner with Four Chambers, U.K. porn performer, producer, director and sex worker advocate Vex Ashley’s decade-old video project that straddles art porn with A24 aesthetics, prioritizes female empowerment and has on occasion been more forthright in pushing the boundaries between sex and maternity than Abramovic’s Freudian wish fulfillment, an artist statement-cum-fetish to unburden herself of some childhood longing to glimpse her parents through a crack in the bedroom door.

In Four Chambers’ latest film, Some Reddish Work, which premiered earlier this month, maidens dressed not dissimilar to the raindancers showed just how well they would have embodied the Balkan Erotic Epic universe. And for their effort, they aren’t shut out of legitimate art spaces but prove a draw. Their participation in the Barbican’s Dirty Weekend this November 29-30 promises to bring their “living archive that blurs cinema, performance, sexuality and fine art,” and Ashley will participate in a keynote panel on intimacy and censorship. Here, only the debate is animated.

Turkish artist Sarp Kerem Yavuz had a busy few months abroad. He built İznik tiles with LEGO for two weeks at Maxx Royal in Bodrum after securing the final slot in the new luxury resort’s inaugural summer Arts Connected residency, which hosted fellow New Yorkers Chloe Wise, Emma Stern and Jenna Gribbon. He developed a new model of analog-cum-A.I. photography at Supersense’s Polaroid studios in Vienna days before displaying his prints across town at the capital’s historic Volkstheater, where he had been invited to host back-to-back talks about his latest series of blown-up nudes at the first official TED conference dedicated to artificial intelligence, before packing them up for a second show during Contemporary Istanbul, where he curated this year’s Dialogues series. The success of his European tour was at odds with the expectation of any good news back. Yavuz was only able to travel overseas because he was appealing his denied green card application for the second time.

What good is showing on the walls of Soho House Istanbul, which exhibited Yavuz’s portraits across two floors of the leased-out former U.S. Consulate, when the members club’s superpower landlord seemingly has such contempt for his works? One of them, Hayal (“Dream”), 2024, an A.I.-generated image on expired large-format Polaroid film, will appear in Christie’s upcoming Augmented Intelligence sale, which will also feature lots dating back to the 1960s. The auction has attracted a degree of negative attention, but there’s no denying its importance.

When Yavuz appears at a Meet-the-Artist event at the auction house as the sale kicks off on February 20, his bags will already be packed. The artist says he’s moving to Paris, his stay having been extended through the first days of the Trump administration while he attempts a final appeal.

Yavuz had taken to Instagram in recent weeks to sell off furniture and prints that filled the one-bedroom apartment he kept around the corner from the United Nations because, as the State Department has now repeatedly informed him, despite more than a decade spent producing transgressive art in the United States, having shown works around the world from Venice to Seoul to Palm Beach that challenge and celebrate the sexuality of Turkish men in a way that may not be welcome in his native Turkey, the U.S. government has determined there is nothing original or unique about Yavuz’s output, nothing to confer the Paris-born French-Turkish creative with the imprimatur of being an American artist.

It’s been fifteen years since Yavuz studied at Oberlin College and then earned his master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduation, he applied for an artist visa, which he renewed before applying for a talent-based green card. “I was told I was a textbook case,” Yavuz recalled. “But they ignored all the press, the exhibition histories–and so much of that criteria is worded in a way that allows the government to dismiss you for whatever reason. One criterion was that my work had to be original, and even if you don’t like the content of my work, you can’t deny that nobody else is doing this.”

A.I. found its way into Yavuz’s longtime photography practice at the tail end of the Covid pandemic in December 2021. “I often found myself daydreaming of scenes and scenarios that I would like to continue to shoot, and because I was stuck in the U.S. while waiting for my green card, I was lamenting that I couldn’t go and make new things in Turkey,” Yavuz said.

Midjourney helped to evolve the content within Yavuz’s images as he mastered navigating the political reality of the software. “I insisted on using Midjourney because it allowed me to talk about the limitations of a Western-based algorithm in depicting life in Turkey; there are insane mistakes both culturally and architecturally, like its inability to make a decent Turkish İznik tile even though it has access to billions of them. It fails to depict the Middle East as accurately as it should.”

Over time, Yavuz found, the software offered fewer, not more ways to express himself in an art historical context. “If I say show me two handsome Turkish men in a hammam looking at each other longingly, the software will warn me the result is too raunchy, so for a time, I would have to find ways to ask for that image in the context of other artists, like Robert Mapplethorpe, but now those requests are refused. For all I know, the most erotic images I could hope to create from the software are behind me now. It’s a shame that software developers, presumably a bunch of hetero white boys, have become arbiters of what makes sensual versus sexual art, but now the software will warn me that I’m trying to produce ‘adult work’ and threaten to revoke my membership.”

Of course, A.I. isn’t the focal point in Yavuz’s latest series—it’s the analog craftsmanship that led him to call upon and challenge Florian Kaps, the founder of Supersense. Yavuz had previously commissioned Supersense to print one of his images on large-format film, but at the time, Supersense had only conceived of a system to transfer digital images to film by capturing them from an iPad Mini screen, a process which led to visible pixelation. “So I asked, what if we did it with a transparency?”

