Eliana Willis

Six years ago, things looked bleak for the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa, California. The organization had announced plans to deaccession the 1,600 works in its holdings—the world’s foremost collection of Post-war Northern California art—sparking an outcry from the arts community. But last month, the di Rosa kicked off an exciting new chapter in its history with the opening of a new art space in downtown San Francisco, with an exhibition celebrating its once-imperiled holdings.
Titled “Far Out: Northern California Art,” the show features important artists from the region such as Enrique Chagoya (b. 1953), Peter Saul (b. 1934), Viola Frey (1933–2004), Roy De Forest (1930–2007), and Jay DeFeo (1929–1989). It is an eclectic mix of work bound together by a radical and progressive ethos that characterized Northern California counterculture throughout the 20th century—at San Francisco’s first museum dedicated to the region’s art.
“Visitors have cried and said ‘it feels like seeing old friends again,’” Twyla Ruby, the di Rosa’s curator of exhibitions and programs, told me during a tour of the show. “People really seem to be emotionally affected by seeing this collection together again in this way, and it’s been really beautiful.
And it’s a rebirth not only for the di Rosa, but also for the space it has taken over at the Minnesota Street Project in Dogpatch. The galleries there—owned by local arts patrons Deborah and Andy Rappaport—have sat empty since 2023, with the closure of the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, which for six years staged excellent contemporary art exhibitions there drawn from the collection of Nion McEvoy. Where the Bay Area once seemed at risk of losing two beloved institutions, one has come roaring back against the odds.
Jock McDonald,  Rene & Gorilla (1988), a portrait of Rene di Rosa. Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Gift of Jock McDonald.
Who Was Rene di Rosa?
The di Rosa’s founder was the eccentric winemaker-turned-art collector Rene di Rosa. In 1960, long before Napa became a famous wine region, he purchased 465 acres of land there, and enrolled in viticulture classes at UC Davis, outside Sacramento. What he learned at school helped di Rosa rehabilitate the rundown vineyard on his property. (He named it Winery Lake Vineyards, after a small pond on the property that he had enlarged, and eventually sold grapes to more than 50 wineries.)
But di Rosa also caught the art collecting bug at school, where the instructors included the likes of Manuel Neri (b. 1930), Robert Arneson (1930–1992), and William T. Wiley (1937–2021)—three important area artists included in the current exhibition.
Bruce Conner, CRUCIFIXION (1960). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Photo: courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California.
“Most of the courses in viticulture were so beyond me I would end up going to the art department to hang out,” di Rosa told Coast News. The first piece he ever bought was by Bruce Conner (1933–2008).
Di Rosa and his wife, the artist Veronica di Rosa (1934–1991) became key Bay Area arts patrons, befriending artists and serving on the board of trustees at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Sandow Birk, The Triumph of ‘The San Francisco’ (1998). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Photo: courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California.
In 1983, the couple established the Rene and Veronica di Rosa Foundation. With the profits from the reportedly $8-to-$10-million sale of the vineyards to Seagrams in 1986, they worked to turn their remaining 217-acre property into an art park. Veronica died in a tragic hiking accident in 1991, but the di Rosa Preserve: Art and Nature, as it was originally known, opened to the public in 1997, a hidden gem with galleries and an impressive sculpture meadow overseen by a towering Mark di Suvero (b. 1933).
Di Rosa called his collection “the incorrect museum,” priding himself on operating outside the stuffy confines of the mainstream art world to capture something of Northern California’s rebellious counterculture. And while some critics may have dismissed his holdings as merely a display of wacky Bay Area aesthetics, di Rosa’s collection could also be quite serious, works with political gravitas created by artists with a distinct anti-capitalist vein.
A view of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa with Mark di Suvero’s sculpture For Veronica. Photo by Grace Hendricks, courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa.
A New Path Forward 
Trouble started with the 2008 recession, which wiped out nearly a quarter of the nonprofit’s endowment, forcing layoffs. Two years later, di Rosa died at age 91. Without him, the art center struggled to make its way, and to care for the expansive collection he had left behind. The 2017 wildfires, which caused damage on the property, including a storage barn, raised further concerns about the di Rosa’s long-term future.
Under director Robert Sain, appointed in 2015, the center made the difficult decision to break up the collection. There simply wasn’t enough money in the budget, he said, to host exhibitions and programming as well as covering maintenance costs for the historic artworks, especially with so many large-scale installations and outdoor sculptures.
Enrique Chagoya, When Paradise Arrived (1988). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Photo: courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California.
That could have been the end of the story—but the dark days of deaccessioning came to an end in 2021. The people’s voice was heard, and Kate Eilertsen, who had been appointed as Sain’s successor the previous summer, promised a renewed commitment to the collection.
Under her leadership, the di Rosa has made every effort to bring its art to the people, opening a small satellite space, di Rosa Downtown, in the heart of Napa in late 2024. The di Rosa has even begun collecting again, picking up the story of the region’s contemporary art scene where its founder left off.
“We really want to make this into the world’s foremost collection of Northern California,” Ruby said.
Clayton Bailey, Burping Bowl with Lurching Monster (1972). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Photo: by Sarah Cascone.
Recent acquisitions include 10 works each by Clayton Bailey (1939–2020) and his wife Betty Bailey (1939–2019), the subject of a joint show that closed this past weekend at di Rosa Downtown in Napa. He is known for his fantastical sculptures depicting monsters and other creatures—and his alter ego, Dr. Gladstone, who would help children excavate their so-called remains—while she created works on paper and ceramics.
The expansion to San Francisco is the next step in the di Rosa’s revitalization, which also looks to bring an increased revenue source by hosting weddings and other events on the center’s picturesque grounds. And the hope is that the space in the city will introduce new audiences to the di Rosa, and encourage them to make the trip to Napa to learn more.
“The board felt strongly that the first exhibition should really be a showcase of the collection, but in the future, the collection will serve as a jumping-off point for more novel, scholarly, and focused curatorial presentations,” Ruby said.
Installation view of “Far Out: Northern California Art from the di Rosa Collection.” Photo: courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California.
A Celebration of the Incorrect
“Far Out” is kind of a greatest hits of the di Rosa collection: Funk, Conceptual art, ceramics from the California Clay movement, assemblage, and even figurative painting.
“We wanted to spark dialogue about the art history that’s in the collection,” Ruby said.
She and Eilertsen have broken up the exhibition into three sections: “Material Worlds,” exploring California artists’ embrace of different mediums as a means of expression; “Tricksters, Scavengers, and Scamps,” which looks the use of second identities and unconventional, sometimes salvaged materials; and “Piracy and Protest,” featuring works that critique American culture and politics through the appropriation of corporate mottos and logos. Mickey Mouse, for instance, is a recurring image.
“It’s either a weird fetish on Rene di Rosa’s part, or, more likely, it’s because Mickey represented a capitalistic order that Northern California artists were poking fun at and subverting,” Ruby added, pointing to a lithograph by Wiley of the Disney character with a cryogenic tank that accompanied a performance series by the artist about the urban legend that Walt Disney had his remains cryogenically frozen.
Joan Brown, Woman Preparing for a Shower (1975). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California; © Estate of Joan Brown; photo: courtesy Venus Over Manhattan, New York.
Other highlights range from Conceptual artist Paul Kos’s (b. 1942) sculpture Equilibre III, a coat hanger with bells on each end, precariously balanced atop a broomstick, to Joan Brown’s (1938–1990), Woman Preparing for a Shower (1975), a vibrant painting of a woman in a robe and shower cap and her little dog posed against the bright turquoise of the bathroom tiles. (She had a critically acclaimed traveling retrospective that opened at SFMOMA in 2022.)
David Best (b. 1945), known for his ornate, ephemeral Burning Man temples, is represented here with a large, 3-D cut-paper collage titled Triangle Factory Fire (2000) that the artist once estimated took 900 hours to make. Made from appropriated 19th-century magazine illustrations, it depicts the deadly 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a tragedy that led to reform in factory working conditions.
“This one really reflects the labor politics that courses through the collection in ways that people don’t always think about,” Ruby said.
Ester Hernandez, Sun Mad (1982). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa.
Striking a related note is Sun Mad, a 1982 screenprint by Ester Hernández (b. 1944) that offers a play on the well-known Sun Maid raisins logo. The artist has replaced the young woman holding the overflowing basket of grapes with a skeleton, in a condemnation of the dangerous pesticides used to grow the fruit, and the health risks such chemicals pose for farmworkers.
There are also artists in the show who even Ruby is still learning more about, like Nancy Youdelman, who was one of the students who made work for “Womanhouse,” the landmark feminist art installation created by Judy Chicago (b. 1939) and Miriam Schapiro’s (1923–2015) groundbreaking CalArts Feminist Art Program in Los Angeles. She turned a second-hand dress into a mixed media sculpture, Love’s Armor (2000), adorning it with found beads and other jewelry, turning the soft and feminine into a protective sheath.
Nancy Youdelman, Love’s Armor (2000). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Photo: by Sarah Cascone.
And then there are works that had fallen into disrepair over the decades. A pair of model ships by Sandow Birk (b. 1962), sails emblazoned with the IBM and American Express logos, had gotten lost in a di Rosa storage barn, but have now been restored.
The two works are being shown for the first time alongside his post-apocalyptic seascape, The Triumph of ‘The San Francisco,’ in which galleons attack a massive battleship on which is perched the SFMOMA, representing corporate interests attacking the museum. (Painted in 1998, it notably predates the arrival of the Fisher Collection, from the founders of the Gap clothing empire.)
Sandow Birk’s The Triumph of ‘The San Francisco’ (1998) and Untitled (Galleon (IBM)) in “Far Out: Northern California Art from the di Rosa Collection.” Photo: courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California.
There’s also one piece on view that is not currently in the collection—the curators have actually included one of the deaccessioned artworks, amid discussions to potentially bring the work back into the fold. Titled Stack (2002), it’s a heaping mound of scissors, corkscrews, matchbooks, and other objects confiscated by the fledgling Transportation Security Administration at San Francisco International Airport in the wake of the 2001 September 11 attacks.
The artist, Michele Pred (b. 1966), made the drive up to Napa from Oakland to collect the deaccessioned work on Valentine’s Day in 2017. The bins it had been stored in were cracked and spilling onto the floor after years of neglect. When she made the work, Pred had been working as a limo driver. She was inspired by picking up passengers who complained about the new travel restrictions and the things taken by TSA. It took months of negotiating, and signing a release of liability waiver, but eventually Pred convinced the airport to let her have some of the seized belongings.
“I realized how emotional and how frightening this experience was. So I started thinking about freedoms being taken away, surveillance culture, and this sort of security theater,” Pred, who staged a performance at the exhibition on September 11, told me. “It’s really a time capsule of our history then, but it’s still very timely, with not just items, but people being taken away now and being sent out of the country.”
Michele Pred in costume as a TSA agent with her piece Stack, made from personal belongings confiscated from passengers leaving San Francisco International Airport in the months following the 9/11 attacks of 2001, in “Far Out: Northern California Art from the di Rosa Collection.” Photo: courtesy of the artist.
Pred had met di Rosa while studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the two became friends. The acquisition of Stack was a major career milestone for Pred as an emerging artist. When she got a letter from the di Rosa in late 2016, telling her to pick up her piece or it would be thrown away, it was nothing short of heartbreaking—and to have the di Rosa embrace the piece once more is particularly meaningful.
“They’ve welcomed me back with open arms,” Pred said. “They recognize how important Rene and his artist friends were to the whole culture of the di Rosa, and they are carrying forward the excitement and the passion that Rene had for this collection.”
“Far Out: Northern California Art From the di Rosa Collection” is on view at the Incorrect Museum, the di Rosa SF, 1150 25th Street, San Francisco, California, August 2–October 4, 2025. Michele Pred will stage a performance in character as a TSA agent on Thursday, September 11, from 5–7 p.m.
“Betty and Clayton Bailey” was on view at the di Rosa Downtown, 1300 First Street, Suite 251, Napa, California, June 7–September 7, 2025. More

