Eliana Willis

At first sight, Emma Ferrer’s paintings are serene, if slightly melancholic, ones. Her skies are alive with shades of blues, pinks, and grays, her landscapes golden and textured with gestural brushstrokes. Closer inspection, however, reveals a sense of disquiet in these scenes. A dog runs down a village road leaving behind bloody paw prints; a mountain goat on a dirt mound gazes ruefully at a retreating figure; a younger goat lies prone on a red mat, teetering, it seems, between sleep and death.
“I almost feel like some things are too gruesome or shocking to paint,” she told me during a walkthrough of the exhibition. “I don’t want them to have that shock factor, but I want them to have a very subtle eeriness.”
Emma Ferrer, A Humble Return (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.
Ferrer’s paintings are making their debut at New York’s Sapar Contemporary, in “The Scapegoat.” The show brings together works she recently created in her studio in Tuscany, for which she had decamped after a six-year spell in New York. In tone and tenor, the art bears out the solitude and untamed nature of her Italian outpost, woven with nods to the region’s storied art history.
Emma Ferrer, Agnus Dei (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.
While her art is making its first appearance on the scene, the artist herself is no stranger to the spotlight. Ferrer is the granddaughter of Hollywood legend Audrey Hepburn (her father is Hepburn and actor Mel Ferrer’s son, Sean)—a relationship that has kindled breathless press coverage over the years, including her outing at age 20 on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar.
Ferrer never got to meet her celebrated grandmother, who died a year before her birth in 1994, and coming to grips with her legacy, she said, was a process.
“I spent a lot of my life feeling like I didn’t know how to live up to that. But I have reached a place where I’m incredibly proud to be the granddaughter of Audrey Hepburn,” she reflected. “It’s a part of my identity and a lot of my life experiences. There’s no point in trying to hide it. It’s part of my journey.”
Emma Ferrer. Photo: Filbert T. Kung.
Ferrer’s journey so far has taken her from Switzerland, where she was born, though Los Angeles, where she spent some of her childhood, and Italy, where she attended the Florence Academy of Art. Along the way, she earned her BA at SUNY Empire in New York and her MFA at Central Saint Martins in London. In the late 2010s, she was back in New York working as a curator and art liaison (she interned at Sapar Contemporary, too), until the lockdowns hit.
At that time, Ferrer told me, she was likewise hit with a desire to return to nature—to be “in the environment that I realize now feeds my practice.” She departed the city and set up a studio in the Apuan Alps, where she was joined by her two herding dogs, Orso and Lilla.
“I really, really love to be alone,” she said. “I still work remotely, in design PR, but ultimately, having that space, time, and quietness is really what allowed me to just pour myself into my practice.”
Sapar’s co-founder Nina Levent concurs, telling me of Ferrer’s resulting paintings: “There was no prelude. This work could not have happened in New York.”
Emma Ferrer, L’abbandono (Abandonment) (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.
Indeed, “The Scapegoat” is riven throughout with ancient lore and practices in ways that seem of another world. The exhibition’s title—and its centerpiece—takes its cue from the Old Testament ritual of the scapegoat, animals either slaughtered or sent out into the wilderness to expel all of humanity’s sins. But notably, it also harks back to William Holman Hunt’s masterwork, The Scapegoat (1854–55)—which Ferrer said she became “obsessed” with—and Francisco de Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei (c. 1635–40). “This whole concept crystallized around those paintings,” said Ferrer.
At the gallery are Ferrer’s haunting interpretation of these brutal, age-old rituals, some of them created on rustic jute and hand-primed linen canvases.
Emma Ferrer, The Scapegoat (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.
The Scapegoat (2024), a response to Hunt, places the wounded animal on barren ground, its sad fate made plain by roiling brushwork and doleful drops of rain. You Will Return the Evil to its Steppe (Homage to Zurbarán) (2024) references a pre-Assyrian rite of spitting into a frog’s mouth before piercing its feet with rose thorns in order to cure a sickness. Ferrer’s beautifully rendered scene depicts her wistful frog staining an otherwise bucolic field with its bloodied feet, the landscape encircled by a painted wooden frame adorned with dying flowers.
This relationship between humans and animals also surfaces in more everyday tableaux such as A Humble Return (2024) and Lost in the Mountains (2024). They capture the sights of the Tuscan countryside, particularly its hunting culture, Ferrer noted, while hinting at more complex questions.
Emma Ferrer, You Will Return the Evil to its Steppe (Homage to Zurbarán) (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.
“The animal has trusted humans, and there’s this betrayal of trust,” she said of these sacrificial practices. “Why do people do this thing in the name of God? Where is God for that animal? Does the animal perceive God in those final moments? I am trying to give the sense of this higher power. I don’t intend to be persuasive at all with my work. I’m just raising questions that go back basically to the beginning of men.”