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“I wanted to human-wash the works, to insist on a photographed reality for them, not because I wanted to trick people, but because I wanted to preserve the fantasy of storytelling, and before I knew it, I was on a Zoom call with the man who rescued Polaroid, and he loved the idea of transferring these images in this new way, but he warned there’s still a chemistry issue because the film expired thirty or forty years ago, and he invited me to come to Vienna.”

Just before he arrived, Yavuz learned about the TED A.I. conference that would be in town and emailed the organizers. Twelve minutes later, they responded and invited him to mount a show during the conference at the Volkstheater. The timing worked out, and Yavuz and Kaps were able to produce ten images in twelve hours.

“If I get lung cancer, it’ll be because of this,” Yavuz quipped. “That was real OG Polaroid chemistry on the last functioning large-format Polaroid camera on the planet. I hadn’t spent that much time in a chemical photo setting since my college days, which is crazy to me because this was the most digital project I’ve ever done in my life.”

And it’s because of Yavuz’s determination that Supersense now sells this same service to other visiting artists. Afterward, Yavuz recalled Kaps telling him, “You know what makes you an artist? You solve problems nobody has.”

The originality of his practice is still up for debate, however—at least as far as the U.S. is concerned. “The government wanted letters of reference, so I provided letters from incredible curators, and they made the point of saying why my work was unique and original. We received some concessions, but you have to score X number of points, and originality still eluded us. The only way I was able to travel to the residency, to Vienna and Istanbul was by appealing my denial, but now the odds of them conceding is astronomical. I have to get the fuck out of the country and get an artist visa to come back—it’s the most expensive process, and the fact that I have to jump through so many hoops to be a legal immigrant here after so many museum acquisitions and exhibitions when I’ve done everything right is bonkers to me.”

It doesn’t help his case that those who have the opportunity to profit from Yavuz’s work are more vocal about his importance than the fragile cultural institutions that hold his works in their permanent collections. “Sarp’s body of work is deeply personal and unmistakably infused with human agency,” Nicole Sales Giles, vice president of digital art sales at Christie’s, tells Observer. “His intricate process of converting his digital images into analog photography–a meticulous endeavor–exemplifies how some artists use A.I. as a tool to complement their practice rather than as a substitute for human creativity.”

Prior to the last presidential election, Alyssa Nitchun, executive director of the Leslie Lohman Museum in SoHo, wrote a letter in support of Yavuz’s green card application. The museum bills itself as “the only dedicated LGBTQIA+ art museum in the world with a mission to exhibit and preserve LGBTQIA+ art and foster the artists who create it” and has three of Yavuz’s Polaroid portraits in its permanent collection. However, when asked by Observer how the museum feels about the daunting political issues queer artists like Yavuz face in the current administration and whether the museum regards A.I. artwork as misunderstood or lacking originality, a representative for the museum replied via email that “they’re unable to provide any details or comment on the topics [Observer] mentioned.”

Oktoberfest was winding down in Cincinnati. The last schnitzel sandwich specials were selling out at Paycor Stadium during Monday night’s loss to the Washington Commanders. One day prior, revelers filing into the city from Covington crossed the old blue Roebling Bridge in dirndls and lederhosen; twenty-four hours later, defeated fans returned to Kentucky in black and orange, picking up their cars from the discounted parking lots along the waterfront. But high above them, another cultural celebration was underway. The Ukrainian-American artist Maya Hayuk was plotting her latest mural overhead, on the side of the Northern Kentucky Convention Center, her work equal parts alarm bell and homage to her ravaged ancestral homeland. Hayuk’s project was delayed until she returned from an impromptu trip to Lviv this summer, where she saw firsthand a people who would not, could not accept their losses three years into the Russian invasion.

The Covington mural, eye-popping abstract geometry at first glance, takes its inspiration from Ukrainian folk handcrafts, including embroidery and egg dyeing. It’s a practice the 55-year-old Brooklyn artist has maintained for nearly two decades—she conquered Wynwood in 2013, and the Bowery Wall in 2014—decades after being taught decorative arts by her grandmothers while simultaneously developing a nascent passion for drawing. Her murals are an impassioned celebration of the delicate nature of women’s work that today doubles as a metaphor for the fragility of Ukrainian society in the face of three years of foreign aggression.

There’s no confusion about Hayuk’s intention when you meet her in person, as I did at Sudova, a new Ukrainian restaurant in downtown Cincinnati, after a series of near misses while we both independently explored the contemporary art scene in Ukraine earlier this year.

“I knew some people in real life that I met on my first visit in 1989, but I mostly hung out with artists I met through Instagram that I had never met before, and on my first morning there, I attended a nude drawing class at Ya Gallery, which was the most grounding thing I could have done, so I started hanging out there every Saturday and soon there was a crew of us,” Hayuk recalled. “Two weeks turned to a month, and one month turned to two, and by then, I knew I couldn’t leave before Ukrainian Independence Day at the end of August.”

The Ukrainian diaspora is everywhere, and in retrospect, Hayuk believed the Ukrainian summer camps she attended outside Cleveland, Ohio, helped prepare her for her latest return to the country her parents fled in 1944. “The Soviets cut up the house where my mother grew up west of Lviv; my parents knew what the other side looked like. They wanted to maintain their heritage and history and they sent me scouting every summer. They knew one day we were going to have to fight for our homeland; we just didn’t know in what capacity.”

At dinner, before we broke bread—sourdough rye with honey butter and spring onions—at the chef’s own grandmother’s table, Hayuk introduced herself by handing out pocketbook-sized red and black stickers unambiguously emblazoned with the words “Russia is a Terrorist State.”