How did a rare 16th-century Renaissance tapestry, currently housed at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, come to be the unlikely centerpiece of a fascinating performance running in downtown Manhattan?
Honor is the brainchild of artist Suzanne Bocanegra, who has used the monumental weaving as a springboard to create a piece that is part lecture, part performance, part historical deep dive. Also titled Honor, it’s brought to life by a vivid mixture of spoken word threaded with the artist’s insightful cultural commentary and personal reflections, colorful supporting visuals that play on a large screen, and a seamless performance by actor Lili Taylor.
If it sounds like there’s a lot to unpack here, that’s because there is. But trust me, it’s worth it.
For starters, Honor, is “a key example of Renaissance weaving,” according to Elizabeth Cleland, curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Met. “It was originally the central hanging in a nine-piece tapestry series, known collectively as ‘The Honors,’ that is often perceived as the most important tapestry series of the first quarter of the sixteenth century,” she told me over email.
Honor from the series “The Honors.” Design attributed to Bernard van Orley and workshop, with collaborators. Designed before 1520, woven between 1525 and 1532. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The first edition of “The Honors” was made for Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and remains in the Spanish Patrimonio Nacional collection. Meanwhile, the Met’s tapestry “was part of the second (and only other surviving) edition, made some time between 1525 and 1532 for Charles’s trusted advisor, Cardinal Erard de la Marck, Prince-Bishop of Liege and one of the most powerful men of his generation.” The Met was fortunate enough to acquire the work in 2015.
The subject matter is also key; the series as a whole was commissioned and designed to present “a great allegorical guide to the qualities a successful ruler should espouse,” said Cleland. Seven tapestries were meant to capture the themes of Faith, Virtue, Prudence, Justice, Fame, Nobility, and Honor, with two additional works dedicated to Fortune and Infamy.
Bocanegra Takes on Honor
Bocanegra first became fascinated by tapestry-making via the art of Anni Albers, particularly some of the Bauhaus artist’s 1920s weavings that she studied “and drew over and over again,” she told me in a phone interview.
This particular angle of her multidisciplinary practice eventually led to an introduction to the Met’s tapestry experts, including Cleland, who were interested in commissioning a related performance or lecture. The Met eventually commissioned and hosted the piece a few years ago. One of the producers on the current run is actor Frances McDormand who previously collaborated with Bocanegra on a Shaker Museum show and performance last fall. Bocanegra told me her initial tapestry research and work efforts were interrupted in 2020, giving her plenty of initial time to think about her technique and approach.
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor, in performance at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on February 19, 2022. Photo: Stephanie Berger.
However, Bocanegra has packed the lecture with so many insightful connections and detail, mining not just on her personal but ancient and social history.
Part of it reads: “I wanted to make pieces, complicated and busy-like Renaissance tapestries, but also simple and plain. There are exceptions—but historically Men weave for profit, the men who wove the Honor tapestry were paid professionals, working in strictly regulated crafts guilds. It was Illegal for women to belong to the guild. Women weave cloth at home—for their family’s use. Unpaid.”
This thread leads on to personal reflections about how the artist resisted her mother’s urging to take home economics class in high school, and how she later found a library book on the history of home economics, randomly. “It was created by Ellen Swallow Richards a chemist specializing in sanitation and the first woman to graduate from MIT. Home economics was Richards’s attempt to bring honor to the work that women did in the home.”
Bocanegra also manages to weave in memories of her favorite childhood fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel (a “gruesome story about starvation and killing your family” but also one with “a house made of candy”). There are also deep dives into the brutality of religious persecution via the Spanish Inquisition and the honor conferred to young girls via the medals and insignia of the Girl Scouts, of which Bocanegra was an avid member during her youth.
Taylor Takes on Honor
“Suzanne follows things she respects,” actor Lili Taylor told me in a phone interview. “She makes connections and she keeps following things. She’s always making meaning, and I think it’s an important outlook for everyone, not just artists.”
Taylor has now been working with Bocanegra for over a decade, including on previous performances such as When A Priest Marries a Witch, Bodycast, and Farmhouse/Whorehouse, which appeared at various venues across the U.S.
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor, in performance at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on February 19, 2022. Photo: Stephanie Berger.
Previous one- or two- night performances of Honor took place at the Met post-pandemic, but this two-week run at the the Performing Garage in Soho (ending Sunday, September 14) marks the longest continuous run to date.
Taylor, who is soon heading to Germany to commence multi-month filming of the Hunger Games prequel told me that performing Honor every night “is actually kind of fun. Suzanne is loving it, because she understands what happens when you settle into a run. You don’t have to keep stressing out.”
Their shared ability to roll with the punches was more than obvious on opening night on September 3, when Taylor walked onstage with an air cast and a cane. In very meta-fashion, she said, “Lili will be performing with a broken ankle tonight. She tripped over her dog Oreo in the middle of the night. This is Oreo.” A large image of her Shih Tzu-Chihuahua flashed on a screen to laughter and “awws” from the packed theater.
When I asked Bocanegra about the set-up of enlisting Taylor to read (she wears an earpiece and receives the text as spoken from the artist), she explained: “I’m not an actor and I have seen so many artist and art historian lectures over the years where, even if the information is fascinating, of course they’re not trained. I don’t know how to entertain.”
Cleland, for her part, has enjoyed watching Bocanegra engage with the tapestry.
“She immediately grasped the performative character of the scene and the series,” she said. “So many modern-day observers would either dismiss or revere this as a precious but anachronistic relic of a totally distant society; conversely, Suzanne treats the tapestry and its message as a fresh and absorbing springboard for her own artistic ingenuity… Honor is a work of art, provocative, funny, multi-layered and clever, and I love witnessing this 16th-century art and 21st-century artist collide!”
Honor is on view at Peforming Garage, 33 Wooster Street, New York, through September 14. More