Ferrer’s deft hand is also on view here. Her Newborn Scapegoat (2024) offers a disorienting perspective of the Terrazza Mascagni in Livorno, the surreal vista heightened by the presence of the titular newborn. Her rendering of physical and emotional depth, such as the placid body of water in At Sea (2024), is delicately achieved.
“This is an unusual body of work,” said Levent, who commended Ferrer for making such an ancient narrative her own. “I think this is something authentic; an artist finds the theme or the theme finds the artist.”
Emma Ferrer, Newborn Scapegoat (2024). Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary and the artist.
The artist and theme having met, the show is a confident one. Ferrer’s is a keen artistic voice—one she hopes will resonate.
“I don’t want the works to be overly obscure. I don’t want their concepts to be alienating,” she said. “If someone can just access these deeper questions that I’ve asked, if a person can find that personal connection to the work, then it’s done its job.”
Emma Ferrer with At Sea (2024). Photo: Filbert T. Kung.
In other ways, too, she hopes it honors her grandmother’s legacy.
During our conversation, she detailed the research Hepburn embarked on for her roles in such films as The Nun’s Story (1959) and Wait Until Dark (1967): “It’s interesting, from an artistic point of view, to see how she poured herself into roles that aren’t Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” The artist’s own deep dives into ancient history, it appears, have an antecedent. Ferrer is also a national ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, a role that sees her continuing Hepburn’s tireless advocacy with UNICEF.
“I would like to get to a place where I can marry those worlds and continue that legacy with my artistic practice,” Ferrer said. “As I’ve gotten older, I understand more what she meant to so many people. It’s a privilege that this has landed on me. I feel the best way to honor her is by continuing to be myself.”
“The Scapegoat” is on view at Sapar Contemporary, 9 North Moore Street, New York, through February 15. More

Standing in front of the entrance to the exhibition “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists” at a high-ceiling basement gallery of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul, I felt a spark of exhilaration that jolted me. Finally, an exhibition dedicated to Asian women artists! But why has it taken so long?
Perhaps it was worth the wait, as the historical context gives the show a lot more weight. Featuring around 130 works by some 60 Asian women artists from 11 countries and territories across East, South, and Southeast Asia—Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and India—”Connecting Bodies” surveys works from the 1960s, when women’s art began to emerge in the region, through today.
Certainly, names such as Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Lee Bul, and Cao Fei are no strangers to the global art world today. But what about those in-between, and those who have not been receiving the same level of exposure internationally or even regionally? How are they different? Do they share a common ground?
Kim Insoon, Begging for a Job as a Woman Student (1995). Photo: Vivienne Chow
An ambitious and expansive exhibition like this offers a great opportunity to examine these artists and their practices while reflecting on the transformation experienced over the past six decades. This period, coincidentally, corresponds to the sexagenary cycle that forms the foundation of the lunisolar calendar that is still widely used in many parts of Asia. In a way, the opening of this exhibition signifies the return to the starting point of this 60-year cycle, an appropriate time to review and contextualize the rich materials from the past to present.
Going through the exhibition occupying two galleries located on the museum’s basement level, it was not hard to notice the theme of “bodies” on display, quite literally. From the image of Korean artist Jung Kangja’s iconic performance The Transparent Balloons and Nude (1968), the country’s first known female nude performance that saw the artist covering her naked body with transparent balloons, to Philippine artist Agnes Arellano’s surrealist sculpture Carcass Cornucopia (1987), which depicts the body of a woman with horse feet hung upside down, with her torso ripped apart revealing a baby sitting inside, and the charming video work Dance with Farm Workers (2001) by Chinese artist Wen Hui, bodies are not just part of a work, but also a conduit and a point of convergence.
Chung Chanseung, Jung Kangja, and Kang Kukjin, The Transparent Balloons and Nude (1968). Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Works selected for this project live up to the expectations outlined by Bae Myungji, MMCA’s curator who also curated this ambitious show, which “focuses on the values of communication, connection, and solidarity associated with the body.” It explores works “through the lens of corporeality,” the curator said. “The body is a place where various ideologies and situations intersect, and it also represents a locus where one can explore the existential possibilities of difference and diversity.”
Rather than organizing works in chronological order and categorizing works and artists by region, the show is made up of six thematic sections, with each featuring a selection of works to echo the respective theme, each punctuated by bold works and rarely seen pieces.
Atsuko Tanaka, Gate of Hell (1965-1969). Photo: Vivienne Chow
Section one, titled “Choreograph Life,” highlights works responding to socio-political conditions through women’s bodily experiences, addressing the changing roles of women. Included in the section are Japanese artist Mako Idemitsu’s video works Woman’s House (1972) and Another Day of Housewife (1977), Korean artist Ryu Jun Hwa’s politically-charged paintings Red Flesh (1992) and The Fall of America (1992), and the late Filipino artist Brenda Fajardo’s whimsical commentaries on migrant workers from her country depicted in Tarot Card Series, her works on paper comprised of Pilipina, Entertainer in Japan (1993), Pilipina, Domestic Helper in Hong Kong (1993), and Pilipina, Not Documented in Taiwan (1993).
