Eliana Willis

Some of the art world’s most renowned venues and events take place in what seemed unlikely contemporary art hubs at their inception. Just think of Dia Beacon, Prospect New Orleans, SITE Santa Fe, and Mass MOCA. 
Now, a contemporary art triennial aims to create that same magic in a tiny village in Western New York State, an hour’s drive from Rochester to the east and Buffalo to the west. Launching in 2026, the Medina Triennial will invite artists to create some 50 site-responsive works at a dozen or so indoor and outdoor locations in a village on the Erie Canal, a few miles south of Lake Ontario, that is home to about 6,000. The sites include former industrial buildings, public spaces, and significant spots along the canal, with the central site being a sandstone former hotel. 
You may never have heard of Medina, but those in the region have. It has had no fewer than five local landmarks designated on the National Register of Historic Places, including its downtown, and it was noted by the Buffalo News in 2020 for “a bubbling multifaceted culinary and cultural renaissance.”
Downtown Medina. Photo: Hakan Topal. Courtesy Medina Triennial.
Heading up the show are co-artistic directors Kari Conte and Karin Laansoo, with Buffalo-based Ekrem Serdar as associate curator. Conte, an independent curator and writer based in New York and Turkey, currently holds curatorial roles at New York’s City as Living Laboratory and Kai Art Center in Tallinn, Estonia. Laansoo lives in Rochester and Tallinn, and is founding director of the Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center and artistic director of Tallinn’s Kai Art Center. Serdar is curator at the Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center.
“The Medina Triennial will converge transformative artistic positions within a village marked by history and possibility,” said Conte in press materials. “It will offer an inclusive space where global perspectives and local sensibilities meet, with numerous works that are grounded in Medina with far-reaching perspectives.”
Added Laansoo: “Western New York is a location of personal significance to me, as it’s a place I’ve called my home for a number of years. Medina is a hidden gem in this region in many ways. A triennial of this scope has never been organized in the U.S. in a community of this size, making this an unprecedented opportunity.”
View of the Canal Port in Medina, New York. Photo: Hakan Topal. Courtesy Medina Triennial.
Invited artists will often work in collaboration with local residents, said the organizers, who aim to draw 50,000 visitors. 
The show was conceived by what might seem an unlikely duo of arts impresarios—the New York Power Authority, the nation’s largest state public power organization, and the New York State Canal Corporation, which operates some 524 miles of waterways—in hopes of revitalizing the canal and highlighting its significance. Those authorities recruited the leadership of three Buffalo institutions—the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and the University at Buffalo—along with Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery and the Corning Museum of Glass, to serve on a steering committee.
The inaugural edition will run June 6–September 7, 2026. The artist roster is in formation; the organizers will start to name the participants in the fall. To gin up excitement in the meantime, the Medina Triennial Hub will open in September and will host public programs and events in partnership with Western New York arts venues. More

Jo van Gogh-Bonger (1862–1925), one of art history’s most quietly influential figures, will be the subject of an exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum, the institution named after her brother-in-law, the Dutch Post-Impressionist she helped make famous.
It is well known that Vincent van Gogh struggled to find an audience for his work during his lifetime, only achieving the renown he enjoys today posthumously. But it is Van Gogh-Bonger who deserves much of the credit for his blossoming into a beloved figure known the world over for his captivating paintings as well as his mental illness and premature death.
When Van Gogh-Bonger married Theo van Gogh (1857–1891), it was with the knowledge that the art dealer was supporting his artist brother, a preternatural talent who also suffered from fits of melancholy and had even cut off his own ear just after their engagement. When Van Gogh died in July 1890, the couple inherited his life’s work, a cache of 400 paintings and many more drawings.
Finding a home for this art, and fostering a love and appreciation for it, was always going to be a monumental task. But then, adding to the family’s tragedy, Theo died just 21 months after his wedding, leaving his young wife to care not only for their baby Vincent, but for the life’s work of his namesake uncle. (The brothers are buried side-by-side in the cemetery in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village north of Paris where Van Gogh died.)
Isaac Israëls, Woman Standing in Front of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1920). Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
The exhibition, which marks the centenary of the death of Van Gogh-Bonger, will feature the work of Isaac Israëls (1865–1934). She at one point hoped to marry the Dutch painter after the death of her husband, but Israëls and Van Gogh-Bonger instead became close friends.
She even loaned him several works by her brother-in-law, which served as a major source of inspiration for Israëls. Incorporating copies of Van Gogh’s paintings into the background in at least 17 of his paintings between 1915 and 1920, Israëls even began using Vincent’s name as a verb.