Europe’s answer to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Peggy Guggenheim, Helene Kröller-Müller’s influential tastes and expertise, as much as her wealth, saw her establish a new template for art philanthropy and personal legacy-building in the 20th century. She is best-known as one of the very first collectors to recognize the significance of Vincent van Gogh’s unusual painting style. Built over just three decades, she amassed a magnificent collection of some 11,500 objects, featuring luminaries of Neo-Impressionist and Modern art, including Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, and Piet Mondrian.
For more than eight decades, the coveted collection has been on public display at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands. Now, the trailblazing collector’s vision is traveling to London with the opening of “Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists,” a new loan exhibition at the U.K.’s National Gallery that runs until February 8, 2026.
Press view of Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists. Photo: © The National Gallery, London.
Taking as its focus the late 19th-century, the show will reveal how a new generation of experimental artists took the baton from the Impressionists and became the oft-cited forefathers of Modern art. In the spotlight are leading figures like Van Gogh, Paul Signac, Camille Pissaro, and Seurat—whose infamous Le Chahut (Cancan Dancers) (1889-90) is being shown in the U.K. for the first time—as well as lesser-known but important painters whose careers Kröller-Müller helped establish, like Jan Toorop, Théo van Rysselberghe, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Maximilien Luce. The cast is completed with some choice loans from private collections, including works by the notable woman painter Anna Boch.
How did a German heiress with no background in art come to build such an era-defining collection? Born in 1869 to a wealthy industrialist, Kröller-Müller was only 19 when she married her father’s most promising employee, the Dutch entrepreneur Anton Kröller. While he was busy turning Müller & Co. into a highly profitable international powerhouse, Helene had four children before the age of 30. It was only some years later, in 1905, that she was able to dedicate her leisure hours to developing a nascent interest in art.
Anna Boch, During the Ascension (1893). MuZEE Collection – City of Ostend Collection. Image: © Bridgeman Images.
Soon enough, Kröller-Müller’s beloved teacher Hendricus Petrus Bremmer had become something of a proto-art advisor, visiting studios, galleries, and auction houses on Kröller-Müller’s behalf to help her source new work. By 1913, she had already established a private museum in her name in the Hague, the first dedicated to modern art in the Netherlands.
But as her collection grew rapidly, Kröller-Müller was recognized for much more than merely writing cheques. Long before he became one of art history’s most prized artists, she amassed the largest private Van Gogh collection in the world at no fewer than 91 paintings and 180 works on paper. Her interest in the impact of Neo-Impressionists, like Van Gogh, on the artistic developments of her day even saw her publish the 1925 book, Considerations regarding problems in the development of Modern painting, in which Kröller-Müller proposed two dominant strands in Modern art: realism and idealism.
Helene Kröller-Müller. © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
Kröller-Müller was even a pioneer of the classic “white cube” modern art gallery aesthetic, which she first considered with the prominent De Stijl designer Bart van der Leck in 1916 for the art room in her new villa. Though that plan was eventually abandoned as too radical, the look was later adopted after Kröller-Müller bequeathed her collection to the Dutch nation and oversaw designs for a new museum by the Belgian architect Henry van der Velde. Since opening in 1938, a year before Kröller-Müller’s death, her museum has been housed on Helene and Anton’s formerly private estate, Hoge Veluwe National Park, now a national park in Otterlo.
Here are five standout works going on view at the National Gallery in London.
Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower (1888)
Vincent van Gogh, The Sower (1888). Photo: Rik Klein Gotink, © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
Kröller-Müller’s collecting journey began with Van Gogh and she became so enamored with the Dutch artist that, in 1912, she went on a “hunt for all the best Van Goghs” with Bremmer in Paris. When she gave him the spacious front room of her first museum a year later, it was a statement in support of a then overlooked artist. She described the effect of his paintings as “powerful, dramatic & heavy, like hammer blows” bar a few exceptional works that were conversely “delicate or very calm.”
As well as her very first Van Goghs acquired in 1907–Four sunflowers gone to seed (1887) and Edge of a Wood (1883)–the National Gallery exhibition will include The Sower (1888), made after a 1850 painting of the same name by Jean-François Millet. The figure of the agricultural laborer scattering seeds in the warm glow of dusk would become a common theme but, in this instance, most of our attention is on the heavily textured earth of recently ploughed land.
Georges Seurat’s Le Chahut (1889-90)
Georges Seurat, Le Chahut (1888-89). Photo: © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
In developing Pointillism, a painting technique in which a composition is made up of small dots of pure color, Seurat was one of the artists who most boldly developed, and departed from, the ideas of the Impressionists. Unlike their harmonies of similar color, Seurat and his peers positioned contrasting hues beside each other according to scientific color theory, so that they could vibrate and merge in the viewer’s eye. These optical effects were initially met with resistance by critics but at least one Belgian journalist, writing in L’Art Moderne in 1887, appreciated how they achieved “a higher and sublimated reality.”
Le Chahut, or the Cancan Dancers, was one of Seurat’s most divisive paintings when it was first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1890. Pointillism was dynamized by the complex interplay of lines–in the dancers’ lifted legs, the neck of a musical instrument, and the conductor’s baton–and the composition was widely read as a condemnation of the seedy decadence of the time. Some critics compared its formal language to that of advertisements for popular entertainments. The sense that the image is a contrived depiction rather than a realistic interpretation of events was amplified by the painting of a blue border around the edge of the canvas.
Henri-Edmond Cross’s Bullfight (1891-92)
Henri-Edmond Cross, Bullfight (1891-92). Photo: © photo courtesy the owner.
After Van Gogh and Seurat, the French painter Henri-Edmond Cross is one of the best represented artists in Kröller-Müller’s collection. He was cherished perhaps most for his placid, abstracted landscapes, which, in the collector’s words, capture a sense of “the unchanging pure reality behind the changeable forms of nature.”
One of his most striking works included in “Radical Harmony,” however, is a bullfight seen from the bleachers. This vantage point becomes a study of the act of looking–a significant portion of the action is concealed by the back of another spectator’s head. Elsewhere, another viewer peers through binoculars. Pointillism is used to capture both large masses in the foreground and each individual audience member on the outer edge of the ring. Cross was cited as a major influence on Henri Matisse’s development of Fauvism at the start of the 20th century.
Jan Toorop’s Evening (before the Strike) (ca. 1888-89)
Jan Toorop, Evening (before the Strike) (1888-89). Photo: © photo courtesy the owner.
Dutch artist Jan Toorop was a central member of the Belgian avant-garde artistic society Les XX (The Twenty), which played a prominent role in developing Neo-Impressionism. He is notable for his interest in working-class subjects: often young couples who have found a moment of privacy behind a tree in a rural setting, as in Glimmer of the Setting Sun or Seduction (c. 1888-1889).
Two of his most moving works on view at the National Gallery are Evening (before the Strike) (c. 1888-89) and Morning (after the Strike) (1888-89), a pair of paintings that pull us into a precarious and impoverished, yet tenderly depicted, world of striking laborers. In the first image, a mother nursing a baby and a father, barefoot and clutching his face in exaggerated despair, crouch in anticipation of violent retribution for having stepped out of line. In the second, their worst suspicions are confirmed as a family are forced to carry away the slumped corpse of a young man. The works were inspired by the poor treatment of strikers in Charleroi.
Théo van Rysselberghe’s Anna Boch (1892)
Théo van Rysselberghe, In July, before noon (1890). Photo: © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
Another key member of Les XX, the Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe is the author of the very last Neo-Impressionist artwork even acquired by Kröller-Müller: In July, before Noon, a charming, summery Pointillist composition featuring five women at rest from 1890. Another notable female subject by the painter is fellow Les XX member Anna Boch (1892), in which she appears as though ready to recommence work on the painting before her, wearing a blue smock with her palette in hand.
Like many of her peers, Boch was drawn to everyday subjects and dreamy landscapes. In During the Ascension (pictured above), she tenderly portrays the congregation outside a church in the humble Belgian fishing village where she lived. We get the sense of her familiarity with the local community from the care taken to capture each individual posture, even in figures seen from behind. The artist was recently the subject of a long overdue exhibition “Anna Boch: An Impressionist Journey” in Ostend and Pont-Aven in 2023.
“Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists” is on view at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, U.K., September 13–February 8, 2026. More