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Green borscht with stewed chicken and a side of caramelized cabbage and onion in brown butter made a welcome respite for Hayuk and her crew, whose work has been in high demand since Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. In the immediate aftermath, as control of Kyiv was being contested from all directions, Hayuk embarked on an international tour installing murals around the world like she was plastering stickers on lampposts, painting in bold nationalist blues and yellows that evoked both flag and tryzub—the post-Cold War trident and coat of arms meant to represent the country as it came out from behind the Iron Curtain. Variations on the theme are now visible everywhere from Oostende, Belgium, to Benjamin Cardozo High School in Queens, where Hayuk contributed a mural to the Branded Arts Festival alongside wall-sized compositions by Daniel Arsham, Futura and OSGEMEOS.

This past summer, Hayuk returned to Ukraine for the first time in more than three decades. She spent three months in Lviv, the westernmost big city and cultural capital of Ukraine. She made the trip with the intention of settling affairs at an apartment her mother kept there but soon found herself engaged in a depleted-but-hungry contemporary art community filling a void left by classical institutions, including the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum, began emptying out their collections of historic artworks and artifacts on February 24, 2022, and shipping them off to western Europe where some paintings have found new life in touring exhibitions like “In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine,” which closed last month at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

“I discovered a new institution, the Lviv Municipal Art Center through artist friends in the city; it’s a space for bright, young experiments in art–history, activism, film, music, performance–and has electricity for when there are blackouts, which happen all the time,” Hayuk told me. “They have an initiative connecting artists with wounded soldiers, which was what interested me so much I conducted a workshop with artists and warriors.”

It was Hayuk’s first time in Lviv since 1989, when she was accepted in an International Sister City program, facilitated by Johns Hopkins University–in Odesa. “Baltimore and Odesa are sister cities, both being port cities, but it wasn’t a typical exchange program, “ Hayuk explained; “they didn’t allow anyone to leave the USSR to study in the United States, and it was specifically tailored for young Ukrainian-Americans to learn about Ukrainian literature, culture and history. Unfortunately, it was taught in Russian, so we bailed. A few friends and I got train tickets to Lviv, which was completely inaccessible at the time.”

Hayuk made fast friends with young artists, actors and activists, some of whom she called on in Lviv this summer, none more famous than the poet-rocker Taras Chubay, who was a student at the Lviv Conservatory when he and Hayuk first met. “He’s an incredible musician, but he’s been in hiding since the beginning of the invasion. His recording studio and house have been destroyed by the Russians, his guitars stolen, but he is still alive,” Hayuk said.

By the time Hayuk returned stateside to prepare for Covington, the energy across Ukraine had shifted. What felt like a summer of love, with locals pouring out of the cities for uninterrupted beach and mountain holidays, came to an abrupt end as Russian forces resumed a near-daily bombardment across the country; a single day could bring a barrage of more than 200 drones and missiles.

But that hasn’t stopped more international artists from following in Hayuk’s footsteps. On October 29th, the Victor Pinchuk Foundation awarded its 7th biannual Future Generation Art Prize at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv. This year’s $100,000 prize, awarded to an international artist under 35 years old, was awarded to Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman who traveled to Kyiv to accept the prize on a day that saw drone attacks near the city center. Rahman’s multidisciplinary practice examines how women have been historically silenced by society. Her works will be on display at the PinchukArtCentre until January 19, 2025, the day before the inauguration of Donald Trump, which will mark the next chapter in Ukraine’s uncertain future.

Hayuk’s Covington mural is not the only merger of Ukrainian art and architecture on display in Kentucky right now. A gallery at the 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville is currently dedicated to a series of white-on-white silkscreens by queer Amsterdam-based Ukrainian artist Anton Shebetko, recently shortlisted for the 2025 PinchukArtCentre Prize awarded to a Ukrainian artist under 35 years old. His current series of works examines the crumbled remains of Unesco heritage sites across his native country. “In the first iteration of the work, there was also a list of all destroyed and damaged objects of cultural heritage by Russia. The series itself was not only about being reminiscent of what’s lost but also posed a question of why it wasn’t seen and known as well as what the role of culture was during the war,” Shebetko told Observer.  On a recent visit, 21C Museum curator Alice Gray Stites suggested examining the pictures from side to side as natural light reflects on the ink at an angle, an action representative of the struggle to remember what was lost, but I couldn’t help thinking they were best witnessed with the flash of my iPhone, an action that captures the speed with which the sudden violence transpired.

A daily tragedy of the current conflict is the way in which architecture across the country has suffered; martial law has prevented citizen activists from publicly protesting the quiet erasure of landmark buildings that are being acquired and demolished without permits after suffering the slightest scarring by developers who sweep in to erect modern buildings, including luxury residences and members clubs, that will dot a post-war landscape. Shebetko pointed to online activists devoting their attention to saving one building at a time, like save.kvitny.ukrainy, which recently shined a light on a new owner’s plans to raze an outdoor summer theater walled with mosaics believed to depict the Lesya Ukrainka’s 1911 play The Forest Song. This past July, the Kyiv Independent reported on the razing of Zelensky Manor, a late 19th-century merchant home that is one of Kyiv’s last remaining original wooden houses. Its destruction was the most egregious since the previous summer’s teardown of a 200-year-old home in the city’s historic Podil neighborhood.

