Eliana Willis

Fabric, bronze, fake flowers, feathers, wire, wood—sculptor Nick Cave has wielded a host of materials to build monuments to resilience. Now, he’s turning to a new medium, unveiling his first virtual reality work as part of an exhibition in Detroit.
“Seen/Scene” is now running at the Shepherd, a new arts center housed in a former Romanesque-style church. With V.R. glasses, visitors to the show will get to take in Cave’s massive sculpture, which is perched 26 feet high, underneath the church’s dome. Its presence in the venue, he told me over a video call, offers “a nice shift in medium within that space.”
The sculpture is part of Cave’s 2024 “Amalgams” series, a run of bronze sculptures that merge human and natural forms. In one, a host of branches sprouts out of a seated figure, while another sees a garden plot blooming atop two prone individuals. They embody growth and perseverance even, and especially, amid oppression.
Nick Cave at the opening of “Until” at Carriageworks in Sydney, Australia, 2018. Photo: Mark Metcalfe / Getty Images.
His new V.R. work, Amalgam (Inflate), depicts a pair of crouching legs holding up a cornucopia of biotic elements, their surfaces rendered to look like shimmering bronze. At first glance, the human half seems weighted, almost burdened, but Cave sees “inflated opportunity” in it too.
“I was thinking about how the body takes up space, how the body becomes this abstract form that feels like it could inflate and then float and elevate within air,” he said. “It’s this idea of elevation and how do we rise above it all.”
The piece anchors the larger exhibition at the Shepherd. Co-curated by Cave and Laura Mott, “Seen/Scene” draws from the private collection of philanthropist Jennifer Gilbert; it also offers an echo of “Here Hear,” Cave’s epic 2015 solo show at Michigan’s Cranbrook Art Museum, which Mott curated (the artist is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art). “It was a really wonderful moment to honor that project,” Mott told me.
Installation view of “Seen/Scene” at the Shepherd. Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
This time round, Cave and Mott have homed in on portraiture, gathering works by 36 artists, including Henry Taylor, Jeffrey Gibson, Helen Frankenthaler, Olafur Eliasson, and Rashid Johnson, to explore ways of seeing. The pieces, while centered on the act of looking, also urge us to look.
“The portraits are seeing each other, you’re seeing yourself, and you’re seeing the audience as well,” Mott said. “What’s really amazing about the exhibition is this dynamic act of looking at each other and looking at oneself and looking at community.”
Barkley L. Hendricks, Yocks (1975). Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
Here, Barkley L. Hendricks‘ dynamic dual portrait Yocks (1975) hangs out alongside Tom Wesselmann‘s Great American Nude #9 (1961) and Ewa Juszkiewicz‘s Untitled (after Anton Einsle) (2016), which individually challenge the traditions of female portraiture. Doug Aitken‘s EVERYTHING (flag) (2015), with its fractal mirrored surface, offers an opportunity for reflection, while a self-portrait by Kerry James Marshall shares the same space as Cave’s VR piece.
Installation view of “Seen/Scene” at the Shepherd. Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
Cave’s sculptures, of course, are nothing if not portraits of individual identity and collective strength. His celebrated Soundsuits proposed “suits of armor,” crafted out of found objects, that shield their wearers from surface judgements; his 2024 series of assemblages, “Graphts,” captured the labor and aesthetic of the Black community in its evocation of needlepoint and quilting techniques (a Graphts piece is included in “Seen/Scene”). Amalgam (Inflate), meanwhile, surfaces a rare interiority.
“You can walk into it and be on the inside,” Cave explained of the work. “That feeling of what it’s like to be inside of a form or a body was very interesting.”
Nick Cave, Graphts (2024). Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
It’s a view that came in handy as Cave planned his first public sculpture, newly installed at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The bronze, titled Amalgam (Origin), is modeled on his own body, its skin textured with vegetation and its head replaced with a growth of bare branches occupied by birds. The artist had originally intended for the statue to stand 15 feet tall, but working with V.R. forced him to rethink scale: “This is not big enough,” he thought. The sculpture was raised to 26 feet, the same height as Amalgam (Inflate).
“There’s a bigger force that I believe in. In looking at something at this grand scale allows me to think about optimism in this vernacular way that is just bigger,” he said. “It takes all of us to be proactive when we envision ourselves at this capacity.”
“Seen/Scene” is on view at the Shepherd, 1265 Parkview St, Detroit, Michigan, through January 10, 2026. More

As Art Basel Paris draws the global art world to the French capital, the city’s museums are throwing open their doors to some of the year’s most anticipated exhibitions. From a spotlight on pioneering art dealer Berthe Weill at Musée de l’Orangerie to the much anticipated grand opening of Jean Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier, there’s something for every art lover.
Here are our top picks of what to see in the City of Light.
Bridget Riley: Starting PointMusée d’Orsay, October 21, 2025–January 25, 2026
Bridget Riley, Copy after ‘Le Pont de Courbevoie’ by Seurat (1959). Private Collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates. ©Bridget Riley 2025. All rights reserved.
What better pairing for the undulations of the newly sparkling river Seine than the vibrating canvasses of Op Art master Bridget Riley? The 94-year-old is showing at the Musée d’Orsay in a fascinating show that traces Riley’s creative origin story to an encounter with the work of Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat. In 1959 she copied Seurat’s Bridge at Courbevoie, and the hypnotic study of color and optical vibration became a defining influence on the evolution of her artistic process. Soak in a bevy of geometric patterns, lines, and color arrangements characteristic of Riley’s dizzying works in the unbeatable setting of the celebrated museum.
—Naomi Rea

Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophone ThoughtPalais de Tokyo, October 22, 2025–February 15, 2026
Pope.L, Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action (1998–2015), displayed at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles, 2015. Courtesy of the Pope.L Estate; the MOCA L.A., and Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Photo: Brian Forrest.
This wide-ranging exhibition dives deep into the French intellectual currents that have shaped U.S. art since the 1970s, particularly the revolutionary ideas of Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, and Frantz Fanon, among others. Organized by curator Naomi Beckwith, the show puts works by seminal artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cindy Sherman, Hans Haacke, and Pope.L in conversation with new commissions by the next generation of makers and thinkers, including Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Cici Wu.
The group show accompanies a solo retrospective exhibition by American sculptor Melvin Edwards—his first in France—continuing the theme of Franco-American artistic exchange. The shows kick off Palais de Tokyo’s fall season and are free to visit with no reservation necessary on October 22 and 23.
—Margaret Carrigan

Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-GardeMusée de l’Orangerie, October 8, 2025–January 26, 2026
Raoul Dufy, Thirty Years, or Life in Pink (1931). © Paris Musées / Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
Long overshadowed by male contemporaries, pioneering dealer Berthe Weill finally takes center stage in this sweeping exhibition that traces her overlooked influence on the rise of the 20th-century avant-garde. The show highlights Weill’s crucial role in launching the careers of artists like Picasso, Modigliani, and Matisse, as well as her support for women artists, including Suzanne Valadon and Émilie Charmy. The show offers a rare glimpse into the early Parisian art market through the lens of a tenacious gallerist who believed deeply in one principle: “Place aux jeunes” (Make way for the young), which was printed on her business cards. 
— Cathy Fan

Exposition GénéraleFondation Cartier, October 25, 2025–August 23, 2026
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2 Place du Palais-Royal, Paris. ©Jean Nouvel / ADAGP, Paris, 2025. Photo: ©Martin Argyroglo.
The long-awaited grand opening of Jean Nouvel’s shape-shifting new headquarters for the Fondation Cartier will be the toast of Paris art week. Located in a prime location opposite the Louvre, the dramatic architectural overhaul of the Hausmannian building is almost as anticipated as the opening exhibition curated by Grazia Quaroni and Béatrice Grenier. Titled “Exposition Générale,” it celebrates the Fondation Cartier’s history, bringing together 600 works by more than 100 artists from the institution’s collection, in an epic display of creative might. Highlights include a roll call of the biggest names in contemporary art from Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney to Joan Mitchell and Olga do Amaral who had a critically acclaimed retrospective at the foundation last year.
— N.R.