Isaac Israëls, An elegant lady posing before the sunflowers of Vincent van Gogh (ca. 1916–20). Photo: courtesy of Christie’s Amsterdam.
“I’m still very busy Vincenting,” he wrote to Van Gogh-Bonger at one point. The museum’s collection includes over 100 letters from Israëls to Van Gogh-Bonger, which are being published in a digital edition on the occasion of the show.
“Israëls writes with great candor and verve about art, literature, music, love and friendship. He had a keen interest in Jo and her tribulations, and enjoyed their time together. But he was also fascinated by Vincent’s work, as he frequently expresses in his letters,” Hans Luijten, Van Gogh-Bonger’s biographer, who is publishing the letters, said in a statement.
Excerpts from Van Gogh-Bonger’s diary that provide insight into the relationship between the two will also be on view.
Isaac Israëls, Portrait of Jo van Gogh-Bonger (1895–97). Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
The exhibition unites 10 of Israëls’s Van Gogh-inspired works, as well as his 1894 painting of the young Vincent Willem van Gogh, and Portrait of Jo van Gogh-Bonger (1895–97), which the museum had restored ahead of the show to remove layers of overpainting and thick yellow varnish.
After decades in the shadows, Luijten’s 2022 biography, Jo van Gogh-Bonger: The Woman who Made Vincent Famous, finally brought Van Gogh-Bonger’s important role in popularizing Van Gogh’s work to light—tirelessly wooing critics and arranging shows, even in the U.S. Hopefully, this exhibition will make her name known to even more of those who love and appreciate her famous brother-in-law.
“Captivated by Vincent. The Intimate Friendship of Jo van Gogh-Bonger and Isaac Israëls” will be on view at the Van Gogh Museum, Museumplein 6, 1071 DJ Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 12, 2025–January 25, 2026. More

The city of Amsterdam is known not only for its great museums but also for its thriving erotic culture, with brothels and peep shows galore. But as a small protest last week demonstrated, there are still a few groups that will get their dander up when they feel their religion is being slighted, especially when it involves a sexual joke. The current dustup actually comes as a result of a collision of the worlds of culture and sex—namely, a prophylactic on view at the Rijksmuseum. 
A 19th-century condom, printed with a sexual scene involving a nun and three members of the clergy, is on display in the exhibition “Safe Sex?” at the national museum. In the bawdy scene, the nun has raised her skirt to reveal her crotch as three clergymen expose themselves to her, over the caption Voilà, mon choix (there, that’s my choice). The scene echoes, with genders reversed, the classical scene of the Judgment of Paris, in which  the Trojan prince is forced to decide who was most beautiful among the goddesses Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena. 
The Catholic foundation Civitas Christiana staged a protest outside the museum. Courtesy Civets Christiana.
The Catholic foundation Civitas Christiana staged a protest outside the museum for two days last week, and has posted a petition, which currently has over 1,000 signatures, calling for the condom to be removed, claiming it is “a grotesque insult to God, the Catholic Church and the entire Dutch nation.” For them, the condom is not a joke, it’s evidence of a moment of persecution of the Catholic Church after the French Revolution. 
Right-wing publications have thrown their support behind the protests, for example De Dagelijkse Standaard, which asks why it is “courageous” to mock Christianity, but “completely unthinkable” to display a rendition of Mohammed. “Because a cartoon of Mohammed—even from the 18th or 19th century—would be unthinkable in the Rijksmuseum. Not because they don’t exist. But because people are afraid. Afraid of riots. Afraid of fire. Afraid of protests that are not peaceful.”
The condom is the centerpiece of a new exhibition “Safe Sex?” Photo: courtesy the Rijksmuseum.
The curators think that the condom, likely made from a sheep’s appendix, was most probably a souvenir from an upmarket French brothel. It’s exceedingly rare; only two such objects are known to survive, said the museum, which noted that 19th-century sexuality and prostitution have been underrepresented in its collection.
A representative of the museum downplayed the situation, pointing out to the Art Newspaper that the protesters numbered only 11 people, and also indicated that Civitas Christiana was recently ordered in court to stop spreading misinformation against the Rutgers Centres of Excellence on Comprehensive Sexuality Education, linking the organization to child abuse.
“Mocking religion is as old as religion itself,” exhibition co-curator Joyce Zelen told the Art Newspaper. “I don’t think this is a response to the French Revolution and the Catholic church. It’s meant to be funny.” More

Can art effect change?
