Eliana Willis

Much of the current conversation around the design boom has been surprisingly limited in scope: the new generation of collectors realizing that the sofa beneath their masterwork painting matters. Or, as the art market experiences periods of volatility, design is seen as more accessible—a $20,000 chair versus a six-figure painting.
But what’s missing from this discourse is a deeper consideration of content. Besides price point, the distinction between high art and high design frequently comes down to functionality—or the idea of functionality, as many objects are far too exquisite to risk actual use. What draws people in is not only beauty or utility, but narrative: a richness of symbolism, story, and cultural meaning that design is uniquely equipped to carry.
Which brings us to “Making Home,” the seventh installment of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s Triennial—a show that expands the idea of design far beyond objects and aesthetics. At most sprawling contemporary design exhibitions, there are plenty of melting chairs and purposefully ugly stunt couches. But here, there is no schtick; depth is the premise. Making Home comprises 25 newly commissioned projects that explore the idea of home—its memory, its construction, its rupture. “Making Home” presents a deeply narrative, cross-cultural vision of American life. The exhibition is on view through August 10.
Robert Earle Paige, Fahara: Chicago in View (2024). Photo: Nikola Bradonjic Photography. Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
“We were interested in engaging a topic that was as relatable as possible, that everyone could come to with a point of view,” said Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, the museum’s curator of contemporary design. “‘Home’ is a critical framework that everyone was responding to from a curatorial perspective—we never defined home. It’s defined through the perspectives of the designers and artists that are in the show.”
Cunningham Cameron co-curated the show with Christina L. De León, acting deputy director of curatorial and associate curator of Latino design at Cooper Hewitt; and Michelle Joan Wilkinson, curator of architecture and design at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. It marks the first time that Cooper Hewitt has partnered with another Smithsonian museum to organize its Triennial.
The exhibition unfolds across three floors organized by themes—Going Home, Seeking Home, and Building Home—tracing how personal, cultural, and political histories are embedded in domestic space. The institution is in the former Gilded Age mansion of Andrew Carnegie, a setting that adds a frisson of American dream mythology to the experience—and a gobsmacking architectural backdrop that both complements and challenges the works on view.
Joe Baker and Lenape Center, Welcome to Territory (2023). Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution.
“Our museum is in a former home—and a very particular one,” said Cunningham Cameron. “It’s a monument connected to American history, American exceptionalism, and American philanthropy. What does that mean? How does the house have a presence?”
The Triennial kicks off resoundingly, directly across from the museum’s grand entryway, where a series of turkey feather capes are suspended from the ceiling and seem to float spectrally. At many cultural institutions, land acknowledgments can feel like rote gestures. Joe Baker’s Welcome to Territory is something else entirely—a powerful, haunting reminder of the original inhabitants of this land. A New York–based artist and co-founder of the Lenape Center, Baker draws from his heritage to channel a history of erasure with grace. The capes’ emptiness suggests both absence and ongoing presence, a poignant reflection of displacement—yet the spiritual presence endures. Surrounding the installation is wallpaper patterned with stylized tulip trees, a species sacred to the tribe.
Another artist, Amie Siegel, delved into wall coverings. “She often looks at the connection between design and architecture and systems of value and power,” said Cunningham Cameron. Siegel’s installation Views / Vues interrogates the legacy of 19th-century French panoramic wallpapers—some conjuring distant lands and mythologies, others the antebellum South. A film includes scenes of a Black marching band joyously careening through a Southern mansion and the silent exterior of a plantation house, juxtaposed with the wallpaper’s romanticized vignettes. The work is projected onto a screen floating in what appears to be a grand ballroom; on the reverse is a collage of salvaged scenic wallpaper.
Still from Dream Homes (2024), a film by PIN–UP directed by Michael Bullock and Michael Cukr. Courtesy of PIN–UP.
I have a habit of breezing past film components in expansive shows, but I’m glad I lingered at Making Home. “We wanted to not just present objects and architecture and installations,” said Cunningham Cameron, “but also tell stories about design. Film became an important mechanism for doing that.” Among the most compelling examples is Dream Homes, a triad of heartfelt mini-documentaries produced by architecture platform PIN–UP and directed by Michael Bullock and Michael Cukr. The films profile nontraditional queer collective living spaces across the U.S., from a trans artist-run mansion in rural Massachusetts to the Arkansas retreat led by Stonewall icon Miss Major.
Installation of Hālau Kūkulu Hawaiʻi: A Home That Builds Multitudes by After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and Leong Leong Architecture in “Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial” at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo: Ann Sunwoo © Smithsonian Institution
Hālau Kūkulu Hawaiʻi: A Home That Builds Multitudes, by After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and Leong Leong Architecture, includes a film documenting the collaborative construction of a traditional Hawaiian hale in Waipiʻo Valley, using Indigenous lashing techniques passed down through generations. A full-scale prototype of the structure is on view in the exhibition, embodying a gesture toward cultural, ecological, and architectural restoration across the Hawaiian Islands.
Davóne Tines, Hugh Hayden, and Zack Winokur, Living Room: Orlean, Virginia (2023). Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution.
A celebrated bass-baritone with a genre-defying career, Davóne Tines spends most of the year touring. Living Room: Orlean, Virginia is a response to that rootlessness—a collaboration with artist Hugh Hayden and director Zack Winokur that channels the memory of Tines’s grandparents’ home in rural Virginia, set on a gently rocking plinth. Throughout the show’s run, it also doubles as a performance platform.
AIRIE, Ebb + Flow (2023). Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution.
Tucked into the museum’s glass-walled Conservatory, Ebb + Flow assembles field recordings and visual design rooted in South Florida’s endangered Everglades. “You have to sit and listen to the oral histories,” said Cunningham Cameron. “For decades they’ve been inviting artists, architects, and designers to spend time in this UNESCO World Heritage site, this extraordinary ecosystem.”
Organized by Artists in Residence in the Everglades (AIRIE), the installation includes a film and audio component. Visitors don headphones and sit on cushions printed with swamp-life illustrations—flamingos, alligators, and bald cypress trees with sprawling root systems—designed by Christina Pettersson, while listening to stories that evoke a landscape shaped by ecological precarity, memory, and Indigenous presence.
Curry J. Hackett, So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia (2023). Photo: Elliot Goldstein. Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Curry Jackson Hackett’s So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia is a transportive, multisensory grotto lined with dried tobacco leaves. The crop has a complex history, and the scent is powerful—a sensory trigger for its unresolved legacy. Hackett’s family has grown and sold tobacco for generations on land they own in Prospect, Virginia—making the crop, in his words, “an unlikely celebration of an otherwise haunting crop.” Presented by his transdisciplinary studio Wayside, the installation blends memory, material, and projection: cast-iron skillets, embellished church fans, and flickering video channels form a constellation of “speculative objects.” He wielded artificial intelligence to imagine much of the space, with one exception—his mother’s painting, the only object left untouched.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Is a Biobank a Home? (2023). Photo: Elliot Goldstein. Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
The show continues upstairs with more experimental works, including a trauma-informed design by Designing Justice + Designing Spaces. Their Mobile Refuge Rooms installation—intended for those reentering society from incarceration—invites visitors to step inside and interact with customizable furnishings. Artist and biohacker Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Is a Biobank a Home? is staged as a vast laboratory, lined with test tubes, and explores the afterlives of our DNA in institutional storage.
