Eliana Willis

The nonagenarian fiber artist Olga de Amaral is having a moment. Not just a present career high, but one in which her place and contributions to the history of art itself are being codified. Now, following its 2024 debut at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, a major retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, offers stateside audiences a rare opportunity to encounter the work of this defining—yet underappreciated—figure in contemporary art history.
The canon of contemporary textile art is still very much being wrought. While the medium certainly is not new (on the contrary, it is one of the oldest in human existence), understandings of it as a tradition of fine art, rather than simply craft, are comparatively in their nascency.
Amaral has been the common thread throughout the recent spate of museum exhibitions reassessing textile art’s place within the history and trajectory of art itself—from “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” at the Museum of Modern Art, to “Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Installation view of “Olga de Amaral” (2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
The crowning jewel of Amaral’s recent exhibition achievements is the ICA Miami retrospective. Following the success of “Olga de Amaral” at the Fondation Cartier, a new iteration of the show has been tailored to the ICA Miami’s building, and features work dating from across the full breadth of the artist’s career. On view through October 12, 2025, the show is a testament not only to Amaral’s career to date, but the promised significance of her work moving into the future too.
Amaral’s work feels both ancient and futuristic, at once unmistakably Colombian and universally transcendent. In their golden shimmer and woven density, these pieces hold space for memory, ritual, and wonder—anchors to the earth that somehow seem to float.
Olga de Amaral, Casa Amaral, Bogotá, Colombia (2024). Photo: Juan Daniel Caro.
Who is Olga de Amaral?
Born in 1932 in Bogotá, Colombia, as Olga Ceballos Velez, Olga de Amaral received a degree in architectural design from the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, where she attended in the early 1950s. Between 1954 and 1955 she studied fiber art at the historic Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It was here she first met Jim Amaral, fellow artist and her future husband.
After a year of study in Michigan, Amaral returned to Bogotá where she began her independent artistic practice, creating both decorative pieces as well as undertaking design commissions. Jim visited in 1956, and they were wed in 1957, both remaining in Bogotá and establishing a textile workshop.
In 1965, Amaral established and directed the Textile Department at the University of Los Andes, Bogotá, where she remained at the helm until 1972. In the year following, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Over the course of her career, she has been the subject of dozens of gallery and museum solo shows, and her practice has remained ever evolving and endlessly experimental; no two works or series adhere to a singular technical or conceptual approach but rather reflect an ongoing effort to push the boundaries of what the medium is capable of.
Installation view of Olga de Amaral, “Estelas” (1996–2018) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
An exhibition experiment
The experimentalism inherent in Olga de Amaral’s practice is reflected and interrogated throughout her ICA Miami retrospective. Marie Perennès curated the Paris iteration, and returns for the Miami installment, teaming up with the museum’s Stephanie Seidel. Like the previous iteration at the Fondation Cartier, the show was designed by award-winning Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh.
Envisioning a metaphoric forest, each of Amaral’s works hang free from the walls of the gallery space, not only allowing visitors to fully circumvent each piece but necessitating it. The result is a physical act of discovery, wherein one work leads to the next, and the verso of each work becomes as much a highlight as the recto.
Installation view of “Olga de Amaral” (2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
Carrying the forest metaphor are a series of custom benches and stools that are mirrored, which from a distance appear almost as small pools of light. Close up, they offer ever-changing reflections of the works hanging in their vicinity.
Hung largely at an angle throughout the museum’s third floor space, a wall of windows looks out over a small forest’s canopy. Like in Paris, the natural landscape viewable from within the exhibition played an important part in the development of the show’s design and parallels Amaral’s own practice of taking inspiration from nature.
Installation view of Olga de Amaral, “Brumas” (2013-2018) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
The show is curatorially anchored by two multi-part, large-scale series: the “Brumas” (2013–2018), with individual pieces comprised of hanging linen threads that have been colored with acrylic pigment, and the “Estelas” (1996–2018), idiosyncratically shaped flat works nearly entirely enrobed in gold leaf. Each speaks to the way Amaral explores the third dimension.
In “Brumas,” the works seem to defy rules of opticality and space, with geometric forms hazily being revealed through slow circumvention of the piece. In contrast, the hanging “Estela” works challenge perception, more specifically, perceptions of weight. Covered in gold and in rough-hewn shapes, they appear almost as monumental totems, evoking pre-Hispanic archeological finds. Unravelling this assessment is their delicate hanging, seemingly hovering off the ground, bestowing a sense of weightlessness.