The same bureaucracy that failed to save those buildings in Kyiv also prevented Hayuk from installing a mural in Lviv over the summer, but the artist remains undeterred. “In mid-July, I met the mayor [of Lviv] Andriy Sadovyi and his wife at a local municipal hospital that assists with the rehabilitation of veterans,” Hayuk said. “She studied art and was familiar with my work, and soon we’d taken them across the street to an opening at the Dzyga Art Center, where she whispered in his ear. Next thing, he said, ‘We want to be the first city in Ukraine to have a Maya Hayuk tryzub.’”

Hayuk had a vision for the mural, taking tryzubs drawn by veterans in art therapy, then painting them on a wall behind the Dzyga Art Center with her Lviv crew, and a timeline that involved completing the project by Ukrainian Independence Day. But the more ministers she met with, the more complicated the position became, with the city and oblast governments in conflict over the blank wall in Lviv’s old city.

“It was close to being realized, but at the end of the day, they couldn’t get it together in time, so I made a plan, and we’ll revisit it in the spring.”

KAWS never planned to spend an early October weekend at Nobu Downtown. On Saturday, the artist Brian Donnelly—more widely known as KAWS—closed out the downstairs dining room with graffiti legend and friend Futura (Lenny McGurr) and his daughter, Tabatha McGurr, formerly of 2000s streetwear label, Married to the Mob, which made waves for its KAWS bikini collab back in the early days of Hypebeast.

“I said, are you kidding? I’m fucking going to be there tomorrow,” Donnelly recounted, “but my wife went to Connecticut with my daughter and her best friend for a sleepover, so I could go out—as long as they still came tonight.”

But the next night, Donnelly was back, holding court in a barroom banquette, dressed in all-black everything like a polished one-of-one edition of himself, to celebrate his collaboration with chef Nobu Matsuhisa on the occasion of the restaurant’s 30th anniversary. It was three decades ago when Robert De Niro won over the Japanese godfather of California cuisine and convinced him to grow his burgeoning Japanese-Peruvian empire from Beverly Hills to Tribeca.

Fifteen years ago, Nobu acquired his first KAWS piece, the wall-spanning acrylic abstract FLOATING THE RUMORS (2009), which the chef commissioned from the artist after spotting his work at Art Basel. The two formed a fast friendship, and because not flipping a work means something in this day and age—last year Matsuhisa asked his friend for a favor, to design a limited edition bottle for the chef’s latest collaboration with upstart QUI Tequila.

If KAWS’ past collaborations with Dos Equis beer and Hennessy cognac, more than a decade ago, were as accessible as his ubiquitous collaborations with Uniqlo, his animated Nobu logo on $800 bottles of the barrel-aged agave are on par with his runway work for Dior. (A deadstock KAWS tee shirt from Dior’s Spring/Summer 2019 menswear collection currently sells for $789 on the resale site StockX.)

Not everyone is so lucky to possess a real KAWS, however. Before sitting down with Donnelly, I spoke with QUI partners Medhat Ibraham and Mike Keriakos, who attended the party with his young son in tow. “Nobu had tears in his eyes when he looked at it,” Ibraham told me. The finished product was less of a dialogue between Donnelly and Matsuhisa than it was a gesture to the chef.

“No one felt like we could give Brian dramatic feedback without being offensive to the process,” Keriakos added. “You writers, those artists, don’t want the business folks getting in the way. Our business is how to figure out how to make the money from it.” Then he confessed: “We have a KAWS AstroBoy at home, I bought it on eBay; but there’s a chance it isn’t real. I got it for a quarter of the price.”

The Nobu collaboration wasn’t the only topic on Donnelly’s mind that night. We spoke on the eve of his summer show “KAWS: Time Off,” closing at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, where he showed alongside his wife, multidisciplinary artist Julia Chiang, and the opening of “The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection” at the Drawing Center in SoHo, which features 300+ drawings, illustrated notebooks and the odd Hilma af Klint watercolor, curated from the artist’s Brooklyn home and office.

This isn’t the first time we’ve spoken. About fifteen years ago, before I became an investigative reporter, I honed my craft hunting down a con man making counterfeit KAWS and Obey Giant prints in the basement of his Boston art gallery, defrauding collectors who traded editions through the gray market of message boards before an established resale and auction market for collectibles existed.

I could give you so many people to investigate—the hell of living with these counterfeiters. Somebody sent me this today, in case you haven’t seen it. [Donnelly pulls up the image of a counterfeit Four Foot Dissected Companion, originally produced by the Japanese toy maker Medicom.] This is from a place in California and we just learned about it. All we can do is take it off Instagram.

The way your work has disseminated into pop culture, there’s as much of an industry built around your brand collaborations as there is one built by your counterfeiters—you’re in a league of your own among the living, more on par with the estates of Warhol and Basquiat. Your show, “KAWS + Warhol,” is up now at the Warhol Museum, and you’re launching this tequila collab the same week the Basquiat estate is launching its collaboration with Dom Perignon. Have you begun planning your estate or thought about how your brand will exist beyond you?

With collecting, and making, I have spent so much time of my life getting stuff made, and you have a realization about what’s going to happen to it. And in my mind, I don’t want to dump it on my kids. I want to set it up so it’s comfortable for them to make decisions, so, yeah, I imagine there’d be a foundation. The truth is, and this part of it really sucks, if it’s not a foundation, if there are counterfeit dealers, imagine if there’s no one guarding it. When you’re younger, that thought does not exist.