Room by room, Making Home unfolds into a wide-ranging reflection on how expansive the idea of design can be. “We hope that as you navigate,” said Cunningham Cameron, “it’s a space for exploring ideas or being provoked or having hard conversations—and that people get something out of it.” More

The love-him-or-hate-him street artist KAWS (b. 1974), beloved of hypebeasts everywhere, will get a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It will be the first West Coast museum exhibition for the 50-year-old artist, real name Brian Donnelly, who was born in Jersey City and lives in Brooklyn.
The exhibition, “KAWS: Family,” is a traveling show organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and currently on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.
KAWS is a polarizing figure in the art world, having built his success not in blue chip art galleries or on the auction block—although he’s since had plenty of both—but in the graffiti scene and with sales of his figurines, clothing, and other collectibles.
His cartoon-like characters, instantly identifiable by their skull and cross-bone-shaped heads and the signature Xs drawn across their eyes, are all appropriations. There is KAWS’s take on Mickey Mouse, called Companion; his Elmo-like sidekick, known as BFF; and the Michelin Man-esque Chum, as well as the Simpsons, rebranded the “Kimpsons.”
The artist KAWS. Photo: Audemars Piguet.
“We are delighted to bring KAWS’s family of characters to the Bay Area with this exhibition. Referencing iconic animated figures and posed in ways that strike at the heart of human emotion, KAWS’s characters are inherently relatable,” Daryl McCurdy, SFMOMA’s curatorial associate of architecture and design, told me in an email. “From diehard fans to those experiencing the artist’s work for the first time, visitors will be surrounded by the feelings and culture that connects us.”
The artist does imbue his work with emotion. Many of his compositions are about love and loss, expressed through the bonds between Companion and BFF in surprisingly tender fashion. But it can be hard to take KAWS and his cartoonish aesthetic seriously—there’s a reason my colleague Annie Armstrong recently chose him as one of the prime examples of what she’s dubbed red-chip art, a bro-y sub genre of works that appeal in part because they look cheap, toylike, and mass-produced, with visual appeal that translates easily on digital screens.
When my colleague Ben Davis attempted to explain the appeals of KAWS, he wrote that while it fit neatly into our “era of reboots and remakes, of regurgitated intellectual property,” “the work’s very vacantness seems to suggest a low-level depression running through society, so pervasive that it serves as a neutral sign of the art’s nowness, rather than reading as a personal feeling expressed by the artist.”
American artist KAWS, real name Brian Donnelly, poses with an artwork titled SEEING during a press preview for the exhibition ‘KAWS: NEW FICTION’ at the Serpentine North gallery in London on January 18, 2022. Photo by Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images.
KAWS has his origins in the graffiti world—his moniker a tag he chose as a teenager writing in Manhattan because he liked the way the letters looked together. The Companion has its origins in advertisements KAWS would deface. In the decades since, flat planes of bold, saturated color and strong lines have remained characteristic of his works. On a trip to Japan in 1999, the artist, who had graduated from New York’s School of Visual Arts, began making his first collectible toys of the Companion.
Something about the work resonated, and KAWS quickly began making inroads with the fashion and hip hop communities. Commissions for life-size Companion sculptures—now popular office lobby art—came rolling in. Showing an impressive business savviness, he struck deals with design and fashion brands to create everything from skateboard decks to sneakers, attracting celebrity fans like Swizz Beatz, Pharrell Williams, and Kendall Jenner. Kanye West even tapped KAWS to do the cover art for his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak.
The popularity and desirability of KAWS merchandise is perhaps best illustrated by the 2019 drop of a KAWS UNIQLO collaboration that sparked literal riots in stores in China among frenzied shoppers eager to secure their loot.
KAWS x UNIQLO UT Summer 2019 Promotional images. Courtesy of Uniqlo.
But the artist also slowly built up his presence in the art world, starting with a small show at Connecticut’s Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2010. The Brooklyn Museum was another early adopter, thanks to the gift of an 18-foot-tall sculpture of two wooden Companion figures, titled Along the Way, in 2015—the same year Swizz Beatz joined the board. It made its debut as part of a small lobby show with two paintings, followed up by a major survey show, “KAWS: What Party,” in 2021. (The giant statue remains a fixture in the museum’s lobby to this day.)
And even at museums, KAWS’s work was well-positioned to gain audiences that might not normally engage with art museums. In 2022, an outing at London’s Serpentine Galleries included a virtual exhibition component hosted by the online video game Fortnite. Though art critics were largely unmoved, the response from gamers was overwhelmingly positive.
KAWS has also staged a series of high-profile public art installations of monumental sculptures, including a 115-foot-long inflatable Companion floating in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor in 2019, and a 150-foot-long figure lying on the ground beside Indonesia’s Prambanan Temple in 2023. During lockdown, he even launched an augmented reality version, “COMPANION (EXPANDED),” in 11 cities around the world.
KAWS: NEW FICTION in Fortnite. © Epic Games
But for art world insiders, KAWS began to appear on the radar in 2018, when his sales at auction began to heat up. He broke the $1 million barrier for the first time, and then four more times, selling his 20 most-expensive works on the block to date for a total of $33.8 million on the year, according to the Artnet Price Database.
That December, at Art Basel Miami Beach, Pace Prints instituted a lottery system to manage sales of a new $65,000 KAWS print that promptly sold out.
It was a harbinger of a bigger moment still to come: the HK$115.9 million ($14.8 million) sale of THE KAWS ALBUM at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in April 2019. The painting, which was expected to sell for just HK$8 million ($1 million), is the artist’s rendition of The Yellow Album, a spoof by The Simpsons of the Beatles’ famous 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. (Soon after, the artist dropped longtime dealer Perrotin, which has locations in Paris, New York, and Asia, for Skarstedt, of New York, Paris, and London.)

For the art world, there was officially no more ignoring KAWS. The artist has continued his success in both lanes, with projects including a Companion watch from Audemars Piguet in 2024 as well as a show featuring his own personal collection at New York’s Drawing Center that closed in January. (Donnelly’s perhaps surprisingly refined tastes include a penchant for Outsider Art and Peter Saul [b. 1934].)
Bringing the KAWS show to SFMOMA is something of a surprising choice for museum director Christopher Bedford, who came to the institution from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2022.
There, Bedford had made a name for himself for his progressive efforts to diversify the collection, controversially deaccessioning works by white men to raise funds to buy works by artists of color and women. (SFMOMA and the AGO actually took similar measures.) In 2020, the museum pledged to only acquire art by women. Bedford later cancelled even more divisive plan to sell paintings by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still, and Andy Warhol to fund diversity initiatives.