Installation view of “Olga de Amaral” (2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
Marking the Art Historical Moment
Constantly experimenting with materials, space, construction, and composition, Amaral has crafted a multi-decade oeuvre that not only parallels but defines fiber and textile art making of the latter half of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. It stands apart from her contemporaries in its diversity and reach, in no small part due to her efforts teaching and engaging with subsequent generations of artists.
Beginning her career at the height of Mid-Century Modern popularity, and in the shadow of Bauhaus Modernism and Constructivism, Amaral emerged with her own unique visual, sculptural language informed by the prevailing movements of the time while remaining distinctive.
Installation view of “Olga de Amaral” (2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Artwork: © Olga de Amaral. Photo: © Kris Tamburello.
Incorporating everything from pre-Columbian and Indigenous weaving and craft traditions to straightforward knotting and braiding, as well as employing a diverse range of materials—such as wool, horsehair, linen, paint, cotton, gesso, gold leaf, and palladium—Amaral’s oeuvre evidences the singularity of her creative vision. It is no surprise that her work is consistently featured at the forefront of dialogues and exhibitions around the reappraisal of fiber and textile art as she was one of the first artists to approach it as the foundation of her practice, rather than auxiliary craft like some her contemporaries. As far as the art historical canon goes, the Fondation Cartier and ICA Miami make a convincing case that Amaral is the benchmark of the medium and will remain a key touchpoint for the practice well into the future.
More than a retrospective, this exhibition is a long-overdue recognition. Olga de Amaral hasn’t just contributed to the story of textile art—she’s helped write its most vital chapters.
Text by Annikka Olsen More

Italian artist and Arte Povera pioneer Michelangelo Pistoletto will stage new work at the Great Pyramids of Giza.
The 91-year-old artist has been announced as a headliner leading this year’s “Forever Is Now,” the annual outdoor exhibition that invites artists to create site-specific work using the ancient wonder of the world as a dramatic backdrop.
While full details of Pistoletto’s work are yet to be released, it has been described as a monumental installation that will bring together elements of ancient civilization with modern ideas by Art D’Egypte, the organization that stages “Forever is Now.”
“Having Michelangelo Pistoletto join Forever Is Now is a historic moment for Egypt and for global contemporary art,” Art D’Égypte’s founder Nadine Abdel Ghaffar said in a statement. “Bringing his voice to the Pyramids is not just symbolic, it’s visionary.”
JR, Greetings From Giza (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Forever Is Now. Photo: MO4NETWORK.
For decades, Pistoletto has incorporated social impact into his practice, a point emphasized by his Citadellearte foundation, which over the past 25 years has instructed professionals on the ways in which art can positively affect society. True to form, Citadellearte is involved in Pistoletto’s project at the pyramids. Artists living in Egypt are invited to apply for a fully-funded three-year bachelor course at the organization’s Unidee Academy in Biella, Pistoletto’s hometown in northern Italy, an initiative backed by the Italian Institute of Culture in Cairo and the foundation itself.
“Cittadellarte aims at making art as a bridge between peoples, across cultures and geographies,” Paolo Naldini, the director of Citadellearte, said in a statement. “I take the invitation from Art d’Egypte and the collaboration with Italian Institute of Culture as an opportunity to build a bridge across the Mediterranean Sea that connects Venice and Cairo.”
Born in 1933, Pistoletto began to receive international attention in the 1960s with his mirror paintings, which disrupted traditions of artistic perspective by integrating viewers into the artwork. Along with the likes of Giovanni Anselmo and Jannis Kounellis, Pistoletto was a protagonist in Arte Povera, a post-war movement that employed everyday materials to challenge the commercialization of the art world.
In 2003, Pistoletto penned Third Paradise, a manifesto that called for a balance between nature and artifice capable of leading to a “realistic utopia.” Its mark, an infinity symbol with three loops, has appeared across his work. Third Paradise is developed and championed by Citadellearte, which is set to hold an installation on the concept at the coming Venice Biennale.
Italian artist Lorenzo Quinn poses under his installation, entitled Together. Photo: courtesy Ammar Abd Rabbo/Art D’Egypte.