Meriem Bennani: Sole CrushingLafayette Anticipations, October 22, 2025–February 8, 2026
Meriem Bennani © Valentina Somma, Courtesy Fondazione Prada
Meriem Bennani turns the entire Fondation into a pulsating, absurdly musical organism in her latest installation. The sound installation “Sole Crushing” fills the building with the rhythmic clatter of over 200 animated flip-flops, striking surfaces to create a layered soundscape that’s equal parts symphony and protest. Originally commissioned by Fondazione Prada, the work is reimagined here with a new score by Cheb Runner (Reda Senhaji) and a site-specific architecture. As the sandals perform in unison, solo, or call-and-response, Bennani evokes the collective energy of a crowd—whether joyous, chaotic, or revolutionary—tapping (literally) into the simple sonic power of communal movement.
— C.F. More

America continues to contend with its past, often in the messiest ways imaginable. Just this weekend, millions marched in No Kings demonstrations around the country, protesting president Donald Trump’s authoritarian overreach; the White House reliably (and embarrassingly) trolled the protesters with a photo of Trump and vice president J.D. Vance wearing crowns, as if forgetting the very reason the Revolutionary War was fought. A few years ago, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement especially, monuments to Confederate officials were graffitied and torn down in cities across the country in protest of the racist worldview they embodied.
Now, “MONUMENTS,” a long-awaited show that hopes to find something generative in looking at those felled monuments to the “Lost Cause,” opens at two institutions in Los Angeles.
Ten decommissioned monuments come together with existing and commissioned works by 19 contemporary artists in the show, which is a collaboration between the Brick (formerly LAXART), headed up by Hamza Walker, and the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art, whose participation is helmed by senior curator Bennett Simpson. Nominally a co-organizer, though she wasn’t involved in choosing works, is New York artist Kara Walker (no relation to Hamza); the show includes a dramatic commission by her. “MONUMENTS” has been in the works since 2017, and came to public attention in 2021, when Walker revealed his plans on the Hope and Dread podcast, hosted by art advisor Allan Schwartzman and journalist Charlotte Burns.
Installation view of “MONUMENTS” at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick, Los Angeles. Laura Gardin Fraser, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (1948), and Hank Willis Thomas, A Suspension of Hostilities (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for The Museum of Contemporary Art.
The historical artifacts on view include two whose centrality to bloody recent history can hardly be exaggerated: monuments to Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson that were at the center of the “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi and white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. After white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer, Trump would memorably say that there were “very fine people on both sides.” The Brick had been granted ownership of the Jackson monument by a unanimous vote of the Charlottesville city council; it is one of nearly 200 Confederate monuments that have been destroyed or decommissioned.
The oldest artifact in the show is also a whopper: a statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which included the words: “There are no rights that a black person has that a white man is bound to respect.” Unveiled in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1887, it was removed from public view by the city in 2017, amid the nationwide wave of protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.
A Beheaded General Meets a Paint-Bombed Confederate President
Alongside the monuments are newly commissioned works by Walker along with artists including Karon Davis, Abigail DeVille, Stan Douglas, Kahlil Robert Irving, and Cauleen Smith. Some pieces respond directly to the decommissioned monuments, while others offer contemporary commentary on the historical themes the monuments put in play. What’s more, there will be loaned works by contemporary artists including Nona Faustine, Martin Puryear, and Hank Willis Thomas. 
Nona Faustine, Ye Are My Witness, Brooklyn, NY (2018). Courtesy of the Estate of Nona Faustine and Higher Pictures.
The show promises visual fireworks and pointed combinations of historical and contemporary. There will be bronze ingots from Charlottesville’s melted-down Robert E. Lee statute, the New York Times revealed. Filmmaker Julie Dash created a piece, HOMEGOING (2025), featuring opera singer Davóne Tines and set in Charleston’s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where nine parishioners fell to a white supremacist’s attack in 2015. A statue of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, was pulled down from its pedestal in Richmond and bombed with paint, Simpson explained on a video call; this “really interesting-looking artifact” will be surrounded by Andres Serrano’s portraits of leading figures in the Georgia Ku Klux Klan.
But the star of the show is Kara Walker, the sole artist whose work will appear at the Brick. Just as a Hollywood filmmaker might need to attach a big name to a project to get it off the ground, Hamza Walker told me in 2021, he figured from the outset that he would need to recruit a high-profile co-conspirator. Talking to the Times recently, he said, “To me, Kara’s piece is the whole thing. The show could almost be considered an excuse to get one of those things into Kara’s hands.”
Kara Walker, Unmanned Drone (2023). Photo: Ruben Diaz. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins.
Her piece, which represents the dismantled and rearranged Jackson monument—literally beheaded in the process—is titled Unmanned Drone (2003). Titling the piece for a weapon of war highlights the role of Confederate monuments, which were erected long after the Civil War in what might be termed a racist propaganda war. The 1921 monument, by New York sculptor Charles Keck, shows Jackson on his horse, Little Sorrel, which itself became massively popular after the Civil War, and became an object of some fascination for the artist. The end result presents a frightening 11-foot-high hybrid of Jackson and his steed.
Who Greenlights Loans of These Contested Objects?
“The first thing you’ll see in the Geffen are the chunks of granite from the base of the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond,” said Hamza Walker in the video call, adding that the chunks of stone are heavily graffitied. “That is the calling card for the show: the dismantling with visible signs of protest on the chunks of granite. The stone has an archaeological feel, almost, combined with the urgency of the spray paint.”
Installation view, “MONUMENTS,” at the Brick and the Geffen Contemporary at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for the Museum of Contemporary Art.
One of the centerpiece juxtapositions, Simpson explained, is between a monument to Matthew Fontaine Maury, a Confederate naval commander and oceanographer, and paintings created in response by Walter Price. “They’re abstract paintings—Hamza called them the progeny of Bruce Nauman and Alma Thomas—made with his feet, marching back and forth across the canvas. They have a panoramic, underwater feeling. Walter wanted to deal with Maury because he had been in the Navy, so he has a personal affinity to that context.”
“MONUMENTS” at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick, Los Angeles. Frederick William Sievers, Matthew Fontaine Maury Globe (1929), center, with paintings by Walter Price. Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for The Museum of Contemporary Art.
Red tape is a part of any artwork loan. First of all, the curators had to convince the lenders that they would treat these objects with the same level of care they would any work of art. But in the case of the monuments, there was sometimes ambiguity regarding who actually had the authority to greenlight a loan request.
In some cases, the local authorities understood very well the “Lost Cause” ideology that underpinned these statues—”one of the greatest propaganda campaigns ever waged in this country,” said Walker—and were keen to agree to the loan. But the chain of command wasn’t always clear. In Baltimore, though the city claimed ownership of the object, the Maryland Historical Trust has the easement of the property where it was sited. In other places, like Boston and Pittsburgh, the local department of cultural affairs owned the object and made the decision. 
“Things were unfolding in real time,” said Simpson. “The monuments had just come down in the past year or two. It really was not clear what the future of the objects would be.” Added Walker, “It still isn’t!” 
Elsewhere, the extremely sensitive nature of these particular artifacts added a more emotional dimension to what might usually be just a bureaucratic process. Sometimes, said Walker, the reaction was, “Why do you want to do this? You’re not making fun of us, are you?” But, he said, “Museums are not in the business of making fun of people.”
A Nation Turns Again To a Shameful Past 
The heady days of the wholesale removal of Confederate monuments may be in the past, and in fact there has been a concerted backlash to that iconoclastic moment, Walker pointed out. 
“MONUMENTS” at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick, Los Angeles. Right: Edward V. Valentine, Jefferson Davis (1907). Left: Andres Serrano’s portraits of members of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan. Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for The Museum of Contemporary Art.
“I would make an argument that ideologically the South is rising again,” he said, reeling off a list of moves by public and private entities to rehabilitate the same people whose monuments were torn down. The National Park Service announced in August that it would replace a monument to Confederate army officer Albert Pike that was taken down from its perch in Washington, D.C. in 2020. The mealy-mouthed press release claims that it will honor his leadership in Freemasonry; there is no mention of his military role. 
An Alabama town recently installed a new monument to Confederate admiral Raphael Semmes after the original was vandalized and removed in 2020. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, undertook to return all the names of Confederate generals to U.S. Army bases—defying a 2021 law barring the use of their names by finding soldiers with the same surnames and saying (again, mealy-mouthed) that the bases are now devoted to them.
And, on the private side, at a park in North Carolina, an individual has opened Valor Memorial, a private park “dedicated to resurrecting Confederate statues that municipalities removed from public view,” as the Times reported just this month. 
Walker likened these initiatives to trolling and dog whistles. 
“This is the kind of episode,” he said, “that we read about in history books and go, ‘They did what?’”
“Monuments” will be on view at the Brick, 518 North Western Ave, Los Angeles, and the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, from October 23, 2025–May 3, 2026. More