“Flexible Territories of Sexuality,” which the museum says is not suitable for those aged under 19, is filled with provocative works that challenge the social norms of sexuality, a topic traditionally considered as a taboo across many parts of Asia. Women’s body plays a key role in many pieces on show, such as Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota’s 1965 performance Vagina Painting, where the artist is seen crouching on the floor, painting with a brush held between her legs, depicted in a black and white photograph. Quirky narrative video pieces Love Condition and Love Condition II by Mai Endo x Aya Momose exploring sex, love, and more were delightful to watch. Kusama’s 1967 avant-garde video piece Self Obliteration can also be found here.
Wen Hui, 100 Verbs (1994). Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Chinese artist Guo Fengyi’s drawings from late 1990s to 2000s referencing the intersections between humans and beings of a higher realm set the tone for “Bodies · God(desse)s · Cosmology.” Paintings by artists such as Pacita Abad from the Philippines, Kim Insoon from Korea, and Fitriani Dwi Kurniasih from Indonesia explore femininity borrowing images from folklores and mythologies.
“Street Performances” is a collage of rare documentation of important performances by women artists from past to present. The show concludes with “Bodies as Becoming–Connecting Bodies,” dedicated to works that transcend the rigid boundaries and hierarchies that have long marginalized women. Among the highlights are Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s video work The Class (2005) and Korean artist Kim Nahee’s newly commissioned illustration and video installation piece Gossip Girl Protocol (2024).
Agnes Arellano, Carcass Cornucorpia (1987). Photo: Vivienne Chow
Does this presentation structure work? It is without a doubt a mountainous effort to sift through the materials and to identify overarching narrative threads to connect all the dots. After all, besides the fact that these are all women artists and their art emerged throughout the chaotic post-colonial eras and struggle with various degrees of democratization, they are all rooted in places with vastly different cultural, historical, and geopolitical contexts. Generalizing them as one will simply be factually incorrect.
While the categorization may be arbitrary at times, it was a worthwhile experiment as it creates solidarity among the artists on view, though it may be confusing to those who are not well-versed in the region’s contexts and aesthetics.
Bharti Kher, And All the while the Benevolent Slept (2008). Photo: Vivienne Chow.
The configuration of space was problematic in some instances. For example, in the section “Flexible Territories of Sexuality,” there was an impression of an uneven allocation of space where some works that needed more space were cramped in a room while others were left surrounded with slightly too much emptiness. Nevertheless, confining Taiwanese artist Joyce Ho’s mesmerizing five-channel video installation Vera x Diary (2023) in one room as part of section five’s “Repeating Gestures–Bodies · Objects · Language” was an interesting move. Watching the performer trying to hide herself some weird corners of an apartment made it very difficult to walk away from that room.
“Connecting Bodies” is nonetheless an important show, despite its flaws, and I carried the 400-page exhibition catalog all the way from Seoul to London knowing that it is a reference I want to keep on my book shelf. Perhaps this show is merely the beginning of a new chapter.
In November, Taipei Fine Arts Museum also opened a show focusing on female artists titled “Enclave: An Autobiography.” I sincerely hope that exhibitions showcasing and contextualizing works by women artists from Asia and their diaspora are not just fashion that comes and goes. The show “presents works that have attempted to encourage a reconfiguration of power through women’s language,” Bae noted. Indeed we need more shows and platforms to give Asian women artists their long overdue recognition and tell the stories they did not have the chance to tell.
“Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists” runs through March 3, 2025 at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea. More

If you are not already familiar with the work of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson—a prolific, influential, and largely self-taught artist from Ohio who died in 2015 at the age of 75—you may be in for a revelation this year.
An eye-opening show, “Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson: Character Studies,” is on view now at the Fort Gansevoort gallery in New York’s Meatpacking District. The gallery, run by dealer Adam Shopkorn, represents Robinson in the U.S., and is working to draw attention to her, along with the Columbus Museum of Art, to which the artist bequeathed all of her work and personal effects, including her home-studio in that Ohio city. The CMA will also be sending a touring exhibition, “Aminah Robinson: Journeys Home, a Visual Memoir,” to three U.S. museums this year, with more stops to follow. Both shows present deep dives into various aspects of her multi-faceted seven-decade career.