On the back of this work, Pistoletto was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in February of this year. The artist noted that the nomination carried a commitment to carry on his socially engaged work. “Art must take on a propulsive role for radical change, bringing about a shared, responsible concept of humanity.”
This year marks the fifth successive edition of “Forever Is Now”, which typically takes place in October and November. Previous highlights include photographer JR’s pyramid-shaped photo booth, Lorenzo Quinn’s giant pair of hands that broke out of the desert to touch one another, and Gisela Colón’s 30-foot-long bean of titanium that resembled a rising sun. More

A cup of coffee brewed with water freshly sourced from the Venetian lagoon has won a Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The project, “Canal Café,” from U.S. architectural firm Diller Scofidio and Renfro (DS+R), was selected as the best piece in the biennale’s 19th international exhibition, titled “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.”
Billed as “part espresso bar, part laboratory” on the firm’s website, the project filters Venice’s notoriously polluted canals before biennale visitors’ very eyes. The murky water passes through a series of filters that mimic the natural cleansing effect of a tidal wetland. Once the water is made potable, it is used—with an assist from Michelin-starred chef Davide Oldani—to make a classic shot of Italian espresso.
“‘Canal Café’ reaches beneath the photogenic surface of the city by converting these brackish waters into the comforting scent and taste of espresso—the irreducible Italian pleasure,” the firm said. “The public will drink Venice.”
Venice, of course, is famous for its picturesque waterways, situated on a lagoon that not only protected it from invaders, but also facilitated trade, making it one of Europe’s most historically wealthy and powerful city states. But over the years, industrialization and tourism have taken a toll on the canals, contaminating the waters even as climate change has led to increased flooding, endangering the city.
Diller Scofidio and Renfro, “Canal Café” (2025) at the 2025 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Photo: by Iwan Baan, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
DS+R originally planned to stage “Canal Café” for the 2008 biennial, curated by critic Aaron Betsky, who was an advisor for the realized project. It was impossible to get the permits 17 years ago, but improved filtration made it possible to serve up canal coffee at this year’s event.
“Regulations and technology have come a far way, and part of the big difference now was that the methodology involved has been one that uses biological filtering rather than chemical filtering, so it’s more organic and natural,” Betsky told the New York Times.
The project is set up outside, with a transparent pipe drawing water directly from the Arsenal Canal. You can see the filter at work, removing sludge and toxins.
Half the water is filtered by salt-tolerant plants called halophytes that form a kind of natural membrane bioreactor, or “micro-wetland,” preserving minerals in the water. The rest is treated with artificial filtration, reverse osmosis, and UV disinfection, producing distilled water. The water is combined then steamed to make a high-concept espresso shot, available for sale for €1.20 ($1.36). (Any extra water is used to irrigate plants in the Arsenale.)
Diller Scofidio and Renfro, “Canal Café” (2025) at the 2025 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Photo: by Iwan Baan, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
To design, test, and monitor the water purification system, DS+R enlisted the U.S. engineering firm Natural Systems Utilities, and the Italian firm SODAI. Oldani has selected the coffee blend and ground the beans to the perfect fineness to ensure the espresso meets Venetians’ exacting standards.
But this isn’t just about the perfect cup of joe. Developing new ways to keep water clean is a challenge of particular interest to the city of Venice, which has built a high-tech electromechanical flood protection system called the MOSE Project. Longterm, those barriers may be in near-constant effect, therefore requiring new technology to keep the lagoon’s waters clean.
“Canal Café is a symbol of how we can provide citizens with access to drinking water through innovative technologies that protect the world’s most precious resource,” Pietro Salini, CEO of Webuild, the project’s supporter, said in a statement.
Jurors Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paola Antonelli, and Mpho Matsipa chose “Canal Café” is the best of over 300 projects presented by an impressive 750 participants in the Arsenale, as well as across the grounds of the Giardini, where the central pavilion is currently closed for renovations.
The international exhibition was curated by the architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, a professor at the Politecnico di Milano and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab.
“‘Canal Café’ is a demonstration of how the city of Venice can be a laboratory to speculate how to live on the water, while offering a contribution to the public space of Venice. It also invites future speculation about the lagoon and other lagoons,” the jury said in a statement. “We also acknowledge the extraordinary persistence of the Canal Cafè project, which started almost 20 years ago. It’s an example that biennale can be a long duration project and go far beyond the event.”