You didn’t grow up around such an aggressive collectibles market.

Star Wars. But I always gravitated toward drawings and individual pieces instead of toys. I also have a surplus of friends who make stuff and send it to me. And that ends up in my kids’ rooms, my office… I live with my stuff.

Does it feel different being approached by a collector or friend who wants to collaborate with you versus some established brand, like MTV or General Mills, making a cold pitch?

I treat it the same as anyone. Honestly. It’s a different thing with Nobu. When he asked me, that’s like family. I said, I’m just going to do it for fun.

With collaborations like the Nobu bottle, you prefer to play with logos, and you leave your established characters out of it.

It doesn’t seem appropriate.

Do they ever speak to you?

[Laughing] Do they ever speak to me?

I’ve found a lot of the art that surrounds me at home, there are faces; they have personalities.

I feel very close to the drawings I make.

It would be hard to imagine something I made being trapped in a box on a shelf.

With the toys, it’s hard to keep track. With the paintings and sculptures…

You want them to breathe?

I like the fact you can walk past something.

Do you think it’s hard for someone who knows you to step up to ask to work with you?

I’ve known him since 2008 or 2009, and he’s never asked for anything. He’s always been generous with me; he’s a kind human being. He hosted my 40th birthday party here. So if he asks me to do something, I’m going to do it. I don’t do many friend things. [Pause.] Okay, I do. I do a lot of friend things.

You’re collaborating on a hotel with A Bathing Ape founder Nigo in Japan. And his label, Human Made, is producing a run of t-shirts for your show at the Drawing Center.

That’s a community thing.

But it’s not like Nigo’s assistant is calling you, it’s your friend Nigo approaching you.

It’s not—I don’t know. But take General Mills. They approached me out of the blue to collaborate on Reese’s cereal. I think it was my first or second meeting when I asked about the Monster cereals. I kept asking about the monsters—Count Chocula, Franken Berry—and they were like, Why do you keep asking about this? So they had something I wanted to do, and Reese’s was a cool thing, and I was excited to do it, and I like it as a collaboration, It’s so out of the box in terms of past things I’ve done, I think about things like that; if I do something like that, then I feel like that territory is covered.

And you treat your commercial collaborations with the same respect you do your fine art.

Of course, I put as much time into that stuff as I do anything. With Reese’s and the Monsters, I reverse-engineered the project, and I did a series of paintings, 100 percent hand-painted, not even telling General Mills, and then just showing them at the Warhol Museum.

Before the show, I ordered my cereal boxes from them, and they asked, Why did you order so much? I didn’t know why I did, but I knew there would be a reason why I ordered so much in the future. I knew there would be a use for the actual boxes in the future, and then it was one of those moments—I’m doing the Warhol Museum, and the boxes became my wallpaper. They will call back what Warhol did [with Brillo boxes], and it’s extremely present with my work. It made perfect sense. That was 100 percent me telling General Mills that I am doing this, and in my contract, I have the rights to do that kind of work.

You write your contracts so you have the rights to make fine art using your collaborators’ copyrights?

Yeah, it was part of our agreement. It was a win-win.

Do you know the artist Mark Drew? He paints old Peanuts comic strips and replaces the dialogue with ‘90s mixtape-era hip-hop lyrics. The paintings are even executed in the colors of the old Sony Sports Walkman. He’s always reticent to speak about his paintings for fear of the line he walks with the Schultz estate. When did it occur to you to start seeking permission for your fine art?

It was more like, if I want to make a toy, I get permission. If I’m going to make any produced product, I get permission. But if I’m making a one-off drawing, I won’t get permission, because what are they going to do, send me a cease-and-desist? If you look at the history of me doing this, if a brand takes the time to understand my work, I don’t think anyone would find it a problem.

In your early days you were breaking into bus stops and phone booths and then returning the advertisements painted over with your characters—your Calvin Klein posters were so iconic. When you started to break out, you produced two similar prints for the New Museum in 2000, and another, Gloves, in 2001, featuring a painted-over Kate Moss. It seemed like you transitioned out of the paintovers around that time. Five years ago, another work, a Simpsons-inspired paintover of Mao Zedong, surfaced for auction at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong before it was pulled.

I have no recollection of even doing that. And that was a painting. That was the most misguided moment of my life.

But the idea of painting Mao is an allusion to Warhol, who executed pop culture silkscreens and also made a fortune taking commissions and selling silkscreen portraits to famous friends, socialites and industry power players. Did you ever consider going that route back in the day?

It never crossed my mind. It doesn’t sound like a good idea.

So a trove of private paintover portraits isn’t going to turn up at auction one day?

I’ve only done one for a friend, and that was in an ad. Otherwise, I’ve just done some editorial work.

No photography for you.

I shot all that street stuff at that time; that was all medium format.

The trains and wall pieces in Jersey City, back in the ‘90s. You grew up in Jersey City, but you still haven’t brought any public works to the city. Ten years ago, the city unveiled a mural, The Jersey City Wave, over the Grove Street PATH station. But it was by Shepard Fairey, a South Carolina native.

I don’t do murals. Shepard does all these great murals.

Are you ever going to bring your floating Companion sculpture to the Hudson River?

Talk to Mayor Fulop about it.