Bedford’s appointment seemed indicative of SFMOMA’s commitment to expanding the canon. When the museum completed a massive expansion in 2016, it unveiled the new Fisher Collection galleries. Under the terms of its donation, three-quarters of those rooms are dedicated to showcasing the contemporary art collection of Gap founders Doris and Donald Fisher. Those works, representing a veritable who’s-who of 20th-century American art history, are almost exclusively by white men.
In contrast, Bedford’s tenure to date has seen a string of solo shows for women of color (some of which were planned before his appointment) including Zanele Muholi (b. 1972), Pacita Abad (1946–2004), Hung Liu (1948–2021), Anna Sew Hoy (b. 1976), Sadie Barnette (b. 1984), and Amy Sherald (b. 1973), the last of which just traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Currently, SFMOMA is hosting a large Kara Walker (b. 1969) installation and the first posthumous retrospective for Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), with the first major retrospective for Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944) set to open in the fall.
But the museum is also under pressure to reverse a significant drop in attendance from before the pandemic. Nearly 900,000 visitors in 2019 were down to about 600,000 in 2024. Last June, Bedford spoke with the New York Times about strategies for bringing in bigger audiences, including the museum’s sports-themed “Get in the Game,” show which featured interactive ping pong and foosball table sculptures, among other works.
“We are attempting, without a compromise in scholarship, to meet people more where they are in terms of their interests,” he said.
A sculpture by KAWS is pictured in the “KAWS + Warhol” exhibit at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Photo by Adam Schrader.
With KAWS’s built-in audience of fanboys, including 4.4 million Instagram followers, he certainly would fit the bill. He is mainstream in a way most artists could never dream of, and one of few artists working today with widespread name recognition.
“KAWS has a distinct appeal to a vast array of audiences with his iconic characters and meticulous work in a stunning range of mediums,” Bedford said in a statement. “The playful and contemplative works—a dynamic blend of his street art practice and formal education—will offer something for everyone.”
Spanning over 30 years of work, the show will include over 100 artworks, with paintings and sculptures as well as KAWS product collaborations and collectibles. There will be cereal boxes, sneakers, and album covers, as well as one of the loveseats KAWS made with Brazilian design studio Estúdio Campana using stuffed animals as upholstery.
The blockbuster potential of the 2021 Brooklyn Museum KAWS exhibition was limited by COVID-era capacity and social distancing restrictions, but the show still drew over 150,000 people. Tickets sold out, with a burgeoning resale market from scalpers on eBay, according to the New York Times. At AGO, “KAWS: Family” had 426,660 visitors during its nearly year-long run.
“KAWS: Family” was on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West Toronto, Ontario, Canada, September 27, 2023–August 9, 2024; and is at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 600 Museum Way, Bentonville, Arkansas, March 15–July 28, 2025. It will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California, November 15, 2025–spring 2026. More

Fiber art is having much more than a moment, with increasing market attention paid to artists working in this medium as well as institutional recognition left and right. As just one prominent example, New York’s Museum of Modern Art recently opened the excellent show “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” featuring more than a century’s worth of, as the museum put it, “textile works that challenge accepted divisions between fine art and craft.”
But for a remarkable survey of what’s happening in this art form at this very moment, head downtown from MoMA to South Street Seaport, at the bottom of the island, where New York art dealers Karin Bravin and John Lee of BravinLee Programs have mounted “The Golden Thread II,” which brings together 60 artists, including 10 new site-specific installations. The show takes its title from Greek mythology, in which the three Fates, sister goddesses, spin a thread on their wheel that represents every living individual’s destiny, which they assign at the time of their birth; at the end of a person’s life, the Fates cut the thread. 
“The Golden Thread,” with works by Felix Beaudry, Ruby Chishti, and Alissa Alfonso. Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
The venue, 207 Front Street, was erected in 1797 and is one of the oldest structures in the neighborhood. Added in 1972 to the National Register of Historic Places, it has some 10,000 square feet of space and provides a dramatic setting, featuring heavy timber floor framing, brightly sunlit galleries, and dramatic, wide-open spaces in the topmost floor, where you’ll find a 12-foot iron and wood wheel that was once used to hoist grain from ships into storage. At the moment, that device is home to Tura Oliveira’s Wheel of Fortune (2025), in which a giant, bloodred humanoid figure is tangled in the spokes. (The wheel also nicely calls back to the image of the Fates.)
Tura Oliveira, Wheel of Fortune (2025). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
“Titled after both the tarot card and the game show,” said the artist in a statement, “in this work the grain hoist becomes the breaking wheel of public execution, history turns like a great wheel and catches us in its spokes.” The piece’s price is on request.
It’s the sophomore outing of the show, which had its inaugural run at the same setting last year. That show, which was the building’s debut as a public exhibition space, was open for just several days, coinciding with the Frieze fair. This year, with the blessing of owner Ivan Wolpert of Seaport Associates and Belle Harbour Capital, the show remains on view for a month (including Frieze’s run, when many from the global art world will convene in New York). Prices range from a few hundred dollars for small works by Eileen Braun and Traci Johnson to the range of $70,000 for a large Karen Margolis.
Fabric art is a many-splendored thing, and I’m not an expert, so I called on Elissa Auther, deputy director of curatorial affairs and chief curator at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design—the curator that pretty much every invited artist put on their VIP list, Bravin told me—to tour the show and call out some highlights. Elevated to her current role in 2019, she had joined the museum five years before as as research and collections curator.
Elissa Auther. Photo: Val Bozzi. Courtesy Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
Textile arts span all sorts of techniques and processes, Auther told me, including needlework, embroidery, felting, wet bonding, quilting, and weaving, whether on a loom or off. And these each can lend different meanings, so the more the audience knows, the better they can understand the works. Auther proved an excellent instructor, and no wonder—she also teaches at New York’s Bard Graduate Center.
“I never thought I’d see an exhibition like this in my lifetime,” she said. “Textile art certainly isn’t a recent trend in my world, though it’s definitely gotten more visible, and many more artists are now using the material for the first time.”
Chris Bogia, Village Interior (Maspeth), 2022. Photo: BravinLee Programs. Courtesy Mrs. Gallery.
After sipping on a coffee and chatting with Bravin and Lee, Auther took note of Chris Bogia’s 2022 yarn-on-wood Village Interior (Maspeth), which hangs in the entryway. The boldly colored work shows a table on which stands a candelabra made of human arms, holding shining candles against a rich black background. “He has a tremendous color sense,” Auther said, “and gives attention to the decorative borders. I’m interested in artists who embrace ‘the decorative,’” she said—a term long considered feminized and derogatory in high art. 