“Heatwave,” Kingdom of Bahrain national pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Photo: ©Andrea Avezzù, courtesy of the Venice Biennale.
The jury also awarded the Golden Lion for the best national participation to the Bahrain Pavilion, curated by architect Andrea Faraguna. The project, “Heatwave,” aims to employ shade and passive cooling to make places in extremely hot environments more livable.
The opening of the architecture biennale this weekend sadly coincided with news of the sudden and unexpected death of Koyo Kouoh, the curator for the organization’s upcoming 2026 art edition.
“La Biennale di Venezia Architettura 2025: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective” is on view at the Giardini and the Arsenale, Sestiere Castello, Campo Della Tana 2169/f 30122 Venice, Italy, May 10–November 23, 2025. More

Given Bob Dylan’s reticent public persona, his art has long seemed the closest one can get to standing in the songwriter’s shoes.
Much of the octogenarian’s work may be done on the road, in moments Dylan himself says help to “relax and refocus a restless mind,” but it is most certainly not a whimsical hobby. His easy sense of line is too assured and his eye too keen for any such condescension.
In recent years, the art world seems to have reached this consensus culminating with a major retrospective of Dylan’s work staged across three continents in the early 2020s. It brought together decades of expressive landscapes, intimate portraits, and Americana-filled sculptural works that showed Dylan’s insight on America endures irrespective of medium.
One organization that boarded the Dylan train long ago is London’s Halcyon Gallery. It has worked with the artist for nearly 18 years and has seen, first hand, how public perceptions towards Dylan’s art has changed. “It has been an extraordinary experience,” the gallery’s founder Paul Green said in a statement. “To watch this cultural icon develop into such a critically revered and important visual artist.”
Installation view of “Point Blank” at Halcyon Gallery. Photo: Halcyon Gallery.
Dylan’s latest show, “Point Blank” opens on May 9 and offers nearly 100 original paintings on paper that are looser and more intimate than his previous work. As with an earlier Dylan show, “Drawn Blank,” the paintings began as sketches before being worked over with color.
“The idea was not only to observe the human condition,” Dylan said, “but to throw myself into it with great urgency.” They’re hazy, snapshot things and with Dylan remaining noncommittal as to which derive from reality and which from his imagination, the viewer is encourage to partake in a little storytelling of their own.
Four painting from Dylan’s latest show “Point Blank”. Photo: courtesy Halcyon Gallery.
We meet a cluster of three pale-faced men all holding books: one solemn, as if weighed down by the words in front of them, another appears performatively pensive, the third reads aloud with interest, his sleeves suitably rolled back. Elsewhere, there are portraits of devoted couples, some romantic, others platonic. They appear pulled from mantelpiece picture frames (or perhaps exuberant social media posts). Case in point: the well-dressed young couple that is locked in an amorous embrace, as though posing before prom night.
There is a grouping of nudes that seem to draw from European traditions of portraiture in the genre (minus the one with a dog) as well as brightly colored interiors of empty living rooms and bedrooms. All the same, the nods to mid-century Americana remain in the bucolic scene of a turquoise station wagon idling on a lawn, the pout of topless boxers, and the young man (shirt tucked-in) fixing his hair with a comb.
Painting from Dylan’s latest show “Point Blank”. Photo: courtesy Halcyon Gallery.
Dylan has reworked some of these as blue, red, and monochromatic studies for which he is inviting association with Picasso’s turn-of-the-century Blue Period. This might be something of a stretch, but there is without doubt a quiet discomfort and a heavy dose of isolation.
“People who attend the exhibition will discover that they provoke stories from our imagination,” the gallery’s creative director Kate Brown said. “These works on paper feel like memories, intangible windows into the life and imagination on of one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived.”
“Bob Dylan: Point Blank” is on view at Halcyon Gallery, 148 New Bond Street, London, through July 6. More

British artist Thomas J Price probably could have counted on some controversy when he erected a sculpture of a Black woman in New York’s Times Square. Unveiled on April 29, the 12-foot-high bronze Grounded in the Stars shows an unidealized woman in everyday clothes, standing with hands on hips, gazing into the distance with a contemplative look. Per a description of the work by the presenter, Times Square Arts, Price’s practice “confronts preconceived notions of identity and representation.”