Have you talked to Mayor Fulop about it?

He’s been very supportive, but the right project hasn’t come up.

I found the courage to cover the war in Ukraine somewhere just outside of Copenhagen. The afternoon before my flight to Poland—there are no open airports in Ukraine—provided just enough time to tour the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s immersive retrospective of a decade of Pussy Riot. The show explored the feminist punk rock art collective’s journey, from their impromptu performance on the altar at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2012 to their rushing the field at the 2018 World Cup before slipping out of the country cloaked in the anonymity of delivery drivers.

The show was an inspiration but no fairy tale. They drew a stalemate: Pussy Riot’s arrests, trials and convictions were always followed by release, sure, but they couldn’t even eat at a McDonald’s without being assaulted, even spray painted, by one gang or another; they could only live as freely as being followed by security services allowed, until the women had no choice but to make their escape.

The Russian government hasn’t changed since their departure, but by sacrificing their citizenship, they’re now free to continue to make art and spread their gospel, put up a show in the free world at a world-class institution, and greet visitors with a life-sized video installation showing each balaclava-shrouded artist chugging a bottle of water, baring their sex and urinating on a portrait of Vladimir Putin without fear of reprisal.

The hope after escaping one’s homeland at a time of war or fleeing a dictatorship lies is that one will discover a community of like-minded individuals in exile, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I found that same spirit of artistic rebellion not during my travels across Ukraine but upon my return to Warsaw. In a rambling nightclub and art space called Karma, Belarussian owner Gleb Kovalev has transformed the underside of the Poniatowski Bridge into Rick’s Cafe by way of CBGB’s—a punk rock dive and upstairs members club, complete with a tattoo parlor, vegan kitchen, art galleries and a concert floor, where at any given moment some displaced youth might take up the mic or challenge you to a game of Uno.

Warsaw is home to the third outpost of Karma Kovalev has opened in seven years, his two prior attempts having the bad luck of opening on the brink of revolution. Kovalev started his business in 2017, in Minsk, in his native Belarus, where the polyglot barman also worked as a foreign language instructor, and translator for visiting spirits brand ambassadors. When nationwide protests swept the country in August of 2020 in opposition to the dictator president Alexander Lukashenko seeking and winning a disputed sixth term in office, police violently cracked down on protestors, and those who had somewhere better to go fled the country.

Karma survived for so long in Minsk partly due to Kovalev’s marketing skills. ”We said we had the best rum and Coke, and people believed that,” he recalled, admitting that he finally did make an effort to back up the claim, infusing the rum with Zefir, a local apple-flavored marshmallow candy his father forced him to eat instead of chocolate. “When I was a kid, I thought it was disgusting, but with rum and Coke, people loved it.” The bar also carried on because, in retrospect, his investors were “hand-washing” money and stocking the well with liquor bought on the diplomatic market.

“I realized my partner and I were playing the role of owners,” Kovalev told me, and as the Lukashenko government came to oppose the fighting spirit Karma represented, serving as a heavy metal haven for dozens of Kovalev’s anarchist allies, artists and journalists seeking shelter from soldiers on the warpath, he knew he needed to walk away while he still could.

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“I was assaulted by riot police during the protests, and my business partner was dropped to his knees and beaten at the entrance of our bar,” Kovalev said, fearless but shaken; his tattooed face and jolting charm evoking a post-traumatic Post Malone that makes him unmissable as he navigates the bohemian crowd in Warsaw. “I’m proud that 90 percent of my team left the country because I can give interviews without worrying they will be put in jail, but I know if I go back I’ll be in jail forever.”

“I had to be realistic,” he added, “because Belarus will find a new dictator even after this one, that’s how they live, so I’m focused on the kids now. I tell them about my mental diseases, and they like me.”

Kovalev got a fresh start in neighboring Ukraine. He opened Karma 2.0 in Kyiv later in 2020, on his own terms, and his delinquent magnetism and bedouin aesthetics found a home steps away from internationally acclaimed speakeasy Parovoz and the luxury department store TSUM.

He found new partners for his bars by selling shares to friends and strangers who valued his radical politics, hospitality and transparency–including a Pakistani aristocrat, the women behind Lviv Vegan Kitchen, two chefs from Ukraine who supply free meals to refugees as well as vegan soldiers on the front line and Pavel Kozlov, the bassist for the Belarussian post-punk band Molchat Doma, whose music had gone viral on TikTok during Covid.

“Pavel drove me forty-nine hours out of Minsk to Kyiv,” Kovalev recalled. “When I saw how much his house in L.A. costs, I said, ‘You can afford to invest in my nightclub.’”

At the end of 2021, Kovalev had laid the groundwork to expand into neighboring Poland, though he never planned to start a new life there. But by the following February, the war was at his door.

“I left for Ukraine the first day of the war, and it took forty-nine hours in line just to cross the border,” Kovalev said. “I already had people here to set up the bar, and 100 days later, we opened on the first of June, 2022.”

Karma 3.0 was an instant hit. “We had 600 people here on a Wednesday and ran out of beer twice.”

At street level, Karma, nestled in a support column of the century-old Poniatowski Bridge, is a dive bar-cum-block party. The entrance is marked by the crowds milling between the pillars beneath string lights and a tarp. On my first visit, a couple manned a card table, selling cups of punch for charity at the front door while another played Uno. Opposite them, a spread of worn oriental rugs marked a makeshift stage floor, where Belarusian singer Ketevan Asratashvili, a recent arrival to Poland, via Kyiv, sang for the crowd around her, curled up with a microphone on a chintz sofa, beneath a graffiti portrait of John Lennon. Her melodies gave way to wails as she sang of love and loss and home.