“When I made this piece, I was thinking about our collective period of darkness and the sources of light (candles, lanterns, the moon) that we symbolically looked to as a way to illuminate the dark mysteries of our collective predicament during the pandemic,” said the artist in a statement, adding that the framed archway in the piece, where those decorative flourishes appear, echoes those of typical homes in the borough of Queens, where the work was originally shown. The work, priced at $25,000, appears courtesy of Mrs. Gallery, which is in that borough’s Maspeth neighborhood.
Halley Zien, Morning Mourn (2024). Photo: BravinLee Programs.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Auther said in front of Morning Mourn (2024), an ambitious, five-foot-wide Halley Zien piece. “It’s a combination of painting and dimensional stuffed sculpture. That’s what’s exciting about this show. There’s always new discoveries.” The piece shows a domestic interior, with several figures, some lying in bed, seemingly involved in a wild confrontation. Lee later compared it to a scene in the classic 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (where Charlie’s four grandparents are confined to a single bed), filtered through the sensibility of English photographer Richard Billingham. List price: $12,500.
“My work explores the dissonance between idealized exterior appearances and the psychologically charged realities of internal experience,” says Zien in a statement. “Inspired by traditions that use performative masks to dislodge the spirit, exaggerated figures use their distortion to telegraph hidden emotional truths.”
Julia Bland, Sharp Edge of the Sky (2022). Photo: BravinLee Programs. Courtesy Derek Eller.
Looking at Sharp Edge of the Sky (2022) by Julia Bland, Auther enumerated various techniques: weaving, braiding, painted canvas that seems to have been dismantled and sewn back together, and tie dye. With a palette of oranges and browns, the abstract work, standing nearly 10 feet high, is based on several interlocking triangles. Courtesy of New York gallery Derek Eller, it goes for $32,000.
“This piece is a meditation on the ‘face to face’ encounter described in the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, during which a person’s intimacy and otherness are simultaneously felt,” said the artist’s statement. 
Ruby Chishti, An Intangible Sanctuary of Ocean and stars II (2023). Photo: BravinLee Programs.
An Intangible Sanctuary of Ocean and stars II (2023), an eight-foot-high piece by Ruby Chishti, combines found men’s overcoats with other fabric, as well as thread, wood, metal wire, paint, and other materials into an overcoat for a giant. Auther quipped that it was the opposite of a work by Charles LeDray, the artist known for creating sculptures of miniature clothing. “But she’s created a landscape,” Auther pointed out.
“Magnified by the sheer scale of the structure, it distorts perspective—like a little girl gazing upward at a monumental, unreachable guardian, as abstract and fleeting as God,” said the artist.
Ali Dipp, Concession No 3 (Trumbull, Capitol), 2024. Photo: BravinLee Programs. Courtesy Franklin Parrasch.
Ali Dipp’s Concession No. 3 (Trumbull, Capitol), from 2024, reproduces a familiar scene—artist John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence (1817–18), showing the Founding Fathers presenting that document’s first draft to the Second Continential Congress. It’s made from hand-stitched thread on denim jeans the artist located in Salvation Army stores in El Paso, Texas, near the Mexican border. In a statement, the artist said that “On the border, I see how America is still in the making—where those who work, aspire, and believe there is more to see, more to build, and more to imagine remember that emancipation comes from the Latin word for hand.” Auther pointed out that it’s “a good example of how materials can relate directly to a place, and to communities.”
Walter Robinson, Tumultuous Heart (2017). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
Tumultuous Heart (2017), a six-foot-square rug by Walter Robinson based on a “spin” painting of his own making, served as a spot for Auther and Lee to talk technique, about tufting and weaving and knotting and texture—and to reminisce about the widely beloved late artist and critic. Robinson famously made paintings with a spinning technique starting in 1985, years before Damien Hirst made a mint on similar works. New York Times critic Holland Cotter observed that Robinson’s works combined action painting and a hippy aesthetic. BravinLee Programs has been commissioning rugs from artists for years; also on display are examples by Willie Cole, Rashid Johnson, Deborah Kass, Thomas Nozkowski, and Christopher Wool.
Lee and Robinson often talked trash about sports in text messages, the dealer recalled, asking, mournfully, “So when am I going to get a text from him?” 
Terri Friedman, RE-fresh (2022). Photo: BravinLee Programs.
Terri Friedman, standing before her work RE-fresh (2022), in an array of greens and other earthy tones, enthused to Auther, “I’ve always wanted to meet you!” This work, she explained, engages in a more muted palette than past work, and is at a more mural-like scale (it stands eight feet high). The piece draws inspiration from nun and self-taught artist Sister Corita Kent, as well as protest posters and affirmations. She draws the work on an iPad, she said, which is a fairly new development, while asking, “How can I create a painting out of fiber?” The technology has been a game-changer, she said. 
Several works in “Golden Thread” explore social and political hot-button issues. There are Natalie Baxter’s Warm Guns (2016–25), soft versions of assault weapons, and the same artist’s 2016 People Will Think You’re Making a Trump Flag (a yuge one), that reproduces the Stars and Stripes in Trumpian gold. There’s Diana Weymar’s American Sampler (2020–25), from her Tiny Pricks Project, needlepoints that include quotations from political discourse on various subjects. There’s Jennifer Cecere’s WH (2025), showing the White House, always a locus for contested notions of America.
Natalie Baxter, Warm Guns (2016-2025). Photo: BravinLee Programs.
“I just came from teaching a class teaching about protest art,” said Auther, adding that fiber art has long lent itself well to political commentary. The curriculum included artists like Ellen Lesperance, who has made sweater designs from historical photographs of protesters; the Ribbon International, a 1985 anti-nukes protest involving a large decorated cloth that stretched from the Pentagon into Washington, D.C.; the AIDS Memorial Quilt; and the Social Justice Sewing Academy. 
In all, though she has long thought about and investigated the plentiful ways artists have used this medium over many decades, even Auther was amazed at how many artists in the new show were unfamiliar to her.
“The field is expanding beyond the capability of keeping up,” she said. “And that’s a good thing.”
“The Golden Thread II” is on view from BravinLee Programs at 207 Front Street, New York, New York, April 11–May 16, 2025. More

It’s said that Caravaggio painted Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy in 1606 while holed up on the Neapolitan estates of the Colonna family. He was on the run with Pope Paul V having issued his death warrant in Rome for the murder of Ranuccio Tommason.
At the same time, over in India, emperor Jahangir was entering the second year of his reign, carrying forward the administrative systems and flourishing of Persian culture launched by his father, Akbar the Great. If these worlds, Caravaggio’s 16th-century Italy and the Mughal court in northern India, seem far apart, it’s because they were, each occupying differing spheres and bound to different traditions.
And still, it is somewhat surprising to write that earlier this month, some 400 years on, marked the first time a Caravaggio painting had been shown publicly in India. The host is the Saket outpost of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Delhi, an institution better known for platforming contemporary South Asian art than centuries-old masterpieces.
Visitors gathered to view “Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy”. Photo: courtesy Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA).