And controversy he got, despite a subtle degree of aggrandizement; Price’s figure stands in a pose that nods to Michelangelo’s David, and Jean Cooney, director of Times Square Arts, was drawn to the artist’s work “because of the novel ways in which he imparts a sense of reverence for people’s everyday humanity,” she told Artnet News in February.
But she’s being greeted in some quarters online as an unflattering representation, one with an “attitude,” one who looks stereotypically angry.
Times Square Arts’s own Instagram post of the work has generated dozens of comments, with plenty of love-eyes, flexing muscles, and fire emojis. But they run the gamut, including bessieblount16’s terse “Trash” and Ms_izzie_bee’s “I h8yte your statue as it’s not an accurate representation of Black American Women. We come in all shapes and sizes and you have her plainly dressed looking angry. You’re British and know nothing of Black American Women. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Thomas J Price, Grounded in the Stars (2025). Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts.
“This is some leftist nonsense just to piss off white people,” contributes JayeF121212. “And based on the comments, blacks dont like it either.”
Predictably, aesthetic conservatives use President Donald Trump’s slogan to denigrate the work; one meme juxtaposes it with Antonín Pavel Wagner’s classicizing 19th-century Hercules and Cerberus, in which the mythical Greek hero sports abs for days, under the heading “make statues great again.”

Right-wing media also found a way to place the work in a context they are obsessed with.
“Who is this woman?” asked Fox News host Jesse Watters on Thursday. “What did she do to get a statue? A nice one, too!”
In answer to his own question, he concludes, “Nothing. This isn’t a real person. It’s a DEI statue.”
Price is aware of the debate. On May 9, he reposted to Instagram a slideshow from the popular real_toons account, whose first slide sums up the positions: two Black women flank the sculpture, one saying “I love this!” and the other saying, “Wow, I hate this.” More Black people join in the conversation in succeeding slides, one asking, “What’s next, pajamas and a bonnet?” while another pipes up to say “We are so deep in European beauty standards that the idea of a plus-size Black woman being honored is somehow disrespectful?”
Price did not immediately answer a request to weigh in on the debate, sent via Times Square Arts.
The Times Square installation coincides with Price’s exhibition, “Resilience of Scale,” at Hauser and Wirth’s SoHo showroom. His first major show with the gallery in New York, it presents five similarly towering bronze figures depicting everyday Black people. In Time Unfolding (2023), a woman consults her phone; As Sound Turns to Noise (2023) shows a woman in athletic wear; Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) (2025) shows a man in sneakers and a sweatsuit.
Thomas J Price, Grounded in the Stars (2025). Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts.
Price’s Times Square installation also takes place in the same city at the same moment as many Black women (and men) are enshrined in their everyday glory in Amy Sherald’s acclaimed Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “American Sublime,” where the artist shows Black people as stylish and confident. Prominent Black artists are in the spotlight at the Guggenheim museum as well, with a Rashid Johnson retrospective, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a rooftop installation by Jennie C. Jones.
Other Black artists have also used Times Square as a place to comment on representation of Black people. Price’s midtown installation comes a few years after artist Kehinde Wiley, known for painting young men of color in settings and poses inspired by art historical portraiture, erected a sculpture, 29 feet high and also in bronze, of a Black man in everyday clothing—Nike sneakers and a sweatshirt—but astride a horse, riffing on monuments immortalizing Confederate leaders in the American South.
“Thomas J. Price:Grounded in the Stars” is on view at Broadway and 46th Street April 29–June 17, 2025. More

The city was in full spring bloom during the public days of Gallery Weekend Berlin—but ChertLüdde‘s Alvaro Urbano show “September and Lions” was a sharp contrast that, in some ways, fit the underlying atmosphere of the city. The installation of end-of-season park foliage, cigarette butts, delicately crafted from metal, was rooted in melancholic introspection. It would be a lie to say things have been easy breezy in Berlin in recent months. Quite the opposite: There were deep cuts to the cultural sector, and politics have been causing divisions in the art world. Plus, there’s a new, more right-leaning government and cultural minister to reckon with.
Guests, fresh from Cyprien Gaillard’s video installation “Retinal Rivalry,” dumped their 3D glasses in a bin and gathered at the garden apéro at Sprüth Magers, sipping wine and discussing the sudden resignation of Joe Chialo, Berlin’s culture minister. His exit followed a cascade of public missteps and was made worse by the announcement that €130 million in cultural funding was to be cut from the city’s budget. While this doesn’t directly impact the gallery space, the ripple effect is undeniable. Institutions are rattled, and uncertainty—never great for business—hangs in the air, especially in austerity-minded Germany.