There is a lot to think about in a one-room exhibition at the nonprofit Brooklyn art venue Recess, where the Gaza Biennale has touched down for its first North American outing. Including 25 Palestinian artists, “From Gaza to the World” is what the organizers are calling the New York pavilion of a roving exhibition they have termed (after some debate) a biennale, launched in 2024 and since then developed by the Forbidden Museum of Jabal Al Risan. 
Seeing this show is an exercise in feeling powerless, and I’m afraid anything I say in the face of these works will be hopelessly banal. But it is essential viewing. Set against the context of the ongoing Israel-Gaza War, the exhibition bears witness to life under bombardment, famine, and displacement. Artists keep creating work, desperate to express themselves, to be heard, to be remembered, to live.
Malaka Abu Owda, When the Body Became a Message (2024). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Many of the artists in the Biennale continue to make work in Gaza, while some are displaced. The organizers of the Gaza Biennale said that the show “makes evident the challenges that Palestinian artists face in presenting their work globally, raising questions such as: how do you exhibit art that’s inaccessible while under siege, yet endures despite a genocide?”
Israel launched its war in Gaza in 2023 with the stated goal of eliminating the threat from the militant group Hamas, which attacked a music festival on October 7, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 people hostage, many of whom have yet to be released. The resulting military action in the Gaza Strip has seen its infrastructure destroyed, with nearly 90 percent of its population displaced. Gaza’s Health Ministry estimates the death toll at more than 64,000, about half of them women and children. The World Health Organization and a UN-backed panel have declared a famine in the territory and Amnesty International, the United Nations special rapporteur, and some countries have alleged Israel is committing a genocide. Israel denies the claim, calling the war an act of self-defense.
Mohammed Moghari, Tent (2025). Courtesy the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Since it is difficult for people and artworks to escape Gaza in the current conditions, many of the objects on view are documentation of the art being produced there: printouts of paintings, a facsimile of an artist’s notebook, and the like, with wall labels specifying the materials of the original pieces. Many of the works are straightforward, offering documentary presentations of life in displaced persons camps, and mournful renditions of death and destruction. Extensive wall labels include heartbreaking quotes from the artists and plentiful biographical information.
Greeting visitors near the entry is a small tapestry by Firas Thabet, Gaznica (2025), which adapts Picasso’s famous antiwar painting Guernica; a tearful woman in a keffiyeh overlooks a scene of wailing women, with Palestinian flags waving. A wall text notes that Guernica, too, was reproduced as a tapestry, in which form it hangs in the United Nations headquarters, just a few miles away.
Fatima Ali Abu Owdah, How Alone You Were (2025). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Some of the most powerful words in the show came from the artist Fatema Abu Owda, accompanying printouts of sand-hued ink drawings with text from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s book In Praise of the High Shadow. “No one survives here,” she says, “they just slowly decay. I search for peace among the remains of those who are gone.” 
Emad Badwan’s docudrama Live Broadcast (2024) shows two journalists in the West Deir al-Balah refugee camp, helmeted, in flak jackets emblazoned with the word “press,” trying to broadcast from a rooftop overlooking endless tents. “Guys, can anyone hear us?” one asks, noting that there’s no signal to be had. It’s an effective metaphor. The camera studies children playing hopscotch, building sand castles. Voices complain of missile strikes on civilians. A lot of the action takes place as one of the journalists waits in an interminable bathroom line.
Emad Badwan, film still from Live Broadcast, (2024).  Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale
A painting of a destroyed city by Motaz Naim could be an allover abstraction; it has the misfortune here of being reproduced only in a projection, so we have no idea of its scale or texture. But it does effectively echo photos of whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble, and reminds the viewer that landscape painting can be profoundly political.
Murad Al-Assar has four paintings on view, in a faux-naive style, one showing a girl who had her leg amputated; another shows four children, a bomb over each one’s head; another shows a child trying to block their ears from the noise of war as bombs drop in the distance. Text nearby relates the artist’s experience of trying to distract his children from terror on a winter night among the noise of war. The painting of the amputee is based on a rendition of the girl by his 13-year-old daughter, who said that she “should appear strong.”
Motaz Naim, The Mural in the Silence of Destruction, from the series “Gaza and Its Destroyed Cities” (2024-25). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
The show gives rise to some thoughts. It’s seemingly an article of faith among many people in my circles that art is “impotent and frivolous,” as Art in America’s Emily Watlington recently put it, and that feeling is easy to understand in a context where the market drives much of the conversation, and art is often positioned as a luxury. 
Murad Al-Assar, Noise of Death (2025). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Their lives under constant threat, these artists continue to make work in an open-air prison at best, an open-air mass grave at worst. Are they foolish to believe in art’s efficacy? “Poetry is not a luxury,” wrote Audre Lorde. “It is a vital necessity of our existence.” So, too, is art for these artists in Gaza, and therein is its power.
“From Gaza to the World” is on view through September 14 at Recess, 46 Washington Street, Brooklyn, New York. An abbreviated version will be on view September 18–December 20. Other iterations of the Biennale are soon to be on view in Walla Walla, Washington; Istanbul; Athens; Valencia, Spain; Sarajevo; and Berlin. Other pavilions appeared previously at other European sites, and future exhibitions are planned internationally. More