The exhibition arrives through a partnership with the cultural center of the Italian Embassy and was timed to coincide with the visit of Antonio Tajani, Italy’s deputy prime minister. Through May 18, audiences in Delhi will be able to see Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy in a showcase that includes a VR experience and a documentary series focused on the life and world of one of the most alluring and mercurial characters in European art history.
The painting itself is wicked and sublime. We meet Mary in a moment of private vulnerability; her posture is relaxed and supplicant, her hair is loose and tumbles into the surrounding darkness. A breathless expression hangs across her face, one caught between death and dreaming. The quietly glowing skull beneath her elbow winks at the first. Pure white light (along with the painting’s title) reminds us we’re witnessing one of her daily raptures with the divine spirit. It’s a bold example of skilfully deployed color, mastery of stark lighting, and an eye for a dramatic pose. It would influence of Rubens, Bernini, and Artemisia Gentileschi.
“The arrival of Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy marks a significant moment in India’s engagement with Classical European Art,” the museum’s founder Kiran Nadar said in a statement. “It offers a rare opportunity for our local audiences in particular, to view a Caravaggio painting, and encounter an artistic lineage that has fascinated generations of Indian artists.”
Making the Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy Delhi display all the more remarkable is the fact the painting was only discovered in 2014 in a European private collection. It was duly authenticated by Mina Gregori, an Italian art historian and leading Caravaggio scholar, who pointed to “the quality of the workmanship and the intensity of the expression.” Further proof, Gregori noted, was the Vatican customs stamp on the back of the painting.
Left: Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy “Klein Magdalena” (ca. 1606). Right: Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (1606).
Though the painting went onto be included in a Tokyo exhibition focused on Caravaggio and his contemporaries, not all scholars were convinced. Some believe it is a 17th-century copy made after a lost original. In 2018, this debate was reignited when a museum in Paris hanged Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy beside Klein Magdalena, a painting of the same subject that was painted around the same time that had been discovered after the Second World War and had also once been considered a Caravaggio.
To some, at least, the first Caravaggio is yet to arrive in India. More

In 1997, artist Cameron Cross was teaching high school art in Altona, Canada, when he decided to give the town a massive gift. To honor Altona’s status as “the Sunflower Capital of Canada,” he would erect The Big Easel, a 75-foot-tall sculpture of an easel displaying a reproduction of one of Vincent van Gogh’s (1853–1890) famed sunflower paintings. But the giant Van Gogh’s future was recently in jeopardy after wind damage forced its removal.
A powerful windstorm on February 28 blew off an eight-foot square panel of the 24-by-32-foot painting (although it was recovered). More damage followed amid high winds on March 15. As officials worked to remove the four-ton painting from its stand, the town conducted a “Big Easel Restoration” survey to ask residents if they supported plans to repair and reinstall the work.
A solid majority voiced their approval of the artwork, with 68 percent of the nearly 600 respondents voting that it was important that Altona save The Big Easel. The results showed that 60 percent wanted to make sure that the easel continued to display a painting (rather than a printed image), and 61 percent specifically wanted to keep the Van Gogh sunflowers.
“We will be rebuilding the fiberglass canvas from scratch, and I’ll be repainting the image,” Cross told me. “This will take place next year, in 2026.”

The idea for a giant easel came to Cross one day during his 45-minute commute to Altona, when he realized that two hydropoles, or utility poles, with an X-shaped support between them, resembled a giant easel. Then a young muralist, he was excited to recreate not just the imagery of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, but the heft of the brushstrokes and impasto, building up the surface with fiberglass to sculptural effect before painting with acrylic urethane enamel, an automotive paint.
“Van Gogh’s work is so thick and textured. I wanted it to look like a painting on an easel, not just a mural on the side of a building,” Cross explained, noting that painting the image took about a month.
In 1999, Cross put up a second version of The Big Easel in Altona’s sister city of Emerald, Australia. A third easel has been a landmark on the outskirts of Goodland, Kansas—the Sunflower State—since 2001. All three towns are home to an annual sunflower festival.
Cameron Cross applying a protective coating to one of his monumental public art installations The Big Easel. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Local news outlet Pembina Valley Online has been following the saga of Altona’s best-known public artwork for years, including during its temporary removal and restoration in 2017. Cross made modifications to the work to facilitate future repairs, reattaching the painting to the easel with bolts, rather than by welding. The repairs cost about CA$40,000 ($30,400).
But even then, Cross had recommended to the town that the entire canvas be replaced. After installing the subsequent versions of The Big Easel, he had a much better understanding of how to make the work last—and the mistakes that were causing Altona’s to deteriorate. In Australia, engineers had told him that the wooden under layer needed to be made from pressure-treated marine-grade plywood, and the fiberglass on top needed a gel coat before being painted.
This time around, the town projected a cost of CA$27,000 ($19,500) to install a printed replica that would last about 10 years, or CA$70,000 ($50,500) for Cross to repaint on marine-grade plywood that should last for over 25 years. To remove the artwork permanently would have come with a CA$20,000 ($14,400) price tag. The town has been considering repairs since 2023, and will be filing an insurance claim to help cover some of the cost.
Cameron Cross painting one of his monumental public art installations The Big Easel. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The prospect of taxpayers helping shoulder the continuing expense to maintain the artwork was a problem for some survey respondents.
“At this point we have spent enough money repairing the painting, I think there are better areas around Altona where that money could be spent more wisely,” one respondent wrote. “The painting doesn’t draw attention to Altona like we al [sic] think it does.”
Another was more succinct: “Get. Rid. Of. It.”
Others thought the restoration might be an opportunity to change up the display, suggesting opening the easel for works by “local talents or local students” or converting it into a digital billboard that could rotate imagery, including the Van Gogh.
But many clearly love The Big Easel—an “iconic” and “essential landmark”—just the way it is.
“I have had family come from different parts of Canada and the first thing they ask is ‘where’s the painting? Can we go see it?’ I grew up with it as a huge beacon of ‘home,’ and I hope my kids will also get to see and appreciate it,” one respondent said. “I think getting rid of it would be a huge mistake.… Home wouldn’t quite feel the same without it.”
Online sources indicate that the Altona sculpture was recognized as “the largest painting on an easel” by the Guinness Book of World Records, but Cross said he never pursued such certification. The Guinness website currently lists a comparatively diminutive 56-foot tall easel from India as having become the record-holder for the largest easel in 2008. (Another authority called the World Record Academy declared the Kansas version “the world’s largest easel” in 2023.)
In the 28 years since Cross first conceived of the project, Altona’s agriculture industry has declined considerably, but the town’s giant sunflower canvas has helped keep this history alive.
“I’m still getting emails from all over the world from people who drive by and want to take a look for themselves. It’s certainly put Altona on the map in that regard,” Cross said. “And it’s in pop culture. It’s been in books and magazines and movies and TV shows and Jeopardy! questions—all those kinds of things.”