But no matter. Gallery Weekend Berlin buzzed anyway, infused with a mood of resilience, even defiance. We dance on.
Alvaro Urbano, September and the Lions, installation view at ChertLüdde, Berlin, 2025, Photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza, Courtesy of the Artist and ChertLüdde
In an unusual twist, the event kicked off on May Day, a national bank holiday for International Workers’ Day. For the art industry, “working” meant oysters and air kissing on the patio of KaDeWe, the historic multistory department store usually teeming with tourists bent over perfume vitrines. The large arcade windows of the building were taken over by galleries. Pamela Rosenkranz’s water bottles, filled with flesh-toned silicone and acrylic paint, stood on plinths where Etro resort wear might normally be displayed—at comparable price points.
24/7 exhibition in the window front of KaDeWe from April 22 to May 10, 2025. Photo: Ludger Paffrath
Now in her second year, Antonia Ruder seems to have found her stride at the helm of Gallery Weekend, after taking over last year after the departure Maike Cruse, who headed to Art Basel in Switzerland. Ruder inherited a platform of 55 galleries and a rocky market. “The global art market has become much more competitive,” she said in a recent interview with the German press. “Berlin remains a major player thanks to its unique art scene, but staying relevant means continuously taking action.” Her updates to the format this year were well received: Alongside the 24-hour window project at KaDeWe was a series of artist talks at the Neue Nationalgalerie, a podcast lifting the veil on studio practices, helmed Financial Times columnist Enuma Okoro, and expanded public tours.
Katharina Grosse and Klaus Biesenbach at Gallery Weekend’s annual dinner. Photo: David von Becker
Things will seem normal, but there will be signs. First, the normal: Everyone I spoke to, from dealers to artists and collectors, noted that the event felt international again after a post-lockdown lull and competition for attention with the Venice Biennale last year. We even had an A-list celebrity: Usher, who collects art, was seen in a Berlin-looking trench coat enjoying seasonal asparagus at the Gallery Weekend dinner—hosted within LAS Art Foundation‘s exhibition of Laure Prouvost—though the star allegedly had to leave before dessert (understandable given that he had to perform at the Met Gala on Monday evening). An internationally established blue-chip gallery was scrambling to get its star artist on the guest list of Berghain for Saturday night. Collector Frédéric de Goldschmidt said an invite to artist Zuzanna Czebatul‘s after-party at Berghain, hosted by her gallery Dittrich & Schlechtriem had “sealed the deal” on deciding to come. Some things don’t change.
But there are signs that the before times are no more. Gone are the days when Gallery Weekend was dominated by painting-only shows by the most established rostered artists working on canvas; many exhibitions instead favored experimentation. In these uncertain times, all directions are favorable. At Galerie Neu, a cheekily opaque show prompted some visiting children to throw around colorful bits of SoiL Thornton‘s pom-pom installation and some even pocketed them. This later seemed ominous when I learned that each pom-pom in the exhibition represented one year of the artist’s life.
Installation view “Toy” by Sebastian Jefford at Noah Klink. Photo courtesy Noah Klink
“You have to be flexible, but you can also be more playful,” said Noah Klink, a dealer in his third Gallery Weekend. He was showing a suite of ink drawings by Sebastian Jefford, plus ochre roof material custom-fitted to the interior walls of his gallery, on which moonlike faces gazed out. Berlin has yet to recover the “brand” it had during the apex of post-internet art in the late 2010s (some of those artists reappeared in a brief revival in 2022). But the city’s lack of a unified scene may now be its strength. It is diverse, varied, and allows space for experimentation in a place that remains an incubator for artists.
Gallery Weekend Berlin’s annual dinner at LAS Foundation, with Laure Prouvost’s installation visible above. Photo: David von Becker
There were some key posthumous discoveries on this front. Many recommended David Medalla‘s “Luftbrücke” at Mountains, a show with more institutional muscle and ideas than it could fit on the walls. The gallery expanded into a nearby space, a former apothecary, to show the breadth of an artist who worked for a time in West Berlin. The kinetic art pioneer, who died in 2020, left a vast oeuvre that includes paintings, neon sculpture, and delicate collages. His ethereal bubbling sculpture, called Cloud Canyons, pours over itself at Julia Stoschek Collection‘s post-image group exhibition; a cascade that signaled to me a needed return to what one might call poetic artists’s art. Similarly, Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti brought the ephemeral, playful, and profound fog sculptures of Fujiko Nakaya to the Neue Nationalgalerie‘s historic sculpture garden.