If you spend much time in New York, you are probably among the the six million or so who ride one of the world’s largest and oldest subway systems each day. You may have the New Yorker’s classic love-hate relationship with the system, which can take you practically anywhere for a few bucks, but is notoriously underfunded and run-down. And if so, artist Chloë Bass’s latest project may just speak to you. Literally.
If you hear something, free something is the New York native’s first sound art project, and it is the first-ever takeover by an artist of the sound system in Gotham’s labyrinthine subway complex. Waiting on selected mezzanines, riders hear a deep, attention-getting tone (designed in collaboration with artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste), followed by one of 24 announcements—though the voices may challenge the definition of that last word, as what you’ll hear isn’t always strictly informational, but rather evocative.
An audience gathered to hear a performance organized by Creative Time for Chloë Bass’s new sound project, at the Fulton Street Center. Photo: Ally Caple, Courtesy Creative Time
Last week, in the first moments of the New York fall season, dozens of observers gathered at the massive Fulton Street Center to see a group of 10 performers, scattered throughout the atrium, deliver a performance of the texts, composed by Bass.
“What we hear changes how we feel,” says a voice in one recording. “How we feel changes what we do. And what we do changes the world around us, even if just for a moment.”
Another is a dialogue between two voices. “Remember when Aretha Franklin died and people were singing her songs together on crowded train cars?” asks one. “It was amazing. Everyone was sad, and everyone was smiling,” responds the second. “It was a moment when I wanted to say to the city, ‘You see? That’s how you are,’” says voice one, to which voice two responds, “All these little private worlds coinciding out in public.” 
Each announcement—they will play in English, Spanish, Arabic, Bangla, Haitian Kreyòl, and Mandarin—is followed by the title of the project, which recalls the ubiquitous exhortation “If you see something, say something,” urging riders to protect each other from danger—or, if you like, surveil one another. Ticker displays transmit a brief explanatory text penned by the artist. Posters in the stations will also clue straphangers in to the project, but it may just be that some will hear the announcements while not seeing the posters, and go on about their day with a bit of mystery. 
Sounding Off About Sound
Sound is one of the things that drive subway riders crazy, I pointed out in a phone interview with the artist. Announcements from conductors often come over the speakers in a garbled mess, and riders look around at one another, incredulous, hoping it’s not life-saving information being conveyed. Some stations are also so loud as to be potentially damaging to the human ear.
“Complaining about sound in the subway is a New Yorker’s birthright,” acknowledged Bass, who noted that generations of her family have lived here. “We’re being given information of different forms, and sometimes it’s decipherable and sometimes it’s indecipherable. But recently it’s been mostly about ways that we should make sure to keep ourselves and others safe.”
Chloë Bass. Photo: Naima Green.
“I support the idea of public safety,” she added, “but the announcements are all about monitoring your behavior and the behavior of people around you, and we already know about ways to keep safe, even without thinking about them. There are other ways to use public address to ground these forms of safety that we practice together.”
New York public art presenter Creative Time approached Bass with the same question it poses to the artists it solicits: What’s your dream public project? Having created a mosaic that combines found photographic imagery and her poetic texts at a Brooklyn subway stop in 2023, the artist was already thinking about the subways, and jumped at the chance to have the nonprofit support a project that would go wider. Over the years, Creative Time has presented numerous high-profile projects, including Tribute in Light (2002), which recreates the Twin Towers in light annually on the site where they stood, and Kara Walker’s massive sugar sphinx, A Subtlety… (2014). It also organizes a much-anticipated annual convening, the Creative Time Summit.
“If you hear something, free something engages the largest transit system in the Western Hemisphere, a place where an incredible complexity of public life unfolds,” said Creative Time curator Diya Vij in press materials. “The MTA serves millions of New York City residents daily, spanning every single neighborhood and social boundary. It is where every denomination of New York City meets. For this truly public art work, Bass offers a monumental but fleeting gesture that seeks to change the way we relate to each other in public life and public space. She asks us to consider, if we change what we hear, can we change how we feel, and in turn, will we be better neighbors?”
Public Input on Public Interventions
Bass maintains a multifarious practice; Creative Time describes her as “a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, conversation, situation, publication, and installation.” The new work continues a thread that has been present in past works by the artist, which have also constituted an intervention in systems of public communication. One past project I saw dealt with visual signage; in 2020, the Studio Museum in Harlem presented her show “Wayfinding,” in a Harlem park, just as society was beginning to reopen after pandemic shutdowns. Three billboards throughout the park asked the questions: “How much of care is patience? How much of life is coping? How much of love is attention?”
A performer reads a script in a performance launching Chloë Bass’s Creative Time project If you hear something, free something (2025). Photo: Ally Caple, Courtesy Creative Time
In addition to the Studio Museum project, Bass has had recent solo projects at upstate New York’s Buffalo AKG Art Museum; California African American Museum at Art + Practice, in Los Angeles; Skirball Cultural Center, also in L.A.; and the Pulitzer Art Foundation in St. Louis. She also recently had her first solo commercial exhibition, “Chloë Bass: Twice Seen,” at New York gallery Alexander Gray Associates. That show was billed as “a multifaceted investigation into the nature of representation, positioning racial and cultural hybridity as foundational to American identity.”
The public was involved with If you hear something even before a sound was ever recorded. The artist conducted four preparatory focus groups, one with teenagers through East Harlem arts nonprofit Artistic Noise, one with straphangers, one with transit advocacy groups, and one with Metropolitan Transit Authority workers; all were paid for their time, but, said Bass, even those required to be there for work brought “real sentiment and thoughtfulness.”
That was encouraging, Bass said, “because this is a scary project. New Yorkers have a lot of opinions, and not everything is ideal for everyone—ever.”
If you hear something, free something is at the following subway stations through October 5, courtesy of Creative Time:
Bronx: Westchester Square (6) and 167 Street (B,D)
Queens: Court Square (7,G), 74th Street – Broadway (7), and Mets Willets Point (7)
Brooklyn: Clinton-Washington Avenues (G), Fort Hamilton Parkway Brooklyn (F,G), York Street (F), and Atlantic Avenue / Barclays Center (2,3,4,5).
Manhattan: Grand Central (S), 5th Avenue Bryant Park (7), Fulton Street (4,5), 163 Street Manhattan (A,C), and Union Square (4,5,6). More