Originally, Cross’s plan was to create seven versions of The Big Easel around the world, one for each of Van Gogh’s still life paintings of a vase of sunflowers. There are four distinct compositions, and three repetitions of two of them. Firebombing during World War II destroyed one version, and another is in a private collection that never exhibits it publicly.
Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers (1888) at the National Gallery, London. Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images.
But the others are in some of the world’s leading museums, at London’s National Gallery, Munich’s Neue Pinakothek, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Seiji Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Museum of Art in Tokyo. (The Amsterdam and Tokyo canvases are repetitions of the London one, and the Philadelphia painting of the Munich one.)
The original Altona sculpture replicates the London version, and Australia’s is the Amsterdam repetition. The Kansas sunflowers match the private collection sunflowers, the first version painted by the artist. For the four still-unrealized versions of The Big Easel, Cross hopes to find sites in Japan, South Africa, Argentina, and either the Netherlands or France with connections to either Van Gogh or sunflowers.
“The city in Canada, they said yes immediately. I presented to the city in Australia, and they said yes immediately. I presented to Kansas. They said yes immediately. So it was like, ‘how hard could this be?’ I quit my job, and I thought, ‘being a public artist is fun,’” Cross said. “The next 200 places said no. But I’m not giving up.”
The concept of the giant easel still captivates the artist, and he’s actually expanded his vision beyond Van Gogh. Cross wants to bring giant easels to different cities around the world in a project now called “The Easel Project“—but to turn over the canvas to local artists to let them display their work. (A digital screen would be another option.)
Cross is hoping to kick off the project with a site in the Middle East, where the easel may have been invented, but working at this scale in public art is understandably challenging.
“It’s like a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and every piece has to fit perfectly. And in those pieces are land acquisition and insurance and volunteers and funding and engineers and fabricators,” Cross said.
“An easel is usually something that an artist would put a work of art on. But in this case, it’s a monumental piece of art itself because it’s so large,” he added. Cross is grateful that enough people in Altona see it that way that he’ll have a chance to recreate it with tested materials that will last for decades to come. More

Earlier this week, Ruth Angus, the associate curator of the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, was giving me a tour of a jewelry exhibition nestled deep within the museum’s Halls of Gems and Minerals. “Each piece in this show is a collision between art and science,” she said. “Some are poetic interpretations. Others are accurate visualizations of galaxies, stars, even planetary nebulae.”
The exhibition, “Cosmic Splendor: Jewelry from the Collections of Van Cleef & Arpels,” runs through January 4, 2026. It comprises more than 60 pieces drawn from the Parisian maison’s archives as well as private collections, each one inspired by the vastness and mystery of the cosmos. Installed in the Melissa and Keith Meister Gallery, the show unfolds in a darkened chamber transformed into a celestial expanse, illuminated by constellations across black plexiglass walls—and, yes, by the light sparkling off the jewels in the vitrines.
Doubles Galaxies clips (2021), rose gold, rubies, pink sapphires, amethysts, diamonds. Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels
“Space is colorful,” Angus said. “We think of it as black and white, but in fact, it’s vibrant—and so is this show. The jewelry captures that beautifully.” Angus served as a curatorial advisor on the show, working alongside Denton Ebel and Kate Kiseeva, the curator and assistant curator in the museum’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Alexandrine Maviel-Sonet, director of patrimony and exhibitions at Van Cleef & Arpels.
Fleur de Soleil clip (2016), yellow gold, mandarin garnet, yellow sapphires, diamonds. Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels
The exhibition is organized thematically, with sections dedicated to everything from the Moon and the Sun to distant galaxies, meteorites, and the Zodiac. In one display titled “Across the Universe,” a pair of spiral-shaped brooches mirror the form and color of the Butterfly Galaxies—two merging galaxies in the Virgo constellation. “These clips really look like galaxies,” said Angus, noting the artist’s fidelity to astronomical imagery. “The colors of the gemstones correspond to actual elements found in space—hydrogen gas shows up red, new stars glow blue. You can trace the science in the sparkle.”
Showcasing treasures inspired by worlds beyond our own, the “Beyond Earth” display includes the Trappist transformable necklace and earrings (2021).
An outstanding piece in the show is the Trappist transformable necklace from 2021, inspired by the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 and its seven Earth-sized exoplanets. Crafted in white gold, the piece features rubies, mauve sapphires, amethysts, cultured pearls, black spinel, onyx, and diamonds, all arranged in orbit-like forms that echo the architecture of the planetary system. “TRAPPIST-1 represents our best chance of finding life in the galaxy right now,” Angus said. “It’s amazing that some incredibly fancy jewelry designer has been inspired by this somewhat obscure planetary system. It’s famous to astronomers, but most people haven’t heard of TRAPPIST-1.” On loan from a private collection, its esoteric theme says as much about its mysterious owner as it does about the distant star. “I love that necklace,” Angus said. “I hope the wearer is a star geek.”
Explosion Stellaire necklace (2021), white gold, rose gold, diamonds, sapphires. Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels
Another case in the exhibition charts the life cycle of stars, from young stellar nurseries to dying giants. “This ring is inspired by a very young star that’s just recently formed,” Angus said. “Young for a star, by the way, is just a few million years old.” The sequence moves from youthful rings to brooches modeled after planetary nebulae, ending with the gobsmacking Explosion Stellaire necklace from 2021—a supernova in jewelry form. Art Deco-inspired in its geometry and glamour, the piece is composed of white gold, rose gold, sapphires, and diamonds. The wide diamond-and-sapphire collar can be separated into two necklaces, while the pendant detaches and can be worn as a clip.
For ten days only, the museum is also hosting a rare celestial cameo: Van Cleef & Arpels’ Planétarium Automaton, on view in the Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals from April 11 to 20. The kinetic object—measuring two feet tall and set in a five-foot-wide vitrine—features a bejeweled depiction of the Sun, Moon, and six inner planets, each rotating in real time according to their actual orbits. Earth makes its full revolution in 365 days; Venus in 225.
Planétarium automaton (2023), from the Extraordinary Objects collection, featuring gemstone planets and a kinetic solar system model. Courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels
At the top of each hour, the automaton comes to life. On the day I visited, a crowd formed and oohed in wonder as a diamond-and-emerald shooting star emerged from a hidden door, and the planets began their slow, glimmering dance. The Sun, composed of yellow sapphires, spessartite garnets, and diamonds mounted on hundreds of trembling gold stems. Around it, planets rendered in chrysoprase, rose quartz, turquoise, moonstone, red jasper, and obsidian slowly turned in their orbits—each accented with combinations of sapphires, tsavorite garnets, and white, yellow, and rose gold. Never before seen in the U.S., the automaton blurs the line between timekeeping and stargazing, art and orbit. More

It’s said that friends of artist and sculptor John Chamberlain would wait expectantly for him to finish a pack of cigarettes so as to watch how he’d crimp and contort its hollow shell. Beginning in the late 1960s, Chamberlain applied the same bare-handed attention to other everyday materials, including paper bags, foam, wire, and aluminum foil.