Fog sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya in the sculpture garden of Neue Nationalgalerie, © Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / David von Becker
Beyond the official program, new formats proliferated that brought together sharp curation and business-oriented projects. Noah Klink hosted a group show “Soggiorno” at Tanya Leighton. At a historic church in Mitte, collector, curator, and now art advisor Tiffany Zabludowicz and curator and advisor Anneli Botz launched their debut exhibition under the banner of their new platform Tyger Tyger; the large group show “I Sought my Soul” brought together works by artists including Jacolby Satterwhite, Jean-Marie Appriou, and Mire Lee. Optimism for the current age was the operative word—and the exhibition included an immersive breathwork session during Gallery Weekend. The first in a series, the multihyphenate enterprise to help private collectors and institutions curate and build their collections. “Why not be hybridized, as long as it is additive to the art world?” said Zabludowicz.
Also choosing Berlin: American Art Projects presented “America Unframed,” a tightly curated selling exhibition of well-selected artists from overlapping scenes between L.A., New York, and other American hubs. Organizers Benno Tubbesing (of Ruttkowski 68), Matthieu von Matt, and William Croghan (of Deitch) said they plan to continue the series, spotlighting a new generation of American artists who’ve been underexposed outside of the U.S. Artists like painters Tristan Unrau, who recently gained representation from David Kordanksy, and Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., who had a solo show at Deitch in New York that closed this January, hung together as a visual lexicon of Americana, drawing on Pop Art, realism, vernacular signage, cinema, and online visual culture.
“America Unframed” courtesy American Art Projects
New models are also taking shape on the institutional front. The most visible sign may be the Chanel-backed commission at Hamburger Bahnhof, launched with a monumental work by Klára Hosnedlová. The 12 percent cut to Berlin’s cultural funding likely accelerated the need for an increase in these partnerships. German museums will now be asked to reconsider not only how they fund—but what they fund.
Across Europe, art sales are down 8 percent year over year, and sales are vital—no one disputes that. Institutions partnering with private patrons; selling exhibitions framed as such but with curatorial depth; all this no longer feels un-Berlin; nor does a heterogeneous set of artists pushing past genre toward a poetics of presence. We are seeing some sort of paradigm shift—one still hazy at the edges, but unmistakably underway. Perhaps, taken together, it will someday read as a slow, accumulative response to political inertia, market fatigue, and evolving social priorities.
Things can be much more imaginative, provisional, and porous, and more poetic than polished, too. At KW Institute on Sunday morning, artist Matt Copson and critic Dean Kissick hosted a panel styled after Art Basel’s Conversations series with three nine-year-old guests; together they earnestly discussed the meaning of art. The kids and the two adults on stage spoke, with startling directness, about what art meant to them; a reminder of what an individual and immediate experience art viewing can be. One European collector, singularly rattled by this, demanded to know what the event was supposed to be. But Copson had already turned that question to his panelists, asking the children whether the conversation itself could be an artwork. There was no firm consensus. And that, perhaps, is the point. Maybe uncertain times have taught us something that was always true—that all directions, all interpretations, are favorable. More

Five years ago, nonprofit public art studio Monument Lab teamed up with Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania to ask important questions such as: What stories are missing from Bryn Mawr? How can and should the school reckon with its histories of systemic exclusion? Under the initiative Art Remediating Campus Histories, a series of symposia, lectures, student group consultations, and conversations with alumnae and community leaders followed, before culminating in a public call for proposals.
That’s when multimedia Washington, D.C.-based artist Nekisha Durrett entered the picture. Late last month, Bryn Mawr officially unveiled Don’t Forget to Remember (Me), a permanent public artwork for which custom pavers created pathways in the school’s iconic Cloisters courtyard.
From an aerial view, the intertwined paths are laid out in “the shape of a knot that cannot be undone, symbolizing interconnectivity, and making visual that Bryn Mawr is reexamining its history to tell all of its stories,” said Durrett in a statement. Two hundred and fifty of the 9,000 pavers are engraved with the names of Black staff whose work was critical to building and operating Bryn Mawr, particularly in its early years. Yet their contributions went unrecognized. In all, the project involves 26 pallets of brick, 211 tons of stone, 18 tons of sand, and 285 tons of soil.