“Character Studies” includes drawings, paintings, sculpture, puppetry, music boxes, handmade books, textile-based pieces, and poetry, in which Robinson reflects on themes of family and ancestry, often through the lens of ordinary, found objects and everyday tasks. The art blends her personal experiences—including characters from her childhood home in Poindexter Village in Columbus, one of the country’s first federally funded public housing developments—with broader narratives of the African American experience throughout history, including her great-aunt Cornelia Johnson’s tales of slavery.
Installation view of “Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson: Character Studies”  at Fort Gansevoort, New York. © Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Trust. Courtesy of the Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Trust, Columbus Museum of Art, and Fort Gansevoort, New York.
Shopkorn said that he first came across her work—two monumental quilted pieces that she worked on for long stretches—on the website of the Underground Railroad Museum in Cincinnati, several years ago. “The work never really ended,” he said. “She worked on them for decades at a time and they were still never really complete and could always be added to. I was enamored with what I saw… I just kind of got the Aminah bug.”
He was referring to RagGonNon (completed in 2004), which is comprised of two tapestries, Journey I and Journey II, that tell the story of the artist’s ancestors and their forced relocation from West Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to the U.S. “Once freedom came to enslaved people, Aminah’s journey takes you to her birthplace—Columbus, Ohio,” according to the museum website. The RagGonNon shows images of Robinson’s childhood and the games she played, following her all the way into her adulthood. The title refers to the artist’s philosophy, to “rag on and on and on,” no matter what, and also alludes to her view that complex artworks continue to evolve by way of viewers’ contemplation.
The figurative sculptures at Fort Gansevoort feature heads fashioned from “hogmawg,” a term (picked up from her father) that she used to describe the clay-like material she wielded in her sculptures, made primarily from a mix of mud, sticks, pig grease, lime, and glue. The figures are decorated with human hair, button eyes, and outfits that consist of repurposed clothing and other handcrafted decorations. One tabletop sculpture, Brownyskin Man (1997), was based on a local street vendor who was a fixture in the artist’s childhood. The Columbus Museum loaned it to the show.
Brownyskin Man sports a checkered-print cap and matching coat, sewn to fit his small frame. Multicolored cloth sacks hangs from his figure, representing the vessels in which the vendor carried his pork rinds for sale, also known as brown skins.
Installation view of “Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson: Character Studies” at Fort Gansevoort in New York. © Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Trust. Courtesy of the Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Trust, Columbus Museum of Art, and Fort Gansevoort, New York.
Though Robinson may not be a household name, she never labored in obscurity. A traveling retrospective of her work made stops at the Brooklyn Museum, the CMA, and other institutions between 2002 and 2007, and she won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2004.
“It’s a wonderful history that has sort of evolved over the years,” Deirdre Hamler, the director of the Aminah Robinson Legacy Project at the CMA, said of the artist’s career. “It started with her being enamored with the museum as a child. She was a visionary early on, and always aspired to be at the museum. As a young Black girl from the 1940s who lived in the neighborhood, she was able to go into the museum to see art and also took classes.”
By the time Robinson was in her teens, one of her art pieces was featured in Seventeen magazine, Hamler said. She also exhibited her works at the Ohio State Fair.
Hamler said that the last few years have involved “a long process of determining how to manage this trove,” and that the museum’s working relationship with Fort Gansevoort has helped.
Shopkorn painted his gallery’s walls a brilliant deep shade of red, Robinson’s favorite color, for the exhibition and said that museums have been expressing interest in acquiring works from the show.
Prices have been set somewhat conservatively. Shopkorn said that drawings from the 1960s and ’70s start at $4,500 and run up to $11,000, while some paintings on paper (some of which are eight feet tall), run up to $35,000. The most important sculptures in the show run up to about $50,000. (There are no records of her work selling at auction in the Artnet Price Database.)
Proceeds from the exhibition will support the Legacy Project, as well as a residency program for African American artists and writers that she developed at her former home and studio in Columbus, conservation of her work and workplace, and related museum exhibitions and educational programming.
Installation view of “Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson: Character Studies,” at Fort Gansevoort, New York. © Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Trust. Courtesy of the Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Trust, Columbus Museum of Art, and Fort Gansevoort, New York.
“Having this opportunity to steward her legacy is really special,” the CMA’s director, Brooke Minto, said in a phone interview. “Her legacy is really special. It also allowed us to delve deeply into the history of Columbus and the region, and the way in which the city has evolved.” Minto noted that many artists in the area counted Robinson as a teacher and a mentor.
“In some ways the museum had its marching orders,” Minto said. “Robinson was really clear about the work continuing to be available in the market for the purpose of supporting younger artists. It was the museum’s charge to figure out how to make that happen.”
“Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson: Character Studies” is on view at Fort Gansevoort in New York, through January 25. “Aminah Robinson: Journeys Home, a Visual Memoir” will be on view at the Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio from February 1 to July 13, before traveling to the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey from October 16 to March 1, 2026, and the Mobile Museum of Art in Alabama from March 26, 2026 to January 9, 2027. Two remaining venues will be announced later in the year; the full tour will run through 2028. More

When we think of Versailles, we think of Marie Antoinette, opulence, and the last hurrah of the aristocratic high life before the French Revolution put an end to such folly in 1789. We may also think of philosophers like Voltaire and the age of the enlightenment, but less well-known is the palace’s crucial role in supporting the sciences.
As a new exhibition, “Versailles: Science and Splendour” at the Science Museum in London until April 21, 2025, shows, the French court was motivated to sponsor scientific research as a means of consolidating power and expanding colonial rule. In 1666, Louis XIV established the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, which, unlike peer institutions in Italy or Britain, paid members a salary and covered their lodgings and equipment, meaning their endeavors were all done in the king’s service.
Subsequent kings Louis XV and Louis XVI were so keen on science that they even carried out experiments themselves. At court, they were routinely presented with the latest inventions or discoveries, sometimes even watching live demonstrations, and to receive this opportunity was the greatest mark of distinction for an ambitious scientist in France. Unsurprisingly, the Crown tended to favor advantageous developments, such as chemistry for artillery, astronomy for navigation, cartography for the mapping of French territories, and medicine for public heath.
Henri Testelin, Etablissement de l’Académie des sciences et fondation de l’Observatoire (1666). Image: © château de Versailles, Dist. RMN © JM Manaï.
As such, Versailles became a hub of knowledge-sharing that attracted many different kinds of scientists, then known as “savants” or “natural philosophers.” Even Benjamin Franklin shared his theories about electricity and the lightning conductor with French scientists during a diplomatic visit to the palace in 1778.
But how to get the message out about this impressive bustle of learned activity, and promote France’s role in the advancement of scientific research? The answer, of course, was to commission paintings that would document these developments and emphasize the Crown’s role in them.
One example was Henri Testelin’s Establissement de l’Académie des sciences et fondation de l’Observatoire, 1666 (1673-1681), represented in the exhibition by a reproduction. It is an imagined scene in which Louis XIV, in all his finery, meets with members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, among them are Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens and Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini. The men are surrounded by the accessories of serious study, including books, papers, celestial and terrestrial globes, a pendulum clock, an armillary sphere, and animal skeletons.
Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, from the private collection of Marquis de Breteuil. Photo: © Château de Breteuil.
From Testelin’s painting, you’d be forgiven for believing only men practiced science at Versailles, but there were a few remarkable women scientists who also made important contributions. The most notable of these was Emilie du Châtelet, a mathematician who, in writing the standard French translation of Isaac Newton’s basic law of physics from 1687, added her own commentary, including important contributions to our understanding of kinetic energy.
Du Châtelet’s intellectual collaborator and romantic partner Voltaire once described her as “a great man whose only fault was being a woman.” A painting of her by an unknown artist reveals something of her attempts to balance her ambitions with societal expectations of her gender. Though she is dolled up in a ladylike manner with elaborate dress and a gentle, pensive expression, she holds in her right hand a mathematical instrument for measuring distances known as a divider. A hefty copy of Newton’s Principa Mathematica (1687) lies open on her desk and an armillary sphere, used to map celestial constellations, can be seen in the background.
Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Pineapple in a pot (1733). Photo: © Château de Versailles, Dist. RMN © Christophe Fouin.
As France expanded its imperial reach, budding French naturalists and botanists received new specimens to study from across the world. One fruit that never failed to impress European colonialists was the pineapple, which they “discovered” in South American and the Caribbean in the late fifteenth century and brought back home. These spiky, oval fruits soon became highly fashionable objects coveted by royals who wanted to grow them in their own gardens. In order to pull this off in less than optimal weather conditions, horticulturists in the Netherlands invented the greenhouse and were soon being imitated by their neighbors.
The first homegrown pineapples reached maturity in France in 1733, and were presented to the king on Christmas Day. The momentous feat was recorded by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, a French painter renowned for his still lifes. By the 1750s, hundreds of pineapples were being cultivated and their distinctive form continued to intrigue artists of all kind, becoming a popular subject for paintings or a common design for textiles and decorative arts.
Pierre-Denis Martin, View of the Marly machine and of the Louveciennes castle (1722-23). Photo: © Château de Versailles, Dist. RMN, © Jean-Marc Manaï.
In order to convert Versailles from a mere hunting lodge for the king’s leisure and sports into France’s principal seat of power in the late 17th century, Louis XIV wanted his gardens to be filled with magnificent fountains and waterworks. This was a big ask, given the lack of adequate water source nearby, but engineers managed it by building the largest mechanical device of their time, known as the Marly Machine. This hydraulic system could miraculously raise water in the opposite direction of gravity, over 500 feet up from the Seine to a reservoir, where it would eventually be transported to Versailles.