After two decades of crafting the crushed car sculptures for which he became best known, Chamberlain returned to humble aluminum foil in the 1980s, making a group of 29 palm-sized, freestanding sculptures. It was in some ways his ideal material, one both pliant and resistant, whose every crinkle evidenced the hand of the artist. To make the works, he twisted foil into elongated tubes, which were then bent and woven together into beguiling contortions.
A view of the sculptures by Chamberlain now showing in Rockefeller Center. Photo: courtesy Tishman Speyer.
Scaling up these sculptures proved tricky, impossible in fact, until 2007, when Chamberlain met Ernest Mourmans, whose Belgium-based workshop manufactured pieces for the likes of Anish Kapoor and Frank Stella. The challenge was to recreate the cheap, dimpled, shiny qualities of aluminum foil within a form that was structurally sound. It wasn’t easy. The solution Mourmans found was to lay compressed aluminum ductwork (the type used in heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems) over an interior skeleton of firm metal tubes. Chamberlain chose four colors for the works: silver, green, copper, and pink.
Details inside the John Chamberlain studio on Shelter Island. Photo: Jason Schmidt/Ventura Capital.
It was the start of a short, but productive relationship. Within four years, Mourmans had realized all of the original sculptures, some reaching up to 16 feet, and Chamberlain was most certainly grateful to see his miniatures realized.
“Art isn’t labor. When it’s labor, it’s better to have someone who is an expert,” Chamberlain told Richard Marshall, the long-time Whitney Museum curator, in an interview. “I make the small sculptures, and Ernest just makes them larger.”
John Chamberlain, BALMYWISECRACK (2011) installed at Petit Palais in Paris. Photo: Mnuchin Gallery.
To date, Chamberlain’s Foils have been a largely European affair, they’ve stood in front of the Grand Palais and graced the Inverleith House in Edinburgh. Now, three of these sculptures have temporarily landed in the plaza of Rockefeller Center, that iconic New York space that in recent years has hosted Robert Indiana’s Love (1966–99) and Kaws’s towering Share (2021). Chamberlain’s so-called “foil” works, all of which are making their first U.S. appearance, are somewhat more enigmatic.
John Chamberlain, FIDDLERSFORTUNE (Pink) (2010) installed at Rockefeller Center in New York City, 2025. Photo: Craig T Fruchtman / Getty Images.
BALMYWISECRACK (2011) dips and turns like a ballet dancer, head down, arms swooped back, body contorted. FIDDLERSFORTUNE (2010) stands off-kilter, its knot of entwined strands like some gaudy wreath. RITZFROLIC (2008) appears as a mutant ring fixed with nail on top. They are, as ever with Chamberlain, very much open for interpretation. His goal, he once said in interview is “not to explain [art] so that you don’t destroy the discovery angle.” Expect to see passersby stopping in the Plaza, bending, craning, pacing—all trying to make sense and shapes out Chamberlain’s works.
They are, in the opinion of Robert Mnuchin, whose gallery is presenting the installation, Chamberlain’s most serious body of work intended for outdoor display. “These sculptures reflect the culmination of Chamberlain’s lifelong exploration of material, color, and abstraction,” Mnuchin said over email. “They evoke unmistakable feelings of joy and celebration.”
Details inside the John Chamberlain studio on Shelter Island. Photo: Jason Schmidt/Ventura Capital.
The trio’s arrival is part of a mini Chamberlain-centric festival taking place at Rockefeller Center this Spring. Christie’s is exhibiting 11 small-scale works, “Foil and Form,” including several that inspired his supersized foil works, ahead of a sale on April 17. A day earlier, coinciding with what would have been Chamberlain’s 98th birthday, Assouline is releasing Living with Chamberlain, a splashy coffee table book complete with conversations with family, friends, gallerists, and collectors. More

She was the queen of the 17th-century still life—and her patrons shelled out lavish sums to own her resplendent flowers. Rachel Ruysch, born in the Hague in 1664, rose to fame for her exquisitely detailed still lifes. Hers were gorgeous and unreal bouquets of flowers that could only exist in art; she placed blossoms that bloomed in different seasons, side-by-side, in painted perpetuity. 
The daughter of the famed botanist Frederik Ruysch, Ruysch grew up in a home surrounded by plants and flowers, often painting specimens in her father’s office. As an artist, she combined her passions for art and science to bring her impossible and yet enthralling detailed visions to life.  
A remarkable talent, she was, in the early decades of the 17th century, regarded by many as Holland’s most famous painter. So great was her celebrity that, unlike many women artists of her era, Ruysch was never fully blotted out from the art historical canon, but, instead, erroneously cast as a minor rather than a major art historical figure.  
Rachel Ruysch, Flower Still Life (ca. 1716–20). Collection of the  Toledo Museum of Art.
“She’s an exceptionally talented artist. Her renderings of nature are just absolutely wonderful. It’s a level of detail, precision, and technical mastery that is truly extraordinary,” said curator Robert Schindler, in a recent conversation. “You can situate her in this environment of the late 17th century and early 18th century at the intersection between art, nature, and science.” 
Now, centuries later, Ruysch is finally stepping back into the limelight with “Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into Art” the first monographic exhibition of her work. The exhibition, curated by Schindler, opened at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio earlier this week. The TMA is a fitting venue for the exhibition as the first North American institution to collect her work back in 1956 (that painting is here reunited with its pendant for the first time since 1848). The traveling exhibition originated at the Alte Pinakothek Munich late last fall and will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston later this year. 
The exhibition brings together dozens of Ruysch’s paintings borrowed from public and private European and American collections, along with her only known extant work on paper, as well as manuscripts, works by several women botanical artists of her era—including her sister—and contemporaneous examples of botanical and insect specimens.  
Rachel Ruysch, Flowers in a Glass Vase (1704). Collection of the Detroit Instituteof Arts.
The exhibition positions Ruysch as an artist who both defied and defined her times, and makes the case that she should be a household name. Painting over six decades, she lived a remarkable life. She was the first woman admitted to the artistic society Confrerie Pictura in The Hague. Later, she was named court painter to Johann Wilhelm II, the Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf, a power figure in the Holy Roman Empire.  She married an artist too, Juriaen Pool, who was of a lesser fame. Add to this the seemingly impossible reality that she was the mother of 11 children, for whom she cared, and the monumentality of Ruysch’s persona begins to come into focus. 
Still, today her works remain absent from many major museum collections, including the Louvre, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and many others. “Nature Into Art” seems set on returning Ruysch to an appropriately vaunted stature. 
Still Lifes, Science, and Sex  
Holland, in the 17th century, witnessed a tremendous vogue for collecting and documenting exotic flowers and plants. While the 1630s had seen the rise of tulipmania, a fever for unusual varieties of tulips, at Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam’s botanical garden, exotic plants had become the fascination, a seemingly innocuous pursuit that implicitly tied to the nation’s colonial exploits and enterprises, as hitherto unknown flora and fauna captured the European imagination.  