Nekisha Durret, Dont Forget to Remember me lighting test, Bryn Mawr College, January 10, 2025. Photo: Steve Weinik
Perhaps it was not surprising that, after the request for proposals went out, Durrett’s inbox was flooded with suggestions from fans and friends familiar with her inquiries into historical narratives and monuments, encouraging her to pursue the Bryn Mawr project.
“I was fortunate enough to be chosen as a finalist,” the artist told me. “I’d been wanting to work with Monument Lab for years. Just the fact that they knew who I was, was really exciting.”
Even before she arrived on campus, Durrett learned in her preliminary research that there was a collection of ephemera related to Black life on campus that was contained in a random kitchen drawer. When she arrived on campus and saw it in person, she discovered “index cards that were burned around the edges. They were very fragile so I asked what they were.”
Nekisha Durrett, current students, and alumni collect soil from Perry House, ARCH Project, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, 2023 (Maya Estrara).
Durrett learned that they were time cards of servants who worked at the college from roughly 1900 to 1930. The cards nearly burned in a fire that happened decades later, around 1960. “Someone had the good sense to rescue them from the fire,” she said. Now, some of those names are engraved into the stones on the new pathway.
Durrett also joined a special student-led tour, known as Black at Bryn Mawr, part of which is a walk under the Cloisters to see the underground “servant” tunnel. “These tunnels made a lot of the work that Black staff were performing on campus invisible,” she said.
In her research, she also learned a lot about Enid Cook, the first Black graduate of Bryn Mawr, in 1931. Although Cook was accepted to study at the college, she wasn’t allowed to reside on campus, at the decree of M. Carey Thomas, the college’s former president and trustee who had “a very powerful and persuasive voice at the college,” said Durrett. Cook ended up living off campus with a professor and walking roughly a mile to and from school each day.
Don’ t Forget to Remember (Me) lighting test, Bryn Mawr College, January 10, 2025. PhotoSteve Weinik
Upon learning this, Durrett printed out a map of the campus and the surrounding area so that she could trace the path Cook would have taken to get to school each day.
“I just started thinking about pathways, and also thinking about those hidden tunnels under the Cloisters, and I’m thinking about M. Carey Thomas, this woman whose whose presence and influence on the college, caused pain and exclusion for many,” she said.
Thomas’s ashes are contained in the Cloisters, which Durrett visited on her Bryn Mawr tour with two students of color. “We were standing there and I already felt this gloom, this kind of heaviness of the space. They described to me how they felt being in the space and how many students of color, or any students, did not feel comfortable participating in events that took place in the Cloisters.”
Durrett said she “knew at that moment that that needed to be the site of this project. Whatever it was going to be, it needed to be there. That space needed to be reclaimed.”
Her choice of a braid motif, she added, was inspired by one of the students she spent time with while touring the campus. “They came to me as this really powerful symbol, thinking about hair braids as a protective hairstyle. It’s called a protective hairstyle because all of those braids are stronger together than they are apart. I was also thinking about the Transatlantic slave trade and all of the mythology around hair related to the middle passage.”
Nekisha Durrett inpainting stamped names with a custom glaze made from the soil of the Perry House, a former affinity house forBlack students on Bryn Mawrs campus. Photo by Steve Weinik.
The names in the pavers are further filled with soil that was collected from the site of Perry House, the former Black Cultural Center on Campus, Durrett noted. There were a number of sites that had been selected as possible project sites, “but I felt that Perry House was a little bit removed from the center of the campus,” including having to cross a busy road. “What I decided to do instead of placing the artwork there was to bring a piece of Perry House to the Cloisters,” she explained.
The results of Durrett’s years-long, thoughtful approach speak for themselves. At the April 24 unveiling, she described the sense of reaffirmation sparked by the project and how it’s beginning to “heal this community… I heard it come out of the mouths of alumni who were there, and had tears in their eyes. They felt like there was a healing that was happening on campus. It’s been very reaffirming for me particularly in the times we’re going through now, witnessing these very blatant attempts to erase history and to alter the past.”
With the artwork’s unveiling, she added: “It feels like it’s the official turning over of this piece to the community.” More