Though the Marly Machine no longer exists, it survives via various modes of documentation, most notably a painting by the artist Pierre-Denis Martin, who produced many sweeping landscape paintings recording battlefields or architectural arrangements. The  composition gives a sense of the machine’s scale and impressive presence within the natural topography, and we can just make out various paddle wheels and a rod system leading up the hill behind.
As with so many other sophisticated technological achievements at Versailles, the Marly Machine’s invention was ultimately co-opted for political purposes, becoming a proud expression of the king’s extravagant wealth and power.
“Versailles: Science and Splendour” is on view at the Science Museum in London until April 21, 2025. More

The artist Kenneth Webb, a free man granted early parole after 16 years in prison, smiles as he talks about an experience that he thought he might never have—the chance to see a major solo show of his work for the public.
Webb, 34, was convicted of first-degree murder and another charge for the shooting death of an 18-year-old after a fight while leaving a party in January 2008, court documents show. Webb, then 17, was handed a sentence of 50 years to life in prison.
“Kenneth’s parole date was long in the future, like 2031,” said Meetra Johansen, founder of the Huma Gallery, where Webb’s show “Hymns from the Cave” will go on view this month. “When we heard he was coming out, it was electrifying. I had the gallery; he had the work.”
Kenneth Webb, City on Fire, Girl at Water (not dated). Photo courtesy of Megumi Nakazawa/Huma Gallery
Webb said the trajectory of who he became in prison was fated by an opportunity few prisoners get—oversight by progressive corrections officers who granted him access to materials, whereas their peers might see a 12-inch paintbrush as a possible weapon.
In fact, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation beamed with pride when Webb took home top honors at the Antelope Valley Fair Art Exhibition in 2019, issuing a press release and photographs of his work. The chaplain of the California State Prison in Los Angeles County, where Webb was then housed, accepted the award on his behalf.
Among the opportunities that corrections officers granted to artists like Webb was the chance to put on a show at Frieze Los Angeles in 2020. Webb thought that show, titled “Out of Bounds,” was beautiful. But he took issue with how heavily it was tied to prison life. Though he became a painter while imprisoned, he said his art is about so much more.
Kenneth Webb, Floriography (2024). Photo courtesy of Meetra Johansen/Huma Gallery
“I noticed that people started to call us ‘prison artists’ and every time I would hear that my ears would ring. Prison artist. Well, okay, I’m an artist in prison, but I wouldn’t say that I am a ‘prison artist,’ whatever that is,” he said.
“I knew that, at some point, I would leave,” he added. “I spent half my life incarcerated. So, it makes sense my work has those themes. But if you ask me about the work, I’ll tell you the themes are about identity or power structures—about, you know, just everyday struggles.”
Johansen believes Webb’s artwork has wide appeal among collectors. She said she first learned of his work during the 2020 pandemic when she applied to teach art history at a prison. Because of the lockdown, she wasn’t allowed inside, so she started looking at what was happening inside the prisons.
Kenneth Webb, Black Tendencies (2020). Photo courtesy of Huma Gallery
“There was a lot of mistreatment and I wanted to do a show about it,” she said. “I wrote letters to people inside prison and reached out to art teachers. That’s how I got in touch with Kenneth.”
Webb’s former cellmate, Tobias Tubbs, had been released already and was able to bring his artwork to her for that 2021 show. Johansen said she was blown away by the quality of the work. Tubbs, who is also an artist, co-founded a nonprofit art education program with Johansen called Huma House that would lead to the creation of the gallery.
“I’m seeing Kenneth’s work, and the label that is always put on that type of work alluding to ‘prison art’ as an outsider thing, and I was like, ‘This should be hanging in the MoMA,’” she said.
Kenneth Webb, Strange Soil (2021). Photo courtesy of Megumi Nakazawa/Huma Gallery
In the years since, Johansen featured Webb’s artwork in group shows put on by Huma House, the nonprofit. But the solo show, one of the first for Johansen since Huma Gallery opened in February, will boast a mix of works created inside and outside of the prison.
Webb initially thought of including only paintings that were made after he gained his freedom, but said it “became apparent that I shouldn’t neglect the work that I did prior to being free, and that that work is integral and that it’s important.”
“I’m discovering things about my creative process. Before, I just had more time to make art. There were natural boundaries where people couldn’t call me on the phone,” he said. Prison is what it is imagined it to be, chaotic and loud, so he would throw on headphones and blast Kendrick Lamar, positioning himself against a wall to draw.
Kenneth Webb, Unnecessary Censorship #1 (2021). Photo courtesy of Megumi Nakazawa/Huma Gallery
His work from prison seemed more “intentional” with its composition, he said. He is learning to be as intentional with less time. “I don’t have six hours to do thumbnails and color studies,” he said.