It’s a question frequently posed throughout the art world, and while fervent believers, cynical detractors, and nearly everyone in between have lobbied one position or another, a concrete answer has yet to be formed. For American artist Bobby Anspach, he had his doubts—but also faith.
Installation view of “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” (2025). Photo: Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Newport Art Museum.
Anspach’s first institutional solo exhibition opened this month at Rhode Island’s Newport Art Museum, “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change,” which traces his focused pursuit of a transformative art form, one that could inspire radical and world-spanning change.
The show is curated by Taylor Baldwin, a multidisciplinary artist who is also the Graduate Program Director of Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Baldwin worked closely with Anspach at RISD while he was a student at the college. While enrolled at the school’s MFA program, Anspach produced the first iterations of his “Place for Continuous Eye Contact” sculpture series, examples of which are the crowning jewels of the exhibition in Newport. The works are physically and psychologically immersive, comprising, variously, pom-poms (tens of thousands of them), lights, tents of expensive fabric, chandelier-like domes, hospital beds, tapestries, sound, and a range of other found or repurposed materials.
Installation view of Spring Break Art Show with Bobby Anspach, “Place for Continuous Eye Contact” (2020). Photo: A. Olsen.
Anspach was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1987. He received his BA from Boston College in 2011, studied at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and earned his MFA from RISD in 2017. Frequenters of New York’s Spring Break Art Show will likely remember his 2018 or 2020 “Place for Continuous Eye Contact” installations, which also made appearances at a pop-up space in Beacon, New York, in 2021, and a Walmart parking lot in Newburgh and on Fifth Avenue outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022. While these happenings should have marked the beginning stages of a career just taking off, on July 5, 2022, Anspach died at the age of 34.
The artist’s untimely death adds a layer of poignancy to the exhibition. “At the center of the show is an artist who isn’t here,” Baldwin said during a preview walkthrough. Despite the artist’s existential absence, his vision and voice are very much present, which remain still as an open-ended invitation for change, one that operates on the individual scale but with a view toward the collective.
Installation view of “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” (2025). Photo: Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Newport Art Museum.
The show’s opening gallery space offers context for his specific line of artistic inquiry, and the techniques and experiments he undertook to hone his approach to the more monumental places for eye contact sculptural pieces. Small-scale pom-pom sculptures that appear straight out of a Dr. Seuss book are juxtaposed with a range of paintings, including two large-scale canvases coated in a thick layer of metallic glitter save for the bottom right corners where the glitter has been seemingly wiped off to reveal “Bobby A.,” reflecting themes of discovery, self, and the subconscious.
Other paintings in the space highlight Anspach’s preoccupation with ideas of flatness, depth perception, and iconography. One canvas shows a technicolor, semi-abstract landscape, replete with a field of pom-poms, a blazing sun, various text, and the rendering of a pumpjack, the device used to extract crude oil from underground wells. While not visible from the front, along the right-hand edge of the canvas, it reads, “It’s going to get really bad, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
Concern about climate change and the devastation it has and will wreak was a core element of Anspach’s creative drive. “He was profoundly motivated by the sense that the world was off track about climate change, and the fear of the end of the world,” said Baldwin. “This painting is walking through a lot of that content, the fundamental motivation for the vast majority of his work was this urgency … feeling this sense of obligation towards saving the world.”
Installation view of “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” (2025). Photo: Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Newport Art Museum.
As Anspach’s biography goes, he had his own transcendental experiences that catalyzed what could be described as this overarching, world-saving project. Long devoted to the practice of meditation, the artist had also experimented with psychedelics and undertaken several silent retreats. While he did not personally ascribe to the religion of Buddhism, from his MFA thesis, he describes it as an important framework, and alludes to the fact that the type of experiences and facets of consciousness he was tapping into were elements that predated him by thousands of years.
Baldwin noted, “He believed that he had experienced a truth through deep meditation and far-out thinking. He understood something fundamental about consciousness and the separation of self that would essentially convert anyone into that sense of obligation, and because he knew that truth, he wanted to make sure he could share it with as many people as possible.”
Detail view of “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” (2025). Photo: Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Newport Art Museum.
Another central aspect of Anspach’s practice was his belief that art could change its viewer, bringing to the surface of consciousness a sense of empathy, understanding, and responsibility—to fellow humans and the world at large, universally threatened by issues like climate change, nuclear war, wealth inequality, and health crises. With such great conviction, however, comes some degree of uncertainty.