Rachel Ruysch’s still lifes were born of this moment and the science and politics that surrounded it; her famed and multifaceted botanist and anatomist father was an innovator in his field.
Rachel Ruysch, Illustration from Observations of a Surinam Toad. London, Royal Society, Inv. CLP/15i/36 ©The Royal Society.
It was her father who recognized her nascent artistic talent, and who apprenticed her to Willem van Aelst, a well-known floral painter in Amsterdam, an unconventional decision for a woman of her times. Most women who were painters were relatives of male artists and apprenticed to them. 
“It’s this perfect moment where you can really connect depictions of nature with the sort of the broader context of inquiries into nature and the Scientific Revolution,” said Schindler.  The exhibition, which includes specimens of bugs and flowers new to Holland at the time, is a cross-disciplinary venture, with curators consulting scientific historians, zoologists, and botanists for the exhibition.  
One of the highlights of the exhibition is Ruysch’s only extant drawing—which isn’t of flowers, but of a Surinamese toad—which Schindler found at the Royal Society of London.  The drawing is a direct and intriguing link between Ruysch’s artwork and the scientific discourse at the time. It speaks to the lingering belief that certain creatures, namely insects and frogs, could reproduce spontaneously from a process known as a generation.  
“The idea was that certain life forms, especially those considered to be lower in the hierarchy, so butterflies, reptiles, amphibians, and all kinds of insects could emerge spontaneously out of a combination of warmth and moisture an inanimate matter, as you might find decomposing in the undergrowth of a forest floor,” explained Schindler, “This [drawing] is the only time that Ruysch doesn’t use plants as her essential motif. Instead, it’s essentially a portrait of a toad, and situates her in the science of the time.”  
While this example stands alone, the artist continued to invigorate what would be otherwise staid bouquets through the unexpected additions of insects and lizards to her arrangements. In some ways, these additions hinted at the vanitas paintings the Dutch were known for, the insects becoming memento mori hinting at decay, death, and brevity of life. At once, her inclusion of these “lower” life forms is evidence of her own innovative approach to the limited subject matter available to women of her generation.   
Anna Ruysch and Other Women Artists  
Interestingly, the genesis of this exhibition started not with Rachel Ruysch but with her sister, Anna. Also trained as a painter, Anna had her own career as a painter of botanical imagery though her works never reached the dexterity or popularity of her sister’s. 
Seven years ago, Schindler, then a curator at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, came across a work by Anna Ruysch which he ultimately helped the museum acquire. While Schindler was passingly familiar with Rachel’s work, he was wholly unaware of Anna.  
“At first, I wanted to look at the two sisters together. Rachel goes on to have this outstanding career and Anna really doesn’t. How could that be, you know? Two sisters, both talented, two years apart, and learn from the same teacher, grow, up in the same learned environment, and one goes on to have this fabulous career and the other one doesn’t?” he mused.  
Anna Ruysch, A Still Life of Flowers on a Marble Table Ledge (1685). Birmingham, Alabama, PrivateCollection. Photo: Erin Croxton, Birmingham Museum of Art.
But as his research continued, Schindler realized a much larger exhibition of Rachel Ruysch’s work was in order. “Learning that Rachel had never had a monographic show until now, and the last publication about her work dates to 1956 made it apparent that something on a larger scale was really needed,” he added. 
Still, kernels of that original notion remain, with several works by Anna included in the show. The exhibition additionally situates Ruysch in a larger context of women artists of her era, showcasing works by Maria Sibylla Merian, Johanna Helena Herolt, and Alida Withoos, who were important botanical artists of the era.  
“We wanted to at least point to the fact in the context of this otherwise pretty monographic show that women artists played important, wide-spread roles, and Rachel was one of them,” said Schindler.  
In many ways, women’s influential role in botanical and still life painting points to the confines set against them. In the 17th century, a strict hierarchy of genres was observed. “History painting, which includes biblical, historical, and mythological scenes, was at the top.  Then portraiture, and, at the bottom, still life painting,” explained Schindler. Admission to the guild was often dependent upon these hierarchies. To become a history painter, the study of the human figure, ideally the human nude, was necessary—a course of study forbidden to women. 
“Because of the restrictions that were in place, women were already relegated to the lower genres,” said Schindler “Which in part explains, why there were so many women artists who specialized in botanical illustration.” 
A Life of Fame and Fortune
One of the most fascinating paintings in the exhibition is a 1692 portrait of Rachel Ruysch recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The portrait, which shows Ruysch at work surrounded by books and flora, is now believed to be a dual-artist work by portrait painter Michiel van Musscher and Ruysch herself. While van Musscher painted Ruysch’s likeness, it is believed Ruysch painted the lavish blossoms that appear set before her.   
Rachel Ruysch and Michiel van Musscher, Rachel Ruysch( 1664–1750). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The only recently discovered portrait hints at Ruysch’s impressive stature in her late 20s. It was a fame that would continue to grow through the 1700s.  “We know of one Leiden cloth merchant who paid dearly for a pair of paintings. Depending on which source you trust it was either 1,500 or 1,300 guilders for the pair, which was a very, very substantial amount at the time,” said Schindler. Her paintings entered preeminent collections in Germany, England, and Florence, including that of the Medicis. Research into her patrons and market is only in the early stages of scholarly inquiry, but she was without a doubt one of the leading artists of her age. “Hugely successful, Rachel Ruysch’s paintings often sold for more in her lifetime than Rembrandt’s did in his,” the National Gallery of London, notes on their website.  
In 1723, Ruysch, already a financial success, had the unbelievable luck of purchasing a winning lottery ticket.  For a decade that followed, she seems to have stopped painting, by and large. But in the final decade of her life, she returned to her still lifes, though on a smaller scale and a bit more brooding in temperament. She also began adding her age to the painting, as though to announce that she was still present, still painting at the height of her talents. Included in the exhibition is one such work, the 1741 painting Posy of Flowers, with a Beetle, on a Stone Ledge. Her last known work was painted at the age of 83.  
Rachel Ruysch, Posy of Flowers, with a Beetle, on a Stone Ledge (1741). Kunstmuseum Basel.
When Ruysch did pass away at the age of 86 in 1750, her death was met with a remarkable outpouring. She is believed to have painted some 250 works in her lifetime. “The year of her death, possibly still within her lifetime, a collection of poems is published, twelve of which celebrate her in the absolutely highest terms. It’s the most unusual honor for any art artist, in particular, a female artist, and just speaks to the level of esteem she was held in during her lifetime and in the mid-18th century,” said Schindler. 
For Schindler, he hopes that “Nature Into Art” is a mere jumping-off point for larger scholarly investigations of her work and life. “It’s been such a great project to work on I’m hoping we’ve found ways to get that across to visitors and open the door for more scholarship,” he said “There’s so much more to discover.”  More