Flora Yukhnovich (b. 1990), one of the fastest rising art market stars of the past five years, has brought her brushy, romantic paintings to New York’s Frick Collection The British artist, known for melding abstraction with the traditions of French Rococo and Italian Baroque, has created a site-specific mural inspired by the museum’s beloved François Boucher (1703–1770) series “The Four Seasons” (1755).
“Flora has developed this language very much of her own,
in the field of abstraction, but bordering figuration. With her paintings, you’re always trying to work out, is it abstract? Is it figurative? Is it somewhere in between? What is it? That’s what is very exciting to me,” outgoing Frick chief curator Xavier Salomon told me. (After 11 years in his current position, Salomon is leaving next month to become director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.)
He first met Yukhnovich at a 2021 opening in London at her dealer, Victoria Miro, and decided to set up a studio visit. What he found was an artist who seemed to bring the Baroque into the 21st century, infusing the peachy pink pastels of the Rococo into sweeping, floral-inspired tableaux that somehow tapped into contemporary pop culture.
“Pretty much from the beginning, there was an idea of could she do something for the Frick?” Salomon said. While the museum doesn’t collect contemporary art, it does work with living artists, inviting the likes of Arlene Shechet (b. 1951), Nicolas Party (b. 1980), and, still on view, Vladimir Kanevsky (b. 1951) to respond to its historic holdings. Yukhnovich was a natural to join their ranks.