In Aspach’s thesis, he describes his concern over people’s willingness to open themselves up to his work and his personal ability to convey the message. “I am aware that there have been a lot of people who have come along claiming to know the truth. And that some of them have done a lot of harm to a lot of people. And I am aware that there is a tremendous degree of suspicion towards anyone who uses that word.”
Nevertheless, Aspach forged on, making numerous versions of his “Place for Continuous Eye Contact” works, two of which serve as the foundation for “Everything is Change,” accompanied by soundscapes produced by composer and Aspach collaborator Eluvium.
Set up in adjacent spaces, one is designed to hold an individual and the other two people.
Installation view of “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” (2025). Photo: Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Newport Art Museum.
In the solo work, the viewer lies on a medical-style bed under a meticulously constructed amalgamation of decorative materials, lights, and a carefully placed mirror for the participant to gaze up into their own eyes, with the intention of inducing a state of deep introspection.
In the other, two viewers sit inside a tent lined with countless pom-poms and drenched in otherworldly lighting behind a contraption that blocks one eye of each participant, obliterating the ability to perceive depth. Staring into the eye of the person across with perception flattened and fully immersed in Aspanch’s high-craft creation, the sense of physical presence, space, time, and intimacy are extremely heightened.
Installation view of “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” (2025). Photo: Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Newport Art Museum.
These are just two examples of a sculpture project that the artist had essentially dedicated his entire practice to. Through numerous iterations, he tinkered, refined, and experimented, all to find the perfect formula for communicating the truth he held so sacred in the most effective manner possible.
Of the series, Baldwin wrote in the show’s accompanying essay, “He once told me that if he finally made this one sculpture right, he wouldn’t ever need to make another one. He would be done. He told me that this sculpture, if he was ever finally able to fully make it right, would save the world.” Although Anspach’s pursuit of making one sculpture “right” was cut short, those that he left behind remain as fascinating entry points to the new world he envisioned.
Installation view of “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” (2025). Photo: Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Newport Art Museum.
Like other pieces from this body of work, the eye contact works ask the viewer to suspend any preconceived notions of what is in favor of what could be, not only in a physical sense—though that plays a significant role—but a psychological one. Here, the viewer experience is as much, if not more, the work than the sculptural construction itself, at once a catalyst and index of change. A common denominator between both iterations is a degree of vulnerability and the stripping back of the ego.
Both during Anspach’s lifetime and posthumously, works from the “Place for Continuous Eye Contact” series have been installed in a range of venues, from a parking lot to an art fair. The Newport Art Museum is a first of its type for the series, set within the historic John N. A. Griswold House, built in the iconic American Stick style. Formerly a private residence, it has a decidedly different air than the typical museum white cube, bringing another dimension to the experience. Under an opulent painted sky full of stars and coffered ceilings, and upon intricate parquet floors, the installation speaks to the artist’s desire to meet people where they are, a desire that lives on.
Installation view of the restorative space designed by Lauren Rottet. Photo: Pernille Loof.
Historically, these participatory sculptures have elicited strong emotional reactions, necessitating time and space to collect oneself and reflect on the experience. Considering this, the museum commissioned Lauren Rottet to design what has been dubbed a restorative space, which functions as an extension of the exhibition itself. Using elements of architecture, interior design, and light, the gallery room invites visitors to rest.
Complementing the exhibition is the debut of a ten-minute documentary in an upstairs gallery space comprised of archival footage of the artist revealing portions of his life and studio practice, narrated with Anspach’s own voice. Also playing is a stop-motion animation he created while attending RISD, underscoring many of the themes that later came to define his practice on the whole.
Installation view of “Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” (2025). Photo: Pernille Loof. Courtesy of the Newport Art Museum.
Part of what makes Aspach’s work so successful is its accessibility. Despite his lofty aspirations for change and the profound conceptual underpinnings of his work, he consistently places the viewer’s experience and understanding at the forefront. No inscrutable performances or nebulous references, the meaning of his work is clear: to unite humanity and save the world, one mind at a time.
Somewhat ironically, Aspach’s ability to achieve this accessibility could be attributed to his doubts about the overall endeavor, which Baldwin says was a recurring topic in their discussions at RISD; doubt in art’s ability to effect change, doubt of audiences’ willingness to open their minds to new ways of thinking, doubt around his own capacity to convey his truth. His faith, however, ultimately outweighed his doubts. “Through these moments of doubt, Bobby always seemed to choose to believe that (as cliché as it sounds and of which he was fully aware) art could change minds,” Baldwin wrote. “He chose to believe and to hope that the work he was making would impact people in meaningful ways. And that is what I would call artistic faith. In this sense, Bobby was one of the most faithful artists I know.”
“Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change” is on view at the Newport Art Museum, 76 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Rhode Island, June 21–September 28, 2025. More

Wars in Iran and Gaza may have distracted some of the attention from the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine, but that conflict rages on, with Russia sending deadly drones into the country and U.S. president Donald Trump criticizing the Group of 7 nations, recently convened in Canada, for expelling Russia after the country annexed Crimea in 2014.
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei certainly hasn’t forgotten, and this fall he will debut a major new installation at a Soviet-era, glass house-style exposition hall in the Ukrainian capital, newly reopened as a cultural venue.
“In this era, being invited to hold an exhibition in Kyiv, the capital of a country at war, I hope to express certain ideas and reflections through my work,” said the artist in press materials. “My artworks are not merely an aesthetic expression but also a reflection of my position as an individual navigating immense political shifts, international hegemonies, and conflicts. This exhibition provides a platform to articulate these concerns. At its core, this exhibition is a dialogue about war and peace, rationality and irrationality.”
Courtesy Ai Weiwei studio.
A metal structure at the heart of the new piece, titled Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White (2025), is made up of spherical forms taken from an earlier Ai work, Divina Proportione (2004–12), itself inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s illustrations for an eponymous book on mathematics. That piece consisted of five-foot-wide orbs made of wood. The spheres, emblematic of ancient ideals of order and rationality, will be encased in fabric with a camouflage pattern, a system of concealment based in animals’ ability to hide themselves, which Ai has explored in his work for years. The camouflage will, in this case, be thinly covered in white paint, which he thinks of as another layer of camouflage. 
“Of course, whenever you cover something there’s still something underneath,” said Ai. “So I give extra meaning to how we’re dealing with reality and which layer of reality we’re dealing with. And is reality just what we are seeing or what we understand?”
The piece was commissioned by Ukrainian nonprofit Ribbon International, which supports arts in Ukraine through exhibitions, commissions, public programs, and grants. 
Pavilion 13, Kyiv, in June 2025 following renovation works by Forma architectural office, commissioned by Ribbon International. Photo: Vitalii Halanzha.
The new work will be unveiled at Pavilion 13, a multidisciplinary art space in Kyiv, housed in a glass exposition hall from 1967 that reopened this month following a renovation led by Forma, an architectural office in the Ukrainian capital, run by Iryna Miroshnykova and Oleksii Petrov. The renovation was also commissioned by Ribbon; Ai’s project is realized in cooperation with Forma.
“Art is something related to humans’ most primitive reactions or emotions, fear or even fantasies or dreams,” said the artist. “Those are always deeply rooted, and it’s more profound than we can ever even understand. I think art is the only way to save humanity from authoritarian and other forms of technical bureaucracy and technical authoritarian push.”
The opening program at Pavilion 13 currently features a site-responsive intervention by Berlin-based artist Sam Lewitt titled Shubin and featuring a film, a neon sign on the building’s facade, and sculptural reconstructions of the pavilion’s original display furniture.
Three Perfectly Proportioned Spheres and Camouflage Uniforms Painted White will be on view at Pavilion 13, 1 Akademika Glushkova Avenue, Kyiv, Ukraine, September 14–November 30, 2025. More

Next month, Aspen Art Museum will kick off its new flagship initiative AIR, which is set to explore the role of art in an increasingly complex world. It won’t lack for guests. To lead its program, the institution is convening a crowd of artists, filmmakers, musicians, designers, technologists, and creative thinkers—among them one Werner Herzog.
Opening July 29, AIR, which encompasses a public festival and a private retreat, is inaugurating things with a rich theme: how the numerous intersections of art and technology are reshaping the world around us. In this, the program takes its cues from the ever-restless Paul Chan, who has spent years programming an A.I. to create a synthetic self-portrait, and physicist Sara Imari Walker, whose boundary-pushing book Life As No One Knows It, on nothing less than the origin of life, gives AIR 2025 its theme.
And AIR is bringing heavyweights. Tapped to lead its series of keynote speeches is Herzog, the German filmmaker long celebrated for his 70-plus features and documentaries that tangle with the extremes of reality, images, and truth. His sizable oeuvre spans the provocative Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Grizzly Man (2005), the meditative Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), and the incisive Into the Abyss (2011). He published his memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, in 2022, and will be collecting a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
Film still from Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982). Photo courtesy of Aspen Art Museum.