The music wasn’t audible inside. The blacklighted beer-and-a-shot dive was rocking; its interior resembled a second home for a nomadic biker gang, but everyone here was warm, knowing no one who found their way here had an easy journey. High on the wall hangs a tribute to the Cross of St Euphrosyne, a thousand-year-old jeweled relic looted from Belarus during World War II. The blacklighted tribute was made for the bar by the Belarusian artist and designer Tasha Katsuba, who also made works in the upstairs members club.

Kovalev handed me a beer brewed by some local Warsaw punks before we wound up the grand outdoor staircase toward Karma’s private members’ club. He clarified that anyone can become a member for a fee, though language may still prove a social barrier. “Right now, it’s hard to let in someone who doesn’t speak Russian, Belarusian or Ukrainian, but it’s my dream to hire barbacks from the Middle East, to make the space more multicultural and to force people to speak English better.”

A maze of small curtained club rooms and galleries are furnished like the sets of a Wes Anderson movie, while a formal bar serves proper cocktails in delicate glassware. Kovalev describes it as a place to hide and a place to hang out.

On our way back downstairs, he stopped to marvel over this hub of outsider culture that’s grown well beyond recognizable faces but has so far faced little resistance.

“As long as no neighborhood grandma calls the cops, everything is legal,” Kovalev said with uneasy delight, wired by now to brace for the worst. “Police will never come for no reason because we pay our taxes—probably this is how capitalism works?”

Following my stateside return, I wondered whether many of the artists who sought freedom in Poland and the E.U., with aspirations to channel their creativity and calls for justice into careers, are finding an international audience for their work outside their immediate circles. It doesn’t happen overnight, I reasoned, but it does happen.

I didn’t take long to find an answer. Last month, I attended the New Art Dealers Alliance fair during Miami Art Week. Two galleries—Raster in Warsaw and eastcontemporary in Milan—shared a booth displaying new works by Ala Savashevich, a multidisciplinary artist who resettled in Poland after completing art school in Minsk in 2014.

Savashevich’s work focuses on the plight women face inside the home and out, as much from the patriarchy as from authoritarianism; at NADA, three new works, Ladies I, II and III, depicted defiant women finely crafted from straw marquetry, a technique popularized by prisoners during the Napoleonic wars. Here, there’s an unmissable modern touch; the women, menacing with traditional vessels and sickles, are all clad in balaclavas. Even when an artist can show her face, she never forgets those who cannot, whose interior lives even place them at risk.

Last month, Asratashvili, the singer I met at Karma, performed in a holiday special on BelSat, an opposition channel on Belarusian television. All the performers were Belarusian entertainers in exile. Despite the vibes, light jazz and Christmas lights, ugly sweaters and candy cane headbands, the show never made it onto the intended airwaves.

“The Lukashenko regime calls [BelSat] extremist, so of course it won’t be shown on TV there, but Belarusians can still watch this channel on YouTube. Although there is a danger there too: If the government arrests you, and finds you are a subscriber, they can put you in jail for that, too.”

Even as galleries and museums began closing down across the city back in March, one work by the Brooklyn artist Luke O’Halloran has remained on view day and night. A painted triptych of slot machine reels—“infinite spinning wheels” he calls them—hang in the 16th floor lobby of the new Memorial Sloan Kettering building on East 73rd Street. At first he had his reservations about how his work might fit—or not fit—within the context of the hospital, but the art consultant Cade Tompkins, who made the purchase on the hospital’s behalf, assured him there was nothing to worry about. “I think her position is, if someone is dying, they’re already dying, and you’re not going to change that,” O’Halloran tells Observer. “You’re reminding them of the chance of life, and that is not a bad thing. They’re already experiencing something ineffable.”

O’Halloran’s subject matter has so far brought the artist good luck. His recent works—paintings depicting a dealt card that’s not yet found its hand, the flourish of a deck before the fix is in, slot machine cherries and lemons that could starve a gambler of their last dollar—have taken on greater meaning during the current pandemic. At first, they only signified diminishing returns on the promise of the American West, a theme rooted in the artist since childhood. O’Halloran grew up in Thousand Oaks, Calif., just up the road from Paramount Ranch, then left to earn his BFA at  the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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“What fascinates me about Westerns and frontier myths is that, even at rest, their setting is uncertain and unjust,” O’Halloran says. “The landscape itself is perhaps cruel, and I like that a good story can arise out of that setting.”

Coinciding with the lockdowns across the country, the diminishing returns of Manifest Destiny have been having a moment, as the most selfish citizens believe it’s their God-given right as Americans to shop for groceries without a mask, crowd sidewalks for cocktails, or huff the recycled air of reopened casino floors before they ever place a bet, none of them understanding the most they could hope to gain is winning back their own life.

O’Halloran, an enthusiastic gambler, has been making no such bets. He’s been indoors since March, dividing his time between his two roommates upstairs and his basement studio. 