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An Artist on the Rise
“Flora is someone who is very avidly looking at Rococo art, art of the 18th century in France and Italy,” Salomon said. “As a curator who works on historic objects, it is very exciting to see a young, talented artist dialoguing with the art of that time, bringing it into a contemporary world.”
But it isn’t just the Frick that has found itself captivated by the young artist. Yukhnovich’s work has struck a chord with many in the art world, tapping into a burgeoning Neo-Rococo movement.
Flora Yukhnovich, The Four Seasons: Summer (2025), installation view in the Cabinet Gallery at the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr., ©Flora Yukhnovich, courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Victoria Miro.
In 2017, fresh out of grad school at City & Guilds of London Art School, Yukhnovich secured her first gallery representation. She immediately began building up a waiting list for her work—not to mention a social media following now approaching 100,000.
Her first painting to come to auction, at Phillips New York in 2021, astonished with a $1.17 million result on an estimate that topped out at just $80,000. She’s since sold nine more works at auction for over $1 million— including one just last week at Phillips London. She has a £2.69 million ($3.6 million) record, set in 2022, and a 100 percent sell-through rate, according to the Artnet Price Database. In 2023, mega dealer Hauser & Wirth added Yukhnovich to its roster; her eagerly awaited debut show with the gallery opens at the end of the month in Los Angeles.
Flora Yukhnovich, Warm, Wet ‘N’ Wild (2020). The painting set the artist’s auction record with a £2.69 million ($3.6 million) sale in 2022. Image courtesy Sotheby’s London.
Yukhnovich’s show at the Frick isn’t even the first time she’s been invited to make work about Boucher at a storied institution. Last year, she installed two new oil paintings atop the grand staircase at London’s Wallace Collection for “Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo.”
“The two projects were along the same path,” Salomon said. “They’re both great artists, Flora and Boucher. Obviously they’ve never met in person, but you see them responding to shapes and colors and textures and subjects in the same way.”
Francois Boucher, Spring, “The Four Seasons” (1755). Collection of the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr.
The History Behind “The Four Seasons”
In August 1916, museum founder Henry Clay Frick purchased Boucher’s “Arts and Sciences,” the paintings now in the Boucher Room, from the dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939). The next month, he got an unexpected letter. It was from American heiress and art dealer Virginia Bacon (1853–1919). She had changed her mind about selling Boucher’s “The Four Seasons,” recently inherited from her late brother-in-law Edward Rathbone Bacon (1848–1915). Did Frick still want them?
Frick sent off a check for $159,000, and the paintings were his. But the works’ origin story dates back to the reign of King Louis XV (1710–1774). The artist painted them for Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), a member of the French court and the king’s official mistress.
François Boucher, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1750). Collection of the Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Her life was remarkable. Born to a middle-class businessman, Madame de Pompadour rose to a position of great power and influence on the strength of her charm and beauty, but also her wits and education. She held great sway at court due to her relationship with the king, and became both a leading patron of the arts and major collector.
Boucher was Madame de Pompadour’s favorite painter, and his works, including paintings and tapestries, decorated her lavish home, the Château de Bellevue. (The two were quite close, and he even taught her the art of etching.) Her patronage and taste helped define the richly ornate sensibilities of the Rococo period, which is presently enjoying something of a revival.
Francois Boucher, Winter, “The Four Seasons” (1755). Collection of the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr.
“This exhibition is a dialogue between two artists, Boucher and Flora, but the shadow of Madame de Pompadour is very much there,” Salomon said. “She was very accomplished and an incredibly intelligent and clever person, which applies to Flora as well. I wish I could be a fly on the wall in a room with the two of them, hearing what the conversation would be like.”
It is unclear where Madame de Pompadour originally hung “The Four Seasons,” but the paintings have an irregular chantourné shape, with corners added later—and subsequently removed during restoration— to make them rectangular. That suggests they were meant to be displayed above a doorway.
Francois Boucher, Autumn, “The Four Seasons” (1755). Collection of the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr.
Originally, Frick wanted to incorporate the series into the Boucher Room, but that space only had two doors over which to hang them. Nevertheless, these Rococo treasures became part of Frick’s Beaux-Arts mansion, which he filled with treasures from throughout European art history—from 14th-century Old Masters through to then-contemporary canvases by the Impressionists.
There’s an interesting through line across the centuries for “The Four Seasons.” Created for the mistress of the French king in one of Europe’s wealthiest courts, mere decades before the nation’s social inequality sparked a violent revolution, the paintings came to America during the increasingly stratified Gilded Age, and wound up in the collection of Frick, who some art historians characterize as a robber baron. Yukhnovich has created her own take on “The Four Seasons” at a time when wealth inequality continues to rise globally. Against that backdrop, it’s worth noting that the Frick’s admission fee is now up to a whopping $30, up from $22 before the reopening, a prohibitive sum for many art lovers.
Francois Boucher’s Four Seasons installed in theWest Vestibule, the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr.
Fitting in at a Gilded Age Mansion
Yukhnovich’s project graces the walls of the museum’s first floor “cabinet gallery,” which, until the recently completed renovation and expansion, was home to the Boucher Room. Those ornate wooden panel paintings are now back upstairs, recreating the boudoir of Frick’s wife, Adelaide Childs (1859–1931), and leaving space for Yukhnovich in work her magic just around the corner from “The Four Seasons.”
“When I began responding to Boucher’s ‘Four Seasons,’ the Disney musical Mary Poppins came to mind. Boucher’s portals reminded me of Mary and the children leaping into Bert’s pavement drawings, landing in a surreal pastoral of farm animals,” Yukhnovich wrote in an essay for the exhibition catalogue. “It’s a painter’s dream.”
Flora Yukhnovich, The Four Seasons: Spring and The Four Seasons: Summer (2025), installation view in the Cabinet Gallery at the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr., ©Flora Yukhnovich, courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Victoria Miro.
She has been influenced by Boucher since grad school, when she first encountered his work at the Wallace: “In an instant, I was sitting crossed-legged on my bedroom floor again, playing with Barbies and peering into Polly Pockets, surrounded by plastic pinks and pastel greens,” Yukhnovich said. “I was hooked.”
At the Frick, she’s created a panoramic installation designed in response to the room’s architecture, the canvas shaped to fit around the windows and doors. For the first time, Yukhnovich, who recently moved to New York and completed the project here, made a canvas designed to be applied directly to the wall for installation.
Flora Yukhnovich, The Four Seasons: Spring (2025), detail. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr., ©Flora Yukhnovich, courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Victoria Miro.
“I wanted to make something that operates kind of like a painting, kind of like a wallpaper,” Yukhnovich said in a video for the museum’s acclaimed YouTube channel. “I thought it would be so interesting to have something that really interacts with the space, in the same way that Boucher’s work will have been set into the architecture.”
“It’s a very contemplative space,” Salomon said. “You just sit on the bench in the middle and looking around you’re surrounded by this whirlwind of shapes and color and art.”
Flora Yukhnovich, The Four Seasons: Autumn and The Four Seasons: Winter (2025), installation view in the Cabinet Gallery at the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr., ©Flora Yukhnovich, courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Victoria Miro.
The finished paintings read as landscapes, hints of mountains and vegetation seemingly forming and reforming before your eyes. Somehow, Yukhnovich has captured the hopeful rebirth of spring, the endless days of lazy summer, the crisp embrace of fall, and the long, frosty, chill of winter in her brushstrokes. There’s a sensual nature to her work that echoes the themes of luxury and seduction in Boucher’s original compositions.
“It makes me look at the abstract qualities in Boucher and suddenly, you know, instead of just looking at shepherds frolicking in a landscape in the 18th century, you start thinking about.
What decision is he making about color, about positioning figures, about the landscape, about the relationship between the two, about the shifting light?” Salomon said.
Francois Boucher, Summer, “The Four Seasons” (1755). Collection of the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr.
The two artists’ paintings differ in an obvious way, in that Yukhnovich has left out the rosy-cheeked men and women that star in Boucher’s series, like the young gentleman tucking flowers into his beloved’s hair, or the voluptuous women reclining by a fountain in various states of undress. But stare at her works long enough, a figure—or at least parts of one—might begin to appear amid the dreamy, swirling colors.
That’s by design, Yukhnovich said: “I always have some sort of hint of the bodily in the work.”
“Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons” is on view at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, New York, New York (September 3, 2025–March 9, 2026),
“Flora Yukhnovich: Bacchanalia” is on view at Hauser & Wirth 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, California, October 30, 2025–January 25, 2026. More