Though Webb has been sketching since childhood, his interest in painting took off when he transferred to a prison in Lancaster, California, that had an art studio. The tenet of the studio was that prisoners could pay for their own supplies, provided that they gave back by donating to organizations like Wounded Warriors or by teaching art to other inmates.
“I flourished quickly in that program, which was different than the rest of the prison,” Webb said. “The prison could be on lockdown and, rest assured, the artists could do what they do because they respected that we’d send funds to Blue Star Mothers or Saint Jude’s Hospital, and it gave us a different proximity to the authority figures within the prison.”
Kenneth Webb, no title, no date. Photo courtesy of Huma Gallery
Webb said two artists in prison, a man named Chuck Wyatt and another he knew only as Rocky, had specific styles with their art that he said were passed on to every other artist in the prison who learned from them.
“The composition of their paintings was very intentional in their style. They taught people in that style,” Webb said. “Even though I have my own style and ideas, I can definitely see the legacy of those lessons being passed on to me.”
Kenneth Webb, Memorial (no date). Photo courtesy of Megumi Nakazawa/Huma Gallery
But Webb also learned a lot of his craft from books he read. “Believe it or not, we had a library of the oldest books that you can imagine,” Webb said. “These art books reeked of just, like, old. So, I studied the Renaissance artists, the masters.”
Eventually, somebody donated contemporary art books and Webb learned of artists like Jack Witten and Kehinde Wiley. But the prison also had a lot of comic books. He said his own art falls somewhere in between the old masters and comic book illustrations.
Kenneth Webb. Photo: Khalil Bowens/Huma Gallery.
Webb plans to formally continue his art education after wrapping up an associate’s degree program through Chaffey College, in Rancho Cucamonga, California, which he started while behind bars. He paroled before he could finish and reenrolled as a free man hoping to transfer at some point for a bachelor’s degree in art. As for how he now puts food on the table, Webb works as an emotional and social educator for children at Big Dogg Gang Intervention and Violence Protection.
“I sat in captivity thinking about what it could look like to have a real art show, who would be there,” he said. “To be here going through the process of creating that in real life feels surreal. I’m so humbled.”
“Hymns from the Cave” is on view at Huma Gallery, 3303 West Jefferson Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, January 11–February 22, 2025. More

Ever wished you could travel back to the mean streets of Victorian London, the one described by the era’s most beloved writer, Charles Dickens? One place to start would be the townhouse at 48 Doughty Street near Bloomsbury that he once called home. Though he lived there only between 1837 and 1839, this was a particularly productive period, during which he wrote three books, including Oliver Twist. 
The house is the only surviving property in which Dickens lived, and it narrowly escaped demolition thanks to the efforts of the Dickens Fellowship, an association that bought the property and turned it into a museum dedicated to the writer. It opened its doors in 1925 and, over the past 100 years, has invited visitors to step back into the year 1837 with many original features like fireplaces and fittings, period furnishings, and some of the author’s own belongings, as well as abundant information about his interests and way of life.
This year, the museum celebrates its centenary with the exhibition “Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens Museum,” which will bring together highlights of the collection, including some of the most rarely seen treasures.
The long-lost portrait of Charles Dickens by Margaret Gillies from 1843. Photo courtesy the Charles Dickens Museum.
Prized among these is a chalk and pastel sketch of Dickens from the time when he was living in Doughty Street, and a miniature painting by artist Margaret Gillies that was made just a few years later, when he was writing A Christmas Carol. Most photographs record Dickens in his rugged middle age; these works capture a much more fresh-faced author, in his late 20s and early 30s.
Though the Gillies work was known to historians thanks to a surviving letter from Dickens to the artist, which will be displayed alongside the portrait, it had been considered lost for over 174 years. In 2017, it miraculously resurfaced in a cardboard box of trinkets headed to auction in South Africa. The museum raised the £180,000 ($225,000) necessary to acquire the miniature in 2019.
The portrait wasn’t the only art that the author admired. Also on show will be works by illustrators with whom he collaborated for various publications. The standout examples are pieces by renowned caricaturist George Cruikshank and John Leech’s early drafts of drawings that would appear in the first edition of A Christmas Carol.
Sketch for Fagin in the Condemned Cell from Oliver Twist by George Cruikshank. Photo courtesy the Charles Dickens Museum.
Many more treats lie in store for Dickens enthusiasts. These include some of his very earliest pieces of writing, including an album of poems he produced at the tender age of 18. Of his personal correspondence, a standout is a draft letter to the family servant that contains the first paragraphs of the infamous “Violated Letter” from 1858, which frankly recounted the breakdown of his marriage.
The exhibition will also include original manuscripts and rare editions of many of Dickens’s most widely beloved works and other notable copies. One example is a David Copperfield that traveled to Antartica as part of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910–12 Terra Nova expedition. The worn tome still bears fingerprints and stains from the seal blubber that provided fuel for fires when extreme weather left the crew stranded in an ice cave. As well as by the warmth of the flames, the men’s spirits were raised by reading one chapter of Dickens’s book every night for 60 days.