Fittingly, Herzog’s keynote at AIR will explore “ecstatic truth,” a kind of insight that surpasses mere facts. The concept has occupied the director for at least two decades—”the factual,” he reflected around 2010, “can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges”—now complicated by an era of artificial intelligence and digital illusion. Besides fueling his forthcoming speech, these ideas will be woven into his upcoming book, The Future of Truth.
“Werner Herzog is one of the most singular voices in cinema and culture—utterly fearless, wildly imaginative, and deeply human,” said Nicola Lees, artistic director and CEO of Aspen Art Museum. “His work doesn’t just challenge how we see the world; it dares us to feel more, to think more expansively, and to embrace the unknown. It’s an absolute honor to celebrate his vision as part of our inaugural festival this summer.”
Maya Lin. Photo: Jesse Frohman.
Herzog joins other keynote speakers at the AIR, namely architect Francis Kéré, who will explore the communal power of public spaces, and artist Maya Lin, who will shed light on how her environmental artworks conjoin landscape and memory.
Elsewhere, AIR’s site-specific art programming will be headlined by Matthew Barney, the avant-gardist whose ideas have taken shape in film, sculpture, and performance. In Aspen, he will unveil a new performance piece titled TACTICAL parallax. It resurfaces and connects motifs from two major bodies of work: Redoubt, his 2018–21 project that unpacks the landscape of myth, and SECONDARY, his 2023 video installation exploring the collision of American sport and violence.
Matthew Barney, Redoubt (2018). Production still. © Matthew Barney, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Hugo Glendinning.
Sculptor Mimi Park, artist Jota Mombaça, and the collaborative duo of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Rafiq Bhatia will also stage works that variously explore the interconnectedness of dreams, sound, body, and nature. Paul Chan, meanwhile, will have his first conversation with his A.I. avatar, during which they’ll discuss false selves and death.
The program will host exchanges between humans, too. Its Dialogues section will see pair-ups such as artist Glenn Ligon and museum director Thelma Golden discussing the role of collaboration in artistic practice; artist Sophia Al Maria and Sara Imari Walker chewing over life beyond our planet; architect Frida Escobedo and curator José Esparza Chong Cuy tackling museum architecture; and artist/writer Aria Dean and art historian Courtney J. Martin confronting the art-historical canon.
Glenn Ligon, Untitled (America/Me) (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
When it debuts, AIR will be the newest event on the annual Aspen Art Week calendar, which counts the Aspen Art Fair, inaugurated last year, and the Aspen Art Museum’s ArtCrush benefit, which this year honors Glenn Ligon, among its highlights. It also coincides with the museum’s exhibitions on Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa, American photographer Sherrie Levine, and Italian visionary Carol Rama, and the unveiling of a new work by British artist Anthea Hamilton.
AIR Festival runs from July 29–August 1, preceded by the AIR Retreat from July 26–28. Registration is now open at airaspen.org. More

In a history of abstract painting dominated by macho, paint-splattered men, Louise Fishman (1939–2021) wanted to stand alone, turning away from the leading school of Abstract Expressionism to develop her own vision colored by her personal identity as a Queer Jewish woman.
Her current show at New York’s Van Doren Waxter spotlights 10 of her later paintings, from 2003 to 2013, their rich colors and deft brushwork informed by a lifetime in the studio. Uniting the works are the titles, all drawn from the verses of American poets Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), reflecting Fishman’s interest in the connection between painting and the written word.
“When I started going through the work to have it appraised, I realized that there was actually a lot of work that had titles from poetry,” the artist’s widow, Ingrid Nyeboe (b. 1946), told me during a tour of the show. “Louise never titled her paintings until after she finished them. It could take days before she found a title, or sometimes even weeks. She would let the painting hang on the wall, and she would look at books or listen to music, or we would just sort of talk about titles. It was a lot of fun, actually.”
The exhibition is part of Nyeboe’s efforts since Fishman’s death to establish her legacy as one of the great artists of the 20th century, the unsung “Queer queen of abstraction.”
Louise Fishman, Glitter of a Being (2005). Photo: courtesy of Van Doren Waxter, New York.
“Louise never really thought of herself as an Abstract Expressionist painter,” Nyeboe said. “She knew that the language that she was wielding had a lot to do with it, but she made it her own. And she pushed the barriers.”
That’s actually quite literal, as you’ll see upon closely examining the unframed canvases in the show.
“Louise Fishman: Always Stand Ajar” at Van Doren Waxter. Photo: courtesy of Van Doren Waxter.
“Her compositions often exceed the kind of physical boundaries of the picture. You kind of read them right off the edge in a way,” gallery cofounder Dorsey Waxter told me. “I look sometimes at the side, and you can see clues about how Louise layered colors, even colors you don’t think are there—but they are!”