The Egyptian gods have gathered in New York. From the falcon-headed Horus to the lioness Sakhmet, the shrouded Osiris to the cow goddess Hathor and the sky-bending Nut, these divine beings—drawn from a pantheon of more than 1,500 deities—assemble at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s evocative new exhibition “Divine Egypt.” Their images, once carved in stone and cast in gold, were not mere symbols but living presences, believed to channel divine power and bridge the human and celestial worlds.
“In this exhibition, you will see about 140 works from the Met’s collection,” said the Met’s director, Max Hollein at last week’s preview. “And another 70 or so spectacular loans from institutions from across the world. Many of these works have never been displayed together. Some have never been shown in the U.S., and all of them you will see now in a completely new way.”
“Divine Egypt,” now on view through January 19, 2026, examines the visual language surrounding ancient Egypt’s gods—how artists over thousands of years shaped a visual language for the divine.
Striding Thoth 332–30 B.C. Faience The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1926 (26.7.860) Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Diana Craig Patch, curator and head of the Met’s Department of Egyptian Art, led me through the exhibition. “There is much that we do not know—and perhaps can never know,” she said. “The archaeological and textual records for ancient Egypt are fragmentary and incomplete. Ancient Egyptian culture lasted for approximately 3,000 years. They occupied a river valley that was 800 miles long.”
That vast span of time and geography, she explained, fostered remarkable adaptability. “One of the defining characteristics of ancient Egyptian culture—of its divine landscape—is its flexibility,” Patch said. “Religious beliefs and practices changed over time and comprised a great diversity of local traditions. Two deities could merge, and some deities, over time, assumed the iconography of other, older, more important figures. It is this fascinating adaptability that this exhibition tries to capture through divine images represented in sculpture and relief.”
Installation view of “Divine Egypt,” on view through January 19, 2026 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, Courtesy of The Met
She added that while Egypt’s monumental temples were the domain of kings and priests, most people experienced religion on a more intimate level. “The inner sanctum was for the king or the priest who acted on his behalf,” Patch said. “But people still found ways to commune with their gods—through shrines, festivals, and offerings left at temple courtyards.”
Amid this undulating cosmology, one figure stands as a rigid outlier: Ptah, the god of creation and craftsmen. When we paused before him, Patch noted how his image remained unchanged for thousands of years. Why, she wondered, did Ptah stay the same when other gods transformed? “Some gods do and some gods don’t,” she said. “If we had control over where things were found in space and time, we might have a better understanding. But so much of the archaeological record is fragmentary—it doesn’t survive complete. We found lots of new things, but not always the answers we expected. The divine landscape is complicated; it moves around. They add things over time—they never get rid of anything, which is why you have all these creation myths.”
Our tour began.
Hathor, the Cow Goddess of Love and Kingship
Carved in dark granodiorite, the head of a cow goddess stares serenely ahead, her horns curving around a sun disk. The work—once part of a full statue—radiates a quiet power, its polished surface catching light like the river itself. She is Hathor, the nurturing mother of kings, the goddess whose milk sustained divine rule.
Head of a cow goddess, New Kingdom, possibly Ramesside Period ca. 1295–1070 BCE. mage © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
Craig Patch: “Hathor—or cow—this goddess who has a whole series of manifestations; one of her manifestations is a cow that nurtures the king. The king drinks milk, which gives him power and rejuvenation. She’s protecting a very early king in front of her. But if you look carefully, nursing from her, there is Ramses. This is one of the ways the Egyptians conceptualized how the king maintains his divinity and power—it’s literally nourishment from the goddess herself.
Goddess Hathor, King Menkaure, and the Deified Hare nome, ca. 2490–2472 BCE. Image © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen.
“She can appear as a woman, a cow, or a hybrid—sometimes even as a human-headed snake. You can’t lock her into a single image. She’s a goddess of love, motherhood, music, drunkenness—so she’s complex, but always benevolent. You see her with the sun disk and horns, or in full cow form, or as the face on a sistrum, the rattle that’s used in her rituals. That’s one of the things I love about Egyptian art—it’s not about likeness, it’s about presence. The image allows the god to appear in the world. When you’re looking at Hathor nursing the king, that’s not symbolic. For them, it’s happening.”

Installation view of “Divine Egypt,” on view through January 19, 2026 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, Courtesy of The Met

Ra, the Sun God and His Serpent-Slaying Mongoose
Small but uncanny, this bronze creature—a hybrid somewhere between an otter and a mongoose—embodies both mischief and cosmic purpose. Egyptians believed such animals protected the sun god Ra from the serpent Apophis, who attacked him nightly as he journeyed through the underworld.
Craig Patch: “Here’s one that everybody argues about—the little animal. Some people call it a ferret, some say it’s a weasel or a mongoose. The Egyptians didn’t worry too much about distinctions like that. Anything that ate snakes was on the side of the sun god.
“This one’s a fun one. It’s been mislabeled in the past because people said, ‘It doesn’t look Egyptian.’ By the Late and Roman periods, things get very loose. It’s not that they forgot how to do it; it’s just a different way of making things.
Statuette of an animal symbolizing Ra, Late Period–Ptolemaic Period, 664–30 BCE. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
“It’s not Greek, it’s not Roman—it’s Egyptian. But at that point, they’re doing it their own way. It’s very expressive. That’s why you get pieces like this where someone looks at it and says, ‘That can’t be Egyptian.’ But it absolutely is.
“The otter mongoose—the otter goose, as I personally call it. Yes, the raised paws are definitely otter-like, but the tail and the fur are much more mongoose-y. But the thing is, the Egyptians often weren’t fussy about identification between things that did the same thing. Mongooses and otters—long, low to the ground, dark, move fast, eat snakes and lizards. They look similar. They do the same thing. So, some places they did otters, some places they did mongooses, and eventually they didn’t get too fussy.”
What did the otter and mongoose mean to them?
Craig Patch: “They ate snakes, and snakes go after the sun god Ra—every night the sun god goes under the earth to be born the next morning. He runs into a big nasty python and has to be killed. And one of the things that kills snakes are cats. Another thing that kills snakes are mongooses and otters. So they become protection. Just like the baboon whose paws in the morning are raised to the sun became a symbol of the sun god.”
Animal Mummies, Offerings of Faith
This gallery explores how people related to deities when they couldn’t enter temples. These macabre offerings—cats, falcons, and ibises carefully wrapped in linen—were often bred by temples and sold to worshippers as votive gifts, a devotional economy built on mass sacrifice and faith.
Craig Patch: “By the end of Egyptian history, they even began mummifying animals and burying them in cemeteries dedicated to the gods. Pilgrims would buy the mummies—cats, dogs, ibises, falcons, even snakes or fish—and donate them as offerings, a way to give the god a ba and earn divine goodwill. Most of the animals were bred for this purpose, though some sacred ones lived in temples their whole lives and were mummified when they died.
Box for a cat mummy inscribed for Bastet, Late Period-Ptolemaic Period, 664–30 BCE. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
“You paid for animal mummies and they were donated to the god that you bought them for. Dogs, cats, ibises. There were a lot of different ones, Sometimes they didn’t actually wrap an animal in it. They scooped up whatever they had and wrapped it. This is beautifully done, but inside is not an ibis. It’s been x-rayed—it’s not in there. It’s a lot of loose stuff, feathers, and bone. But it’s supposed to be an ibis. It’s a symbolic ibis. They probably ran out of ibises that day. So they just put something in there. It’s the gesture that mattered—the act of giving the mummy, not necessarily what was inside.”
Statue of Anubis, ca. 1390–1352 BCE. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen.
Anubis, the Canid-Headed Guide of Souls
Craig Patch: “You come around the corner, you’re now overcoming death, which everybody had to do. And there’s Anubis, the god of embalming and who leads the dead into the next world.”
Did Anubis’s characteristics change?
Craig Patch: “Minor stuff, not major. He pretty much is a canid-headed god from the beginning. He was Khentyamentiu in the first dynasties, and Khentyamentiu seems to be absorbed later by Anubis. Khentyamentiu is shown generally as that kind of image—the reclining canid. Then he merges with Anubis and becomes a human with a canid head.”
What does the canid have to do with death?
Craig Patch: “So whatever the wild animal is that this is copied after, and it is open to discussion, but it is probably the golden wolf, the Egyptian wolf. It’s not a jackal, actually—it’s a wolf. It’s been recast genetically. It lives in the desert and is often found in cemeteries because it digs there. It also, when it finds food, will cache it in cemeteries. So it’s that association with the desert and where the dead are buried that led it to be connected. That’s what we think we understand. Again, we can never be sure. You know, falcons soar, so a sky god—choosing a falcon makes sense. A cow produces milk, nurturing the king—makes sense. Why Wadjet is a cobra in one place and a lion in another has to do with roles. But why was she a cobra to begin with? You don’t always have answers to why they chose what they did. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not.”
Statuette of a canid-headed god, probably Anubis, Ptolemaic Period, 332–30 BCE. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Anna-Marie Kellen
Nut, the Sky Goddess Who Swallows the Sun
Before we reached the coffin showing Nut, the sky goddess, Craig Patch explained the creation story that sets the scene.
Craig Patch: “The world is all water and out of the water is all sorts of swimming things, and one of them achieves consciousness. And he swims to a rising mound of land and climbs out, and that is Atum. And as he stands on his mound, he self-creates; he uses his semen to create a son and a daughter—air and moisture. They create earth and sky and then they create the gods you most likely know: Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys.”
She continued as we stopped at the coffin.
Installation view of “Divine Egypt,” on view through January 19, 2026 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, Courtesy of The Met
Craig Patch: “And this coffin shows Nut, who is the sky goddess, in two forms. This is her typical form, where she swallows the sun every night and gives birth to it in the morning.
Statue of the god Min ca. 3300 BCE The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Presented by Flinders Petrie and H. Martyn Kennard, 1894 Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Min, the God of Fertility and Creation
Craig Patch: “One of the earliest examples of monumental statuary from ancient Egypt, this is also one of the three best preserved sculptures known collectively as the Coptos Colossi. While later representations of Min are shrouded, this statue is nude except for a belt around his waist. The figure’s left hand would have grasped an erect phallus made from a separate piece of stone. This was Min’s traditional pose as a fertility god, which is imagery that lasted around 3,000 years.” More