Washington’s loss is Baltimore’s gain. “Amy Sherald: American Sublime,” a retrospective that the artist pulled in protest from a planned presentation at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in the nation’s capital, will instead appear at the Baltimore Museum of Art, just 40 miles to the northeast. The show will open November 2. 
“Baltimore has always been part of my DNA as an artist,” said Sherald in a press release. “Every brushstroke carries a little of its history, its energy, its people, and my time there. To bring this exhibition here is to return that love.”
The artist yanked the show from what was to be its final venue over censorship concerns. She said that she learned that her painting Trans Forming Liberty (2024), which reminagines the Statue of Liberty as a Black trans woman, might not be shown due for fear of offending the Trump Administration. The president has spoken out on numerous occasions about museums being too “woke” and has specifically targeted the Smithsonian for showing works he deems offensive. The White House included Trans Forming Liberty on a list of artworks released under the heading “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian.”
Amy Sherald, Trans Forming Liberty (2024). Image courtesy the artist and Hauser and Wirth. © Amy Sherald. Photo: Kevin Bulluck.
The museum, speaking to the New York Times, which first reported the cancelation, presented a different account of what happened during the planning of the show. The museum told the Times that the painting was never going to be replaced, but rather “contextualized” with a video that, according to Sherald, was to show people reacting to the painting and discussing transgender issues. The Smithsonian maintains that Sherald misunderstood the museum’s proposal. In any case, the video itself may have been enough of a red flag. “The video would have opened up for debate the value of trans visibility and I was opposed to that being a part of the ‘American Sublime’ narrative,” Sherald told the paper.
Sherald secured her place in art history when she painted an official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018. She also gained widespread attention for her 2020 portrait of Breonna Taylor, who was killed by police while sleeping in her home in Louisville, Kentucky; the portrait was featured on the cover of Vanity Fair. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History and the Speed Art Museum jointly acquired the Taylor painting. Both the Obama and Taylor portraits are in the retrospective.
Amy Sherald, Ecclesia (The Meaning of Inheritance and Horizons) (2024) on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Sansho Scott / BFA.com
“American Sublime” is the most comprehensive presentation of Sherald’s work to date, exploring her career since 2007 and featuring about 40 paintings. A presentation at the NPG would have been meaningful in several ways: the artist was the first African-American woman to win the museum’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition in 2016, before her rise to stardom, and she would have been the first Black contemporary artist with a solo show at the museum. The NPG outing would also have capped the show’s tour, which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in January before touching down at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in April.
But the Baltimore presentation will be meaningful in its own way. Sherald earned her MFA in painting from the city’s renowned Maryland Institute College of Art, and was living there when she achieved national recognition. The BMA acquired her painting Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between in 2018, the year it was made, and has included her in several group shows since then. She was already slated to be an honoree at the museum’s 2025 gala in November. 
The Baltimore Museum of Art. Photo by Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images.
“I’ve had the great pleasure and joy of knowing Amy Sherald for a decade,” said Asma Naeem, the BMA’s director, in press materials. “In that time, she has become a cultural force, capturing the public imagination through works that are powerful and resonant in their profound humanity. Amy’s story is also deeply intertwined with Baltimore. Beyond her education and time lived in our beloved city, Baltimore is rooted in her subjects, on her canvases, and in her titles.”
“American Sublime” will remain on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive, through April 5, 2026. More

The summer is over and the fall art season has officially kicked off in New York City. The cultural calendar is chock-full of art fairs, museum shows, and of course gallery exhibitions. There’s something for everyone, from art historical rediscoveries to emerging talents, plus performances and works on offer in every conceivable medium. Read on for our picks of shows to see this week.

“Mercedes Matter” at Berry CampbellSeptember 5–October 4, 2025
Mercedes Matter, Untitled, (ca. 1848). Image Courtesy of Berry Campbell.
The latest forgotten woman of Abstract Expressionism ripe for renewed attention is the late Mercedes Matter, who is getting her first solo show at Berry Campbell. (The gallery has previously helped revive the reputations of female Postwar artists such as Lynne Drexler.) One of the first abstract painters in the U.S., Matter was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936 and became a key figure of the Ab-Ex movement. And in addition to her studio practice, Matter, who studied under Hans Hofmann, was an important arts educator, founding the New York Studio School in 1964. The exhibition offers an overview of her unjustly overlooked career, from early figure drawings to mature, large-scale canvases that meld abstraction and figuration with bold and colorful brushstrokes, as well as some of Matter’s late charcoal drawings.
Berry Campbell is located at 524 West 26th Street, New York, New York.
—Sarah Cascone 

“Julio Torres: Color Stories” at Performance Space New YorkSeptember 3–September 22, 2025
Julio Torres at Performance Space New York. Image Courtesy of Color Theories.
At the core of Julio Torres’s work is art—whether in Problemista, his surreal comedy set on the fringes of the New York art world with Tilda Swinton, or in the world-building of Fantasmas, his Peabody-winning HBO series. Both projects share the visual audacity and outré fashion that have become Torres’s signature, shaped by his years orbiting galleries and institutions as an amused, skeptical outsider.
That sensibility carries into Color Theories, his off-Broadway debut at Performance Space New York, a venue with deep experimental roots that feels perfectly suited to a comic whose stand-up has always bordered on performance art. Here, Torres blends design, dream logic, and wry humor into a theatrical exploration of how colors map onto feeling and memory. Expect something between comedy, theater, and art piece, with Torres as both spirit guide and trickster.
Performance Space New York, Keith Haring Theater, is located at 150 1st Avenue, 4th floor, New York, New York. Tickets are available at color-theories.com
—William Van Meter 

“Gabrielle Garland: I’ll Get You, My Pretty, and Your Little Dog Too” at Miles McEnerySeptember 4–October 25, 2025
Gabrielle Garland, I’m glad he’s single because I’m going to climb that like a tree. —Megan, Bridesmaids (2011) (2025). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery.
It is the first New York solo show for Gabrielle Garland, whose neon palette and use of skewed scale and perspective lend a surreal note to her paintings of suburban homes. Each house takes on a personality of its own in her square compositions, homes captured under the blazing sun at the heat of midday, at golden hour, or in the dark of night, illuminated by street lamp or porch light. Garland paints her subjects with an undeniable reverence, but not in the pursuit of photorealism, instead embracing the unreliability of our memories. Letting certain architectural elements loom larger than life creates distortions that are at once endearing and unsettling, lending character to what whether others might see as cookie cutter housing developments.
Miles McEnery is located at 511 West 22nd Street, New York, New York.
—Sarah Cascone 

“Omar Ba: Promises and Glory” at TemplonSeptember 3–October 25, 2025
Omar Ba, Promises and Glory, (2025). Image Courtesy of Templon.
Omar Ba conjures fantastical worlds. Sometimes they’re quite alarming. Trained in Senegal before continuing his studies in Geneva, Switzerland, Ba has long woven together African and European traditions, critiquing both with equal brio. In layered works of paint, pencil, pen, and Indian ink, faceless dictators loom over tanks and soldiers and Christianity melds with animism. America has now entered the mix. Following a 2020 residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Ba now splits his time between New York and Dakar. At Templon Galerie he presents 30 new portraits that, though rooted in the city, wander across the Atlantic and back again.
Templon is located at 293 10th Avenue, New York, New York. 
—Richard Whiddington

“Kat Ryals: Showroom Dynasty” at 5-50 GallerySeptember 6–October 12, 2025
Kat Ryals, Pattern Recognition. Image Courtesy of Michelle Silver.
There is more than meets the eye to the 10 ornate-looking rugs from Kat Ryals’s “Rug” series for the Brooklyn artist’s first solo show with 5-50. Each work is actually a large multimedia collage, the ornate pattern of a 17th-century Savonnerie French rug created using a variety of both natural and artificial objects, including poker chips and other gambling paraphernalia. Ryals then takes high-resolution photographs of these labor-intensive tableaux, printing them at life-scale on velvet rugs using a commercial dye sublimation print process. The result is the illusion of luxury, an image of various detritus masquerading as a hand-woven textile, much as a Las Vegas casino apes the opulence of the baroque, while promising visitors a shot at capturing such wealth for themselves.
5-50 Gallery is located at 5-50 51st Avenue, Long Island City, New York. 
—Sarah Cascone 