The works, done with oil on linen, canvas, or jute, are priced starting at $75,000 each for smaller paintings. The biggest one, the five-foot-wide and seven-and-a-half-foot tall The Crust of Shape, a green and black piece from 2003, is $290,000. (This exceeds Fishman’s auction record of $201,600, set at Christie’s New York in 2022, and the only time the artist has exceeded six figures, according to the Artnet Price Database.)
This is the first Fishman show for the gallery, which began representing her estate in 2024. (After showing for many years with Cheim & Read, Fishman briefly joined Karma, which has locations in New York, Los Angeles, and Maine, in 2020.) But Waxter first met the artist while interning at Nancy Hoffman’s then-new Soho gallery back in 1973.
Louise Fishman, The Crust of Shape (2003). Photo: courtesy of Van Doren Waxter, New York.
“It was a very riotous moment for women in the world of making art,” Waxter said, recalling consciousness-raising meetings with Fishman and other feminist artists and performers held at the gallery.
Born in Philadelphia to Jewish parents, Fishman came from a family of women artists. In 2012, she had a show at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum pairing her work with that of her mother, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman (1916–2013), and her paternal aunt, Razel Kapustin (1908–1968).
An avid basketball player in her youth, Fishman considered pursuing the sport as an adult before turning to the canvas.
Louise Fishman. Photo: by Nina Subin, courtesy of Van Doren Waxter.
“Her understanding of the rectangle really comes out of that game, because she always knew where her body was in relation to the edges,” Nyeboe said. “That dream of playing basketball taught her something.”
Although Fishman never achieved mainstream fame, her work is the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pittsburg’s Carnegie Museum of Art, Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum.
The artist studied at the Philadelphia College of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Tyler School of Fine Arts in Elkins, Penn., before earning an MFA at the University of Illinois, Champaign, in 1965. That year, Fishman moved to New York City, taking a day job as a legal proofreader while immersing herself in the downtown art scene.
An encounter at the storied Cedar Bar disabused any notions, however, of joining the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist scene.
Louise Fishman’s New York studio. Photo: courtesy of Ingrid Nyeboe.
“My friends and I were sitting in a booth towards the back when I noticed a booth full of famous artists closer to the front of the restaurant. Milton Resnick motioned to me to come his booth. I was very excited,” Fishman once said in an interview. “I walked up to his booth only to discover he wanted me to sit on his lap. At that moment I understood the sad truth—I would always be an outsider to that community.”
But that realization also led to freedom for the artist, who had come out as a lesbian as a teenager in the ’50s.
“I felt that Abstract Expressionist work was an appropriate language for me as a queer,” Fishman said in an interview for the catalog of her 2016 retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y. “It was a hidden language, on the radical fringe, a language appropriate to being separate.”
“At some point, Louise felt that what she was doing was very driven by the expectations of the of the masculine tradition, so she stopped painting,” Nyeboe said. “She took her canvases that she had painted on and cut them and cut them up in little strips and sewed them back together in various configurations.”
Louise Fishman’s painting tools in her New York studio. Photo: courtesy of Ingrid Nyeboe.
And when she did paint—she returned to the medium after a couple of years—Fishman didn’t limit herself to brushes. She used spatulas, masonry trowels, knives, and other tools to apply paint to canvas. (Nyeboe has preserved the artist’s studio as it was at the time of the artist’s death.)
“Louise was willing to risk everything when she was in the studio—she tried never to repeat what she’d done before. And she was always interested in what the paint was able to do, what she was able to do with the paint on the surface,” Nyeboe added.
Fishman and Nyeboe knew each other for decades before getting involved romantically, as Fishman was a close friend of Nyeboe’s first wife, the art and dance critic Jill Johnston (1929–2010).
“Jill was always following Louise’s work and taking me around to her gallery shows,” Nyeboe recalled. “When Jill died, Louise just sort of stepped into my life, intensely. We were both equally surprised at what happened.”
Louise Fishman, Loose the Flood (2009). Photo: courtesy of Van Doren Waxter, New York.
Nyeboe and Fishman’s marriage was also a creative partnership, and in 2014, they founded the Louise Fishman Foundation with an eye toward the artist’s legacy planning. Now, with Fishman gone, Nyeboe hopes her work will speak for the late artist.
“Louise’s idea about making a painting was born out of her instincts about painting, not about a place or a landscape or something out in the real world,” Waxter said. “It was really about just her and the paint.”