Reviled toward the end of her life, Marie Antoinette has been revered in death. The enduring public obsession with France’s last Queen has only been fueled by the sensational nature of her death during the height of the bloodthirsty French Revolution. Items from Marie Antoinette’s deathbed, including her last writing and a guillotine blade, have gone on display at the V&A in London as part of a magnificent exhibition dedicated to her legacy as a style icon.
After marrying the future Louis XVI in 1770, Marie Antoinette became infamous for her extravagant tastes, including generous patronage of the arts and luxury sectors. But this life of carefree splendor came to an end in 1789, when revolutionaries forced the royal family to leave Versailles and return to Paris. After hostility against the old order grew, the King was eventually charged with treason and the Queen lived out her final days in prison. She was executed on October 16, 1793.
Installation view of “Marie Antoinette Style” at V&A Museum, London, U.K. Photo courtesy of V&A Museum.
The monarch’s gruesome end has titillated audiences in the centuries since. Much of this intrigue was expertly spun by French artist Anna Maria Grosholtz, much better known as Marie Tussaud. Adept at the production of waxwork likenesses of famous faces, she founded the popular Madame Tussauds tourist attraction in London in 1835.
Since the beginning, the museum’s main appeal has been its Chamber of Horrors, which once featured wax heads made from death masks of several victims of the French Revolution, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. These are said to have been modeled by Tussaud herself, who supposedly visited the Madeleine cemetery in secret to cast the ill-fated queen’s severed head, though she herself never confirmed this story. In any case, an effigy of the queen’s disembodied head went on display at Madame Tussauds in 1865 and immediately became a fan favorite, feeding Victorian England’s appetite for all things gothic. The mask was lost in a fire in 1925.
Installation view of “Marie Antoinette Style” at V&A Museum, London, U.K. Photo courtesy of V&A Museum.
Elsewhere in the Chamber of Horrors, Tussaud’s sons installed a guillotine blade from the French Revolution that they had bought from the grandson of high executioner Charles-Henri Sanson. It was exhibited for over a century with the claim that it had been used to behead Marie Antoinette, although this cannot be proven.
Some objects can be confidently connected to the queen’s final days. On view at the V&A is a plain linen chemise worn by Marie Antoinette when she arrived at Temple prison in August 1792. Compared to the lavish dresses on view, it represents her newly humble circumstances. After Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793, Marie Antoinette began wearing black in mourning.
Installation view of “Marie Antoinette Style” at V&A Museum, London, U.K. Photo courtesy of V&A Museum.
One item that likely brought the queen some comfort was a medallion containing a lock of hair from her younger son, Louis-Charles, as well as some of her own plaited hair. The dauphin’s lock was arranged beneath the word “friendship,” and the item was given by Marie Antoinette to her chamber maid Madame Campan.
On the night of August 1, 1793, the queen was transferred to the Conciergerie, where she became prisoner number 280 for 76 days. At 4:30 a.m. on the morning of her death on October 16, Marie Antoinette scrawled a final note in her prayer book. “My God, have pity on me!” she wrote. “My eyes have no more tears to cry for you my poor children; adieu, adieu!”
Marie Antoinette wore a plain chemise dress when facing the guillotine and it is said that she was bravely composed while walking up to the scaffold. She even apologized after stepping on the executioner’s foot, according to contemporary engravings that quote her. Marie Antoinette’s death was met with an eruption of chants of “long live the Republic.” It became fashionable in Paris to wear black clothing in mock mourning, even sometimes decorated with a red choker in reference to her manner of death.
“Marie Antoinette Style” is on view at the V&A Museum, Cromwell Rd, London, through March 22, 2026.  More