“June Edmonds: The Sky Remains the Same” at Galerie LelongSeptember 4–October 25, 2025
June Edmonds, Still Point, (2025). Courtesy of Galerie Lelong.
This marks L.A.-based artist June Edmonds’s first major solo show in New York, featuring new paintings inspired by “ebe-amen,” a river leaf motif. The ebe-amẹn, featured as a quatrefoil or symmetrically shaped form, is prominently showcased in metallic plaques from the Kingdom of Benin, where it was associated with the power and protection of kings and deities.
Edmonds has long centered her practice in researching major events in Black American art and history, For this body of work, “The Sky Remains the Same,” she recontextualizes the historic, sacred geometric form. Bonus: On Saturday September 6, at 3 p.m., the gallery will present a conversation between Edmonds and independent curator jill moniz. The talk is free to attend, and the gallery requests visitors register here in advance.
Galerie Lelong is located at 528 West 26th Street, New York, New York. 
—Eileen Kinsella

“Bilgé: 1975” at Sapar ContemporarySeptember 5–October 13, 2025
Bilgé, Threshold state (1975). Image Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary.
The late Turkish American Bilge Civelekoğlu Friedlaender, known as Bilgé, is currently the subject of her first U.S. museum solo show, with an impressive outing at New York’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Art. Her second exhibition at Sapar Contemporary hones in on the works of a single, watershed year, with watercolors, collages, and sculptural works made using torn paper—a technique that helped Bilgé redefine her practice after she had destroyed nearly every canvas she had ever made just three years prior. The show makes the case that moving beyond the confines of the canvas allowed Bilgé to find herself, and a new style imbued the austerity of minimalism with an undeniable romanticism.
Sapar Contemporary is located at 9 North Moore Street, New York, New York.
—Sarah Cascone 

“9 Women, 20th Century” at NagasSeptember 3–October 25, 2025
Amaranth Ehrenhalt, Untitled (1966). Courtesy of Nagas.
Nagas is paying tribute to the great dealer Peggy Guggenheim’s landmark 1943 show “Exhibition of 31 Women,” which was the first all-woman art show, with a wide-ranging exhibition that includes both artists who have recently enjoyed renewed attention, like Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, and others who remain obscure. There’s Louise  Janin, a California artist who moved to Paris and developed her own art forms she dubbed cosmogrammes, swirling pigments in liquid to create abstract compositions. Also largely unknown because she spent much of her career in Europe is Amaranth Ehrenhalt, a second generation Abstract Expressionist painter who embraced vibrant colors. Other intriguing figures in the exhibition include British Surrealist Grace  Pailthorpe and Filipino textile artist Pacita Abad, who recently enjoyed a stunning traveling retrospective.
Nagas is located at 47 West 28th Street, Floor 2, New York, New York.
—Sarah Cascone 

“Spencer Finch: One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige)” at James CohanSeptember 5–October 4, 2025
Spencer Finch, One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige), (2025) (detail). Image Courtesy of James Cohan.
As a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Spencer Finch took to meticulously copying Claude Monet paintings, an experience he described as “his first brush with Stockholm syndrome.” One wonders what Finch has to say about Hiroshige, the 19th century Japanese woodblock master whose “100 Famous Views of Edo” he has spent the past year channeling. Here, New York plays the muse. Fitch laid a period map of Edo, modern-day Tokyo, over a contemporary one of New York and then photographed the corresponding locations. He focused on Hiroshige’s spring paintings, adopting their shapes, cut-outs, and formats across 42 watercolors. The city emerges in slices and half-familiar fragments, an assembly James Cohan calls Finch’s “love letter” to his long-time home.
James Cohan is located at 52 Walker Street, New York, New York. 
—Richard Whiddington

“Echoes and Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels” at Spruth MagersSeptember 5–October 25, 2025
Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1973–76), Great Basin Desert, Utah. © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo: ZCZ Films/James Fox, courtesy Holt/Smithson Foundation.
If you’ve yet to take the time to make a pilgrimage to Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), Nancy Holt’s famed earthwork in the remote Utah desert, the next best thing just might be the late artist’s first show at Sprüth Magers New York. The show includes drawings, collages, and photographs related to the work, many of which have not been previously exhibited. An installation of four large concrete cylinders lying on their sides in an x-formation, Sun Tunnels is positioned in alignment with the movements of the sun, so that it frames the sunrise and sunset on the Winter and Summer Solstices .A pair of earlier sculptures from her “Studio Locators” series are also included in the exhibition, short steel pipes mounted at eye level, as if they are telescopes without lenses, framing views of the same objects they originally pointed at in Holt’s studio, as referenced in the titles, Locator (Exhaust Pipe) and Locator (Two Windows). 
Sprüth Magers is located at 22 East 80th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, New York.
—Sarah Cascone 

“John McAllister: Sun Sundry Beguiles Wild” at James FuentesSeptember 5–October 5, 2025
John McAllister, ablaze rapt chorus beaming, (2025). Courtesy of James Fuentes.
This marks masterful landscape painter John McAllister’s seventh solo show at James Fuentes, featuring seven new large-scale works that further the artist’s exploration of painting as an immersive field. Inspired by his bike rides through the woods where he resides in Massachusetts, McAllister is a a keen observer of New England’s contrasting seasonal extremes. At the center of the show is ablaze rapt chorus beaming (2025), a sprawling nine-by-fourteen-foot panorama infused with yellow light. Though McAllister is deeply inspired by Impressionism and Fauvism, he aims “less at representation than at evocation,” according to the gallery.
James Fuentes is located at 52 White Street, New York, New York. 
— Eileen Kinsella
“Kahlil Robert Irving” at CanadaSeptember 5–October 18, 2025
Kahlil Robert Irving, Gold GrainedBOX&Gravel[Handle{Terracotta = Architectural Ornament}]news, 2023–2025. Image Courtesy of Canada.Time moves strangely in the work of Kahlil Robert Irving. Taking inspiration from a digital archive that he started in 2012, the images and objects reproduced in his work are recognizably contemporary but simultaneously like products of some ancient archeological dig. Irving noted, “my ceramic sculptures engage in a kind of slow photography, using the kiln as an exposure unit transforming wet malleable clay into ceramic… it is a kind of deep time.” Fresh off his major travelling solo show “Archaeology of the Present”—shown at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, respectively—Irving is set to debut a new body of work at Canada in “EF3+E40.” Here, a range of paintings and sculptures tap into parallel realities, one physical the other digital, suggesting new pathways between the two.
Canada is located at 60 Lispenard Street, New York, New York.
—Annikka Olsen More