“Everyone said this was the perfect time to make art but I thought, no, it’s not—the world is changing,” he recalls. His worldview improved around Memorial Day, once unemployment benefits began showing up in his account. Following the success of his shows earlier in the year (group shows at Kapp Kapp, OCDChinatown, and Y2K Group), O’Halloran knew he was going to get paid, “And then I was spending like I was going to get paid,” he says, but the pandemic relief changed everything. He convinced his roommates not to go on a rent strike, which could have cost him his studio space, and he began painting again.

Two graphite card drawings sold at charity auctions, including an Artsy auction for the Food Bank of NYC, which finally gave O’Halloran a berth on the site. The invitation came from the painter Sam McKinniss who showed his Cherries (after Fantin-Latour), 2019 beside O’Halloran’s Cherries, 2019, at O’Halloran’s invitation last December. This summer, his Card flourish painting 03, 2020, hangs over the mantle at the newly restored Mary Heaton Vorse House in Provincetown as part of the curator Joe Sheftel’s group show, “Intimate Companions.” The show, up through September 8, also includes works by McKinniss, Jenna Gribbon and David Hockney.

Right now, O’Halloran is completing works for an October solo show at Kapp Kapp’s Manhattan gallery. He’s shifting his focus to the way we gamble with our lives today. There are life-sized drawings of women sawed in half, a timely metaphor for those who are desperate to reconnect and be made whole again, and cats hanging in the air as they reach non-lethal terminal velocity never knowing whether they’ll land unscathed. O’Halloran knows there are no good solutions right now unless you’re willing to let the house win. Until then, he keeps painting against the odds.

There shouldn’t have been anyone around when I arrived at Alone Gallery, surfer-dealer Tripoli Patterson’s summerlong experiment with private viewing. The space had just opened in an unmarked warehouse on Ardsley Road in Wainscott, East Hampton, across the street from Patterson’s home. As I arrived, a security services van had just pulled out of the driveway, having put the finishing touches on a camera system that would allow Patterson to remotely observe–but not overhear–visitors from his iPhone.

The inaugural exhibition, “Alex Katz: Three Portraits” was conceived as a solo show for both the artist and the viewer with no staff present. And after spending the weekend visiting empty galleries in East Hampton, having masked, socially-distanced conversations about a Chloe Wise portrait on hold at Harper’s Books, and the glut of musty tabletop Calders on display at Van De Weghe, I thought no gallerist on site might be an improvement. So did Patterson.

“I had a storefront on Jobs Lane for years, and there were mannequins on both sides. I don’t want this to feel like a store,” he told Observer, discussing his new venture before my visit to the space. It’s a wise move. On purpose, a private shopping experience can make everything look desirable, but when you’re unintentionally the only customer on the sales floor while associates lurk, all you notice is how no one’s buying.

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However, Patterson’s presence in the parking lot when I arrived at Alone Gallery brought a chaotic energy that’s been missing from the gallery space these past few months. He nearly shook my hand as he leaned in close and uncovered to welcome me as the show’s first official viewer, reassuring me he’s remained these past few months in a bubble of home, work, and surf. He walked me through the process, as I disinfected my hands then put on a mask and gloves set atop a row of powder-coated school desks by the artist Yung Jake. He screamed, “Fuck!” as we watched his assistant back her BMW into Stray Dog, a 100-pound bronze sculpture by the artist Tony Matelli that suffered a scuffed ear as it took out her left tail light. It felt good to have a shared experience again. (And besides, those dogs have been through worse.)

“She must be so freaked out, she just started working for me,” Patterson said as she pulled away. The moment was a reminder of the anxiety people continue to feel as they return to non-essential jobs—like catering to East End art collectors—and that being distracted during a pandemic should be expected and tolerated. It also gave the slender shoulders of the Katz portraits more weight than they could be expected to bear: Are any paintings really worth this much trouble?

Stepping inside, I was immediately reminded of an experience at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, in 2015, when I stripped naked to experience Jennifer Rubell’s “Not Alone.” Viewers were encouraged to enter that exhibition one at a time, undress, and watch Posing, a film of Rubell sat naked atop a horse and staring back at them. Even if Rubell wasn’t present, her avatar gave the viewer permission to feel seen.

The Katzes aren’t so welcoming. These breezy, 90-inch high canvases, with their sun-kissed skin and their haircuts, ostracize the consciously covered viewer. The subjects aren’t socially distant—you can step in close—they’re socially removed from your gaze. A plywood corridor leading into the main exhibition space leads you into a private party. In every direction there’s another relaxed body and unshielded face. Vincent and Vivien, 1993, a double portrait of Katz’s son and his wife, stand close and turned toward one another, engrossed in conversation. Pink Kimono, Isaac Mizrahi Series, 1994, features Katz’s wife Ada casting a side-eye over the viewer’s shoulder toward her kin. Ada is coiffed, kempt, and curious while keeping a healthy distance. The juxtaposition reinforces that yearning for shared experience and reminds that generations of families remain distant for their own health right now, perhaps making you question what you are doing risking your life to see a painting that will never return your gaze.

At the far end of the gallery, Margit, 1993, turns her back on the viewer as she gazes downbeach behind sunglasses and a bucket hat, embracing a fit of old school, pre-pandemic anonymity, when we could still voluntarily hide in plain sight.

Of course an experiment is nothing without observation. There are QR codes on the gallery walls for those who want to learn more about specific works. If you don’t spot them, don’t worry. When Patterson catches you on camera hovering over a work long enough, he’ll text you the notes himself. You’ll never feel so seen.