The blubber-stained copy of David Copperfield taken to Antarctica by Capt. Scott’s 1910 expedition on the Terra Nova. Photo courtesy the Charles Dickens Museum.
Meanwhile, Victorian history buffs will be delighted to find items that reveal something of Dickens’s personal style and interests, including his hairbrush, walking stick, only surviving suit, binoculars, quill and ink stand, and marriage license. Archival photographs will provide additional insight.
“Gathered together over the past century and displayed in Dickens’s only surviving house in London, a beacon at the centre of the urban landscape quintessentially associated with the writer, the museum in Doughty Street will be filled with objects that define Dickens’s life and the museum’s history,” the museum’s director, Cindy Sughrue, told the BBC.
“Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens Museum” is on view at the Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London, February 5 through June 29.  More

When it comes to critically-acclaimed museum shows, a high premium is usually placed on the uniqueness and rarity of the objects on display. Back in the day, however, copies of an ancient masterpiece would often have to do. This was how the marvels of Greek art made their way to workshops across the Roman empire, in due course influencing the Renaissance masters and Western culture at large. Not only would ideas spread far via reproduction, but otherwise site-specific art could be appreciated in new contexts.
Carrying this spirit into the 21st century, the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) will present the most comprehensive Michelangelo exhibition since 1875, featuring a groundbreaking blend of 19th-century plaster casts and state-of-the-art 3D-printed replicas. Opening March 29, the show will reassemble scattered masterpieces and showcase works that rarely, if ever, leave their original locations, offering visitors a unique opportunity to experience the Renaissance master’s art.
Plaster cast after Michelangelo Buonarroti, Medici Madonna. Original made ca. 1526–1532, cast in 1897. Photo: SMK – National Gallery of Denmark.
Using technology from Factum Arte in Madrid, the museum will enhance its collection of 19th-century plaster casts of Michelangelo masterpieces, such as the head of David and the Medici Madonna, with newly created 3D-printed replicas. These replicas provide access to works that are otherwise unattainable due to immobility or location. For instance, Michelangelo’s depictions of Saints Peter, Augustine, Paul, and Gregory are fixed elements of the Piccolomini Altarpiece in Siena, Italy installed so high that they cannot be easily viewed up close. Other works, like Cupid, are in high demand and geographically restricted, currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from France until 2029.
The show’s curator, Matthias Wivel, said he is not concerned that the use of replicas might be off-putting to audiences. “We will achieve a beautiful exhibition with them that will be compelling to the public,” he said. “The appreciation and study of art has always relied heavily on reproductions. Without them both would be much more limited. Used responsibly, there is huge potential and value in using reproductions.”
He conceded that the show is an experiment, and he will measure its success on its ability to “stimulate debate and prompt refinement or rejection, and innovation.”
Perhaps the strongest argument for the use of reproductions is greater freedom to build art historical narratives unbounded by practical limitations. For example, the show in Denmark will bring together several pieces originally produced for the tomb of Julius II that have since scattered across different locations. These include the Boboli Prisoners at the Accademia and Genius of Victory at the Palazzo Vecchio, both in Florence, and Rachel and Leah at San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome.
Plaster cast after Michelangelo Buonarroti, Day. Original ca. 1524-26, cast 1897. The Royal Cast Collection, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark Photo: SMK
Factum Arte have also been able to reconstruct Infant John the Baptist from Ubedà, which was smashed during the Spanish Civil War. Though the statue has been restored, it still bears the scars of its destruction; the new 3D model was made by referencing archival photographs of the work from before the restoration. Wivel hopes it will “convey some of the wonder of the original.”
The exhibition will also reveal how much reproduction technologies have evolved over the centuries. According to Wivel, Factum Arte’s facsimiles made using digital techniques are accurate down to the micron level, resulting in pieces of “much higher fidelity than the plasters, in that they reproduce the color, surface, and detailing such as veining, of the marble.”
He also noted that digital facsimiles like those made by Factum Arte provide highly detailed records of artworks that may be valuable to researchers and restorers for centuries to come. Wivel noted that traveling as part of exhibition loans can cause significant physical strain on fragile objects as well. In other contexts, high-tech replicas have also played an important role in facilitating repatriation agreements, allowing museums to keep a copy of an object that they decide to return.
Together, these reproductions, both old and new, will enable the most comprehensive monographic exhibition dedicated to Michelangelo since 1875, when the 400th anniversary of his birth was celebrated in Florence. Running through August 31, the exhibition will also include a selection of Michelangelo’s original drawings, correspondence, models in wax and clay, and several bronzes made after models that are now lost. More