“Louise Fishman: Always Stand Ajar” is on view at Van Doren Waxter, 23 East 73rd Street, Second Floor, New York, New York, April 10–June 27, 2025.  More

On a scorching Thursday afternoon outside MoMA PS1, Lady Pink is in beast mode.
The graffiti legend is in the midst of painting a mural at the museum’s entrance—a surreal composition of a large stone foot perched next to an elevated subway platform, with a 7 train whooshing past and the Brooklyn skyline in the background. When I stopped by, Lady Pink had completed the mural’s base with brushes and was adding detail with spray paint. Her two assistants were finessing the foot, while she, perched on an elevated platform, was adding black shading to a subway car. Her concentration was unwavering.
“In the middle of work, I need to focus, focus, focus,” she told me in an earlier conversation over Zoom. “I’m in beast mode. I am moving. And it’s very challenging to be out on the street. When time is up, time is up; what you didn’t get done, it’s not getting done.”
Lady Pink working on the MoMA PS1 mural commission, June 12, 2025. Photo: Min Chen.
When completed and unveiled June 26, Lady Pink’s artwork will mark MoMA PS1’s inaugural mural commission, a new program that will invite artists to create outdoor works on the museum’s public-facing walls every year. For this first round, proposals poured in from more than 20 local organizations and partners, before Lady Pink was chosen for her “deep ties to Queens and our city,” said Connie Butler, the museum’s director.
“We’re excited to see our locality embedded in Lady Pink’s stunning commission, which will engage both our neighbors and passersby alike with its vivid imagery and synthesis of local histories,” she added in a statement.
Lady Pink’s art supplies, June 12, 2025. Photo: Min Chen.
The artist is indeed woven deep into the city’s graffiti history. Born in Ecuador and bred in Queens, Lady Pink began leaving her striking tags on subways cars from 1979, becoming the rare female graffiti writer in a male-dominated field (she, of course, shows up in Charlie Ahearn’s seminal 1982 film Wild Style). Her flair also showed up on her fine art canvases, in dreamlike scenes where an urban edge meets a pastel-hued romanticism. Today, her work is in the collections of institutions from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York to the Groningen Museum in the Netherlands.
Lady Pink’s connection to PS1 and its surrounds goes back decades as well. At age 17, she was included in the museum’s 1981 “New York/New Wave” group exhibition on downtown art, which featured works by some 100 artists including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Futura 2000, Maripol, and Andy Warhol. Returning to the museum, she said, was a “wonderful feeling.”
Lady Pink and her team working on the MoMA PS1 mural commission, June 12, 2025. Photo: Min Chen.
More significantly, the institution itself also once faced iconic graffiti spot 5Pointz. The former factory’s facade was transformed into an evolving outdoor art mecca by artists—Meres, Tracy 168, and Blade, among many others—who left behind tags and murals between the 1990s and 2010s. The structure was controversially demolished in 2013 to make way for a luxury development.
Revisiting the site where she too once painted murals, Lady Pink told me, entailed a “roller coaster of emotions.”
“It’s awful, it’s nice, it’s wonderful, it’s horrible,” she said. “It’s all of these things. I used to love that place, but now, I hate being there, because that building is no longer there.”
Lady Pink working on the MoMA PS1 mural commission, June 12, 2025. Photo: Min Chen.
Her mural duly pays tribute to the lost site. Derived from a previous painting, the composition’s concrete foot is loosely based on 5Pointz and comes adorned with the tags of artists who had worked on the building’s facade, mixed in with nods to graffiti pioneers. Zephyr and Eva 62 are represented, as are Mitch 77 and Vinny 3YB. “I kind of pay homage to the originators in that way,” she said.
For Lady Pink, her mural project at PS1 could help bring back some of the creative spirit that once thrived at 5Pointz. The site, she recalled, was where “folks from all over the world would come and paint at no charge, no expense, and no funding.” And the walls surrounding PS1, apart from the one holding Lady Pink’s new mural, stand invitingly bare.
Lady Pink, Foundations (2025) at MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Paneccasio, courtesy of MoMA PS1.
“I do wish that all the walls around PS1 were painted as 5Pointz used to be. That sheer energy is just so unique to New York,” she said. “I think that PS1 has the opportunity to expand and perhaps grow with that. This is just one wall, but the minute you say, ‘have a go at it,’ artists will beautify that neighborhood.”
“Lady Pink: MoMA PS1 Plaza Mural” is on view at MoMA PS1, 22–25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, New York, from June 26. More