A rarely seen work by the great Italian artist Caravaggio (1571–1610), the master of chiaroscuro who helped usher the Renaissance into the Baroque period, is coming to Florida for an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. The canvas, titled Boy Bitten by a Lizard, is the star of a show featuring 40 paintings by the Caravaggisti, as the renowned artist’s followers have come to be known.
“It’s really fascinating to see the enormous impact of this single revolutionary artist,” Stanton Thomas, the MFA St. Petersburg’s chief curator, told me.
Titled “In Caravaggio’s Light: Baroque Masterpieces from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi,” the exhibition is drawn from the holdings of the Fondazione Roberto Longhi, an institute founded in 1970 by Italian art historian Roberto Longhi (1889–1970). A leading Caravaggio scholar, Longhi is credited with rehabilitating the artist’s reputation after a long period during which Baroque art was decidedly out of fashion. Flying in the face of popular opinion, Longhi recognized the power of Caravaggio’s dramatically lit images, with all of the emotion and psychological intensity bound up in the realism of his canvases.
“During the 19th century, and even before that, Baroque painting was seen as overdramatic and in poor taste,” Thomas said. “And with Caravaggio, who was so peripatetic and just not very well understood or documented up until that point, Longhi recognized the quality of the paintings. And then he was able to do the archival research to discover more about Caravaggio’s life, and also to reattribute things to Caravaggio himself. So he’s really the person who single-handedly revived the career of this extraordinarily influential artist.”
Valentin De Boulogne, Denial of Saint Peter (ca. 1615–17). Courtesy of Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi, Florence, Italy.
An Art Historian Who Collected What He Studied
While Longhi was helping restore Caravaggio’s rightful place in the pantheon of art historical greats, he and his wife, fellow art historian Anna Banti, were also buying forgotten masterpieces of the era. Their collection is technically open to the public at the foundation’s Florence headquarters, where it can be visited by appointment, but has remained largely unseen by American audiences.
The last time Boy Bitten by a Lizard was in the U.S. was in 2012, at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum. Before that, it was 1940. And the larger Longhi collection has never had a dedicated outing in this country. (The show previously traveled to Poland and France, but this is its first time off the continent.)
Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1593–94). Collection of the Fondazione Roberto Longhi, Florence.
There is another autograph version of the work at London’s National Gallery, but this is a rare opportunity for American audiences to see the dramatic composition without taking a Transatlantic flight.
“We’ve all had that moment where something really uncomfortable suddenly happened to us.
It’s an amazing gesture—the young man is pulling his shoulders back and recoiling, with this look of shock and pain on his face. And it’s so true to life. I think that it still compels people to look at it centuries later because it is so realistic,” Thomas said. “Enhancing that is that beautiful light, the figure emerging from the shadowy recesses, this wonderful contrast between the shadows and the very pale skin. And then you get an even greater sense of luminosity because of that wonderful little still life where the lizard’s been hiding and the extraordinary vase.”
The MFA St. Petersburg exhibition will actually feature at least two original Caravaggio paintings, with Boy Bitten by a Lizard being joined by two copies of Boy Peeling Fruit, an early composition by the artist that he is believed to have painted multiple times while training in the workshop of artist Giuseppe Cesari (1568–1640). (Earlier this year, a Baroque art expert claimed to have found the earliest known version of the work, and by extension, the first known painting by Caravaggio.)
At the MFA, one will be on loan from a private collection in Rome, and the other is from Longhi’s collection—when he originally bought it, the art historian thought it was an autograph Caravaggio, but he later identified it as a copy. The foundation stands by that opinion, but it is more generally accepted as the real deal.
“Our understanding of Caravaggio has evolved since then, thanks to new technical examinations and better understanding of the artist and his career. One of the most exciting things about this exhibition is the chance to compare two versions,” said Thomas, who strongly suspects Longhi might have been right the first time. “I’m billing the show as two-and-a-half Caravaggios!”
Caravaggio, Boy Peeling Fruit (ca. 1593). Opinions vary on whether this work is an original or a copy. Courtesy of Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi, Florence, Italy.
Why Is Caravaggio So Important? 
Today, Caravaggio is one of art history’s biggest names, with any potential discovery of a new work by the artist making headlines around the world. Earlier this year, a blockbuster exhibition in Rome, “Caravaggio 2025,” brought together 24 examples of his work, and had to extend its run to meet audience demand.
An authenticated Caravaggio has not hit the auction block in modern times, according to the Artnet Price Database—although a purported rediscovered second version of his Judith Beheading Holofernes was snapped up by a private buyer ahead of a planned 2019 auction where it was expected to fetch up to €150 million ($171 million).
Another painting, originally attributed to a follower of another Baroque artist, was set to be auctioned in Spain in April 2021, until it was identified as a Caravaggio. The work, Ecce homo (1604–05), subsequently went on view at the Museo del Prado Museum in Madrid and sold last year to a British collector for €36 million ($39 million).
“In many ways, I see Caravaggio as the Baroque spirit,” Thomas said. “He’s the first person to really look to the street to find models who were from the lower classes. They were prostitutes and beggars, and that gives us sudden realism to his work. And of course, there’s the tenebrism. There’s that incredible lighting, as if a flashbulb on an old-fashioned camera went off. All of a sudden you see these wonderful shadows with these faces, these gestures emerging from the darkness. And this was something that people hadn’t seen before.”
Carlo Saraceni, Judith with the Head of Holofernes (ca. 1615–20). Courtesy of Fondazione di Studi di Storia dell’Arte Roberto Longhi, Florence, Italy.
An Artist Who Inspired Many Who Followed
We only know of one artist who studied formally under Caravaggio, a mysterious painter known as Cecco del Caravaggio. But because so many of Caravaggio’s works were public commissions, in some of Rome and Naples’s most important churches, his work became widely influential.
“One of the things that’s fascinating about the Caravaggisti is that it wasn’t just people in Rome and Naples.
Artists were traveling to Rome from all over Western Europe, particularly the low countries, both Holland and Belgium, but also France, as well as Spain. And they would come and see Caravaggio, and then they would travel back to their own countries and spread [his influence] further,” Thomas said.
That dissemination across Europe is clearly illustrated in the exhibition. From Caravaggio’s native Italy, there is Carlo Saraceni’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, from about 1610 to 1620. From the Netherlands, there are a pair of dramatic religious scenes by Matthias Stomer (ca. 1600–after 1652). And from France, there is Valentin de Boulogne’s (1591–1632) The Denial of Saint Peter, from about 1620.
“It shows that moment just a few hours after Christ has been arrested and Peter is shaken and he denies him. It’s this amazing image of accusation and self-doubt,” Thomas said.
Jusepe Ribera, San Bartolomeo (1613). Collection of the Fondazione Roberto Longhi, Florence.
The show also features five paintings of the apostles from a series by the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) that Thomas called “shockingly contemporary in their directness, in their realism, and in their absolutely profound emotional content.”
Particularly striking is his depiction of Saint Bartholomew (San Bartolomeo), from about 1613. De Ribera has painted the apostle and martyr, who was flayed alive, as an old man holding up his skin, with his face clearly shown.
“In the other hand, he holds a hunter’s knife. And it’s a very specific type of knife, which shows that Ribera did his homework,” Thomas said. “And the saint has this extraordinary look on his face, looking directly out at the viewer. It looks much more like a portrait than an image that would be used for worship. It’s one of the most profound, gritty, modern things that I’ve seen that belongs to the Baroque. It’s extraordinary.”
Reza Aramesh, Study of the Head as Cultural Artefacts (2023). Private collection. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Datan Gallery.
Thomas has also organized a companion exhibition, “Baroque Continuum,” that illustrates how that influence has continued throughout the centuries to the present day. Among the artists featured is contemporary Iranian sculptor Reza Aramesh (b. 1970), who makes classically inspired works in bronze and marble.
“The three pieces by Reza I’ve borrowed are severed heads, and they look like martyred Roman Catholic saints from 1600,” Thomas said. “They’re unbelievably beautiful and powerful and go great with an exhibition which features Judith and the Head of Holofernes. It ties in very nicely to further illuminate how Caravaggio impacted the history of art and continues to do so today.”
“In Caravaggio’s Light: Baroque Masterpieces from the Fondazione Roberto Longhi” will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, Florida, October 25, 2025–March 22, 2026. 
“Baroque Continuum” will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, Florida, October 18, 2025–March 22, 2026 More