Touring his recently opened exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, artist Hew Locke told some visitors that a song came to mind: “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” written for Nina Simone in 1964. Of course, his concern is not that of the misbehaving lover seeking forgiveness, as in the song, but rather that of an artist whose work is rich with symbolism and teeming with meaningful found objects, and who plumbs complicated histories of empire, identity, and migration—especially those that deal closely with the history of the British Empire, and are coming before American audiences.
The New Haven museum bills “Hew Locke: Passages” as the artist’s most comprehensive show to date, including 49 works spanning nearly three decades and including photography, sculpture, and drawing. On view through January, it is curated by the museum’s director, Martina Droth, who was promoted from chief curator last year. 
Hew Locke, Ambassador 4 (2022). Courtesy John Hammond.
The Guyanese British artist was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959 and moved with his family as a child to Georgetown, the coastal capital of the small South American nation of Guyana, just as the former British colony was gaining its independence. Being there as the country created its own flag and other national iconography sensitized him to the power of symbols and how closely they are linked to identity. He lived there until moving in 1980 to Britain to attend Falmouth Art School; he then earned an MFA at the Royal College of Art in London, where he still resides. 
It’s suitable that an institution devoted to British art be his ambassador in the States for this extensive presentation. But Locke will be known to art lovers on these shores from a few projects that have brought his tart historical commentary—he often says that if he hadn’t become an artist, he could have been a historian—to U.S. museums. The first was For Those in Peril On the Sea (2011), a flotilla of about 70 model boats, which came to the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2013, alluding to his own travels as well as to what the artist has called a “hybridization of culture.” 
Installation view of Trophy 3 for The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, Gilt (2022). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; by Anna-Marie Kellen.
New Yorkers, meanwhile, witnessed Gilt, the installation of his sculptures in the form of gilded trophies on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2022, its title punning on the “guilt” owing to the imperial acquisition of that institution’s globe-spanning holdings. And his sprawling installation The Procession (2022), commissioned by Tate Britain, was installed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2024. It features nearly 150 life-size figures, some on horseback, including drummers, soldiers and other characters, kitted out with masks and costumes, holding aloft banners and flags, ambiguously in celebration and/or protest.
How Is the Queen of England Like Bart Simpson?
One of the earliest works in the show greets visitors to the galleries: Veni, Vidi, Vici (The Queen’s Coat of Arms), from 2004, stands some seven feet high and riffs on the U.K.’s coat of arms, which appears on the British passport.
Hew Locke, Veni, Vidi, Vici (The Queen’s Coat of Arms) (2004). Courtesy of Hales, London and New York.
On that document, a crowned lion and a unicorn flank a shield; here, the shield has been replaced by a skeletal head wearing a crown. “People are literally dying to get this document,” Locke said during the tour. In the piece, textiles and found plastic objects, including the kinds of cheap materials schoolchildren use to make collages, are visibly stapled to a plywood backing; the Black artist self-consciously cast the symbol of Britain partly in the African colors of red, black, and green. “I use clichés deliberately,” he said.
Nearby hangs Koh-i-noor (2005), a nine-foot-high relief sculpture of the bust of Queen Elizabeth II, encrusted with hundreds of plastic objects found at markets and discount shops, including toy animals, flowers, and jewelry. Discussing British imagery such as this, not necessarily immediately recognizable to Americans, he alluded to Simpsons creator Matt Groening, who said that he drew Bart Simpson in such a way that he could be recognized by his silhouette alone.
Hew Locke, Koh-i-noor (2005). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum.
Koh-i-noor is titled for what was once the world’s largest diamond, at 105.6 carats. Originating in a mine in India and long owned by Indian and Persian heads of state, it was ceded to Queen Victoria when she was named Empress of India, and is set in her crown; India, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan have all demanded its return. The queen’s profile, Locke noted, still appeared on his school workbooks in Guyana even after it gained its freedom. In his sculpture, her profile bristles with sword blades, perhaps suggesting the violent colonial enterprise at whose head Elizabeth stood. 
But in an interview, Locke warned away from simplistic interpretations. “It is complicated,” he said. “It is ambivalent.” As an example, he offered King Charles: “He didn’t choose to be born to the Queen. I see decent people in difficult situations. I met the guy and I liked him.” Locke was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to art, in 2023.
Locke Was Early to Scrutinize Public Monuments
Locke’s fascination with symbols of power, and veneration of questionable figures, extended to public monuments before they came in for a reassessment in the 2010s. As early as 2005, he pitched London public arts organization Artangel on a “statue-dressing project” in which he would “dress/disguise/reveal well-known statues in central London in order to reveal/describe aspects of British culture/history/contemporary situation.” When the proposal was rejected, the artist’s mockups for the project themselves became the pieces. 
Hew Locke, Colston (2006). Courtesy Hew Locke.
Colston (2006) shows a statue devoted to 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston in the English city of Bristol that would be torn down in 2020 during Black Lives Matter protests. The photo of the merchant is decorated with medals, skeletons, shells, and symbolic talismans “intended to point to the specific crimes and misdeeds of the commemorated figure,” Drost wrote in the exhibition catalogue. “Black people had to celebrate this dodgy dude,” said the artist in the gallery. 
In our interview, Locke described Colston and the other icons he treats similarly as “weighed down by the burden of history. The people are loaded down until they can barely handle any more.” Here’s more and more gold and treasure, he said; I suggested that they might as well choke on it. “Literally,” Locke agreed. “Literally.”
Hew Locke, Saturn (2007). Courtesy Hew Locke.
In early days, Locke’s colorful works were seen as “exotic”; people would ask him if they were created for festivals, and, in his view, overly linked them to his Black identity. He went to the other extreme in the late 1990s, working only in black and white. But by the time he created Saturn (2007), he was insisting on his own presence in his work; these towering studio photographs show the artist, his eyes barely visible, encrusted with the same kind of finery that Colston and others choked on. In Saturn, he is encrusted with flowers and the heads of baby dolls, and holds a scepter. All around him appear the words honi soit qui mal y pense, the old-French motto of a British knightly order, usually translated as “shame on anyone who thinks evil of it”; that slogan, too, appears on the British coat of arms.
In that piece, Locke’s head is backed by the silhouette of the queen, recalling Groening’s Bart Simpson quip, but perhaps needing translation for U.S viewers. In our interview, Locke described a moment during a county fair that, for him, drove home the legibility of national symbols. A man representing a bird sanctuary had brought a specimen. “The feathers weren’t so good,” the artist noted before realizing it was a bald eagle. The moment the animal spread his wings, Locke said, its symbolism came crashing down on him: “It’s America!”
Sailing Into the Future
In other pieces, like the watercolor Guyana House Boat (2018), Locke looks to his other home country, to which he periodically returns, for inspiration.
Hew Locke, Guyana House Boat 4 (2018). Courtesy Hew Locke.
The country’s name, he pointed out in the gallery, comes from an indigenous language and means “land of many waters.” In an era of rampant sea level rise, that’s not always a blessing: its capital, Georgetown, where Locke lived, is about six feet below sea level, and the country suffers regular flooding, so the notion of putting a Guyanese home in a kind of ark resonates not only with travel, migration, and cultural hybridization, but also with dire environmental threats.
Sculptures by Hew Locke hang in the lobby of the Yale Center for British Art. Photo: Brian Boucher.
Entering and leaving the museum’s imposing building, designed by renowned architect Louis I. Kahn, the visitor encounters a small assembly of sculptures of boats, hanging from the ceiling of the atrium, a few feet above the floor. Desire (2018), The Survivor (2022), and The Relic (2022) bring the house boat drawing into three dimensions, and evoke his earlier, larger flotilla, For Those in Peril On the Sea (2011), even as it also evokes migration, sea level rise, Britain’s maritime history, and the Middle Passage. All sailing in the same direction, they also echo the ambiguous parade of Procession (2022); while the cause being celebrated and protested there is ambiguous, the artist once described the figures as all headed “into the future.”
The future may look no better than the complicated, violent past that Locke explores. But, like it or not, into the future we all sail together.
“Hew Locke: Passages” is on view at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut, through January 11, 2026. It will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts, 1971 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio, where it will be on view February 13-May 24, 2026, and to the Museum of Fine Arts, 1001 Bissonnet St, Houston, Texas, where it will be on view June 21–September 13, 2026.  More

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently home to a guerrilla art project featuring the work of 17 Native artists. The unsanctioned augmented reality exhibition, “Encoded,” was launched by nonprofit media and design lab Amplifier on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, taking over the institution’s American Wing.
Each of the artists has remade existing works from American art history in the Met collection, bringing the Native point of view into galleries long dominated by the perspective of European settlers and their descendants.
“Amplifier wanted to open up an opportunity for more dialogue and discussion about why for so long have Indigenous peoples have not been more integrated into these collections that are in these giant institutions,” exhibition curator Tracy Renée Rector told me.
You can see (and hear) the show’s 25 altered masterpieces on your iPad or smartphone when you are at the museum. Representatives from Amplifier are also on hand to distribute exhibition guides and even offer tours of the show, which runs through the end of the year.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Midéegaadi: Fire (2021-ongoing), overlaid on Thomas Cole, View on the Catskills – Early Autumn (1836-37). Photo: courtesy of Amplifier.
A New Take on Well-Known Works
The first work in the show can actually be seen outside the museum, with a larger-than-life Indigenous dancer in colorful traditional garb, by Skawannati, looming over the Met façade. Inside, video work like Midéegaadi by Cannupa Hanska Luger, continues inside, dancing across paintings like Thomas Cole’s View on the Catskills – Early Autumn (1836–37).
“The works that I’m presenting are an intervention on a narrative that American art has maintained, which is that the landscape of North America was void of population,” Luger said in a video for Amplifier. “I wanted to present work that brought the living things that existed on the landscape before America was America.”

In the galleries, some of the Met’s most famous works are included in the show, such as The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer. Open up the “Encoded” website, and the work’s imperiled Black sailor is joined by a black and white figure dancing to a Tlingit song from a 2006 Nicholas Galanin video, Tsu Héidei Shugaxtutaan I.
The artist also contributed an AR version of his work Never Forget, planting a sign reading “Indian Land” in white capital letters across the verdant landscape of Valley of Wyoming (1865) by Jasper Francis Cropsey. The work is inspired by the original Hollywood sign, which said “Hollywoodland.” Galanin first installed a physical version in California’s Coachella Valley for the 2021 edition of the Desert X public art biennial.

Other works recontextualized by “Encoded” include the monumental Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) by Emanuel Leutze. Viewed through the lens of the exhibition, the Continental Army has become engulfed in vegetation, plants weighing down the boat as it traverses the river. The new piece, by the artist Flechas, is titled LANDBACK.
“The piece is talking about our connection to the natural world.
It is not separate but integrated,” Rector said. “We can’t not acknowledge the earth that holds these stories.”
Flechas, LANDBACK (2025), overlaid on Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851). Photo: courtesy of Amplifier.
A High-Tech Project in a Hurry
Though the show has been in the works for four years, Rector didn’t come on board until July, when an anonymous Indigenous donor provided the funds to finally bring Amplifier’s high-tech vision to life. She had roughly a month to put together the artist list, which she wanted to make sure represented the diversity of Native artists across North America, or Turtle Island, as it is called by some Indigenous people.
“The artists had to turn something around really fast. Some of the artists had pieces ready to go that were immersive for digital technology, and others we supported with technical assistance,” Rector said. “I wanted to be sure to express that Indigenous creatives are dynamic and also have been using technology since time immemorial, from pottery work, weaving, and embroidery
to digital technology. So the exhibition
highlights both traditional forms of art and technology and contemporary forms.”
She was also excited that the exhibition was unsanctioned: “What does it mean to take up space? What does it mean to show up authentically?
What does it mean to work outside of systems?”
Nicholas Galanin, NEVER FORGET Valley of Wyoming (2021) overlaid on Jasper Francis Cropsey, Valley of Wyoming (1865). Photo: courtesy of Amplifier.
The Met has been making a concerted effort to feature the work of Native artists in recent years. In 2018, the museum displayed Indigenous art in its American Wing for the first time, with “Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection.” It followed up by creating a new Indigenous art program and hired Patricia Marroquin Norby as its first curator of Native American art.
The museum even commissioned a pair of monumental history paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman for its series of contemporary “activations,” one of which recast Washington Crossing the Delaware with his Two Spirit alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. (Rector originally wanted an animated version of Monkman’s work, which debuted in 2020, for “Encoded.”)
And just last month, Jeffrey Gibson became the first Indigenous artist to create sculptures for the niches of the museum’s Fifth Avenue façade, with the installation of the commission The Animal That Therefore I Am.
Mer Young, We’wah Lhamana (2025) overlaid on Childe Hassam, Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain (1918). Photo: courtesy of Amplifier.
But as “Encoded” illustrates, there is still plenty of room to add Indigenous voices to the museum’s displays. A 2019 project, for instance, called “Native Perspectives,” added labels written by Native artists and historians to 18th- and 19th-century paintings and sculptures depicting Indigenous subjects—but those texts are no longer on display in the Met galleries.
The museum did not respond to my request for comment about the unsanctioned exhibition or future plans for its Indigenous art program.
“The Met has not issued any formal response,” Amplifier executive director Cleo Barnett told me in an email. “A researcher from the American Wing approached us yesterday at the Met expressing genuine interest in the project, but we haven’t received any official communication from the institution itself.
Acosia Red Elk at “Encoded” with Josué Rivas, Standing Strong featuring Acosia Red Elk (2021)over Thomas Sully, Queen Victoria (1838). Photo: by Aaron Huey, courtesy of Amplifer.
A Meaningful Moment
Many of the loved ones of the “Encoded” artists—who include Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Jarrette Werk, Josué Rivas, Katsitsionni Fox, and Mer Young—were at the museum for the show’s opening day.
“Watching family members see their relatives depicted or witnessing their own faces light up when they see their own cultural symbols reflected back at them at the exhibition, brought so many tears of joy,” Rector said.
Cass Gardiner, Skoden Warriors (2025) atop Jerome B. Thompson, The Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain (1858). Photo: courtesy of Amplified.
The exhibition was also inspiring reflection from museum goers encountering the AR artworks, such as Cass Gardiner’s Skoden Warriors (2025). It overlays 8-bit Native American figures that recall Oregon Trail video game characters atop Jerome B. Thompson’s The Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain (1858), of a group of white people picnicking atop a mountain. “Look at these guys, acting like they discovered the place,” a speech bubble pops up.
“Many people recognized the educational game from school and were curious to understand more from Cass Gardiner’s perspective about what colonization means, and what the actual impact of westward expansion is from an Indigenous point of view,” Rector said.
Priscilla Dobler Dzul, Future Cosmologies: The Regeneration of Maya Mythologies (2023), overlaid on Thomas Crawford, Mexican Girl Dying (1846; carved 1848). Photo: courtesy of Amplifier.
An especially moving work is Priscilla Dobler Dzul’s response to Thomas Crawford’s marble sculpture Mexican Girl Dying (1848). The original work fits into the trope of the extinction of the Native American people, romanticizing the death of young woman, shown topless. Dzul’s piece Future Cosmologies: The Regeneration of Maya Mythologies (2023) tenderly covers the woman’s bare breasts with a blanket made from the skin of a wild mountain lion.
“Priscilla’s work honors the many Indigenous lives lost to colonization in Mexico, but also uplifts the cosmologies and vitality of the people, while honoring the ancestors as well,” Rector said.

The project is not just about mourning what has been lost in the centuries since colonization began. It is also a celebration of Indigenous life and culture, and their continued presence here not only in the Met, but across the continent.
“The exhibit is gorgeous and fun,” Rector added. “I think it’s a beautiful addition to the Met, if they are open to incorporating it into their conversations about the work there.”
“Encoded” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, October 13–December 31, 2025. More