Eliana Willis

Most people consider flies vermin, pests they are loath to see in the house. For Los Angeles artist John Knuth (b. 1978), they’ve become collaborators—and no fewer than one million of them helped create the paintings for his current show, “Hot Garden,” at New York’s Hollis Taggart Downtown.
It was a dirty windowsill that first inspired Knuth to start thinking about flies in the context of art, way back in 2005. Flies digest their food through regurgitation, leaving behind tiny specks wherever they land—markings that you may have overlooked in your own home, but that fortuitously captured Knuth’s eye.
“I realized that each of those flyspecks is a painting. That’s a deposit of a pigment on a surface,” he told me.
Inspired by the artistic potential of these humble creatures, Knuth set out to explore it, embarking on a creative journey that would change the course of his career—and forge a veritable army of tiny assistants.
John Knuth, Red Sky in the Morning (2025). Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown, New York.
How Do Flies Make Art? 
Visitors to the exhibition were able to see Knuth’s process with the flies for themselves. Inside a custom-built enclosure in the gallery, there were hundreds of thousands of insects on hand for the opening, buzzing and busily working their magic on a suite of small sculptures.
“It was such a great night,” gallery partner Paul Efstathiou told me. “People were freaking out.”
“They added so much energy to the show,” Knuth agreed. “There’s a real awe moment to it, seeing that many flies in one place.”
Flies finishing the “sculpture garden” in “John Knuth: Hot Garden” at Hollis Taggart Downtown. Photo: courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown, New York.
The flies, whose lifespan is just a few weeks, eventually died out—Knuth had to go back to L.A., and Efstathiou was not up to raising a new generation from maggots on his own—but the art they left behind speaks to Knuth’s unique process.
Knuth orders fly larvae by the thousand, letting them hatch in environments strategically stocked with canvases. (He spent thousands of dollars on the flies for this show; the finished works are priced between $700 and $20,000.)
John Knuth, Hot Garden (2025). Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown, New York.
Knuth has returned to this kind of work periodically over the past 20 years—especially after the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art approached him in 2013 about doing a video on the fly paintings for its still-nascent YouTube channel. It got over 100,000 views, a big viral moment by the standards of the day, and one that led to multiple gallery shows and even landed Knuth a mention in a book, Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects.
“I can say that moment in 2013 is what really made my career happen,” Knuth said. “The fly paintings literally helped me buy my house.”
John Knuth with his flies, working on two paintings. Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber.
Art Responding to Personal Tragedy—and Climate Crisis
Now, those same paintings are helping Knuth; his wife, interior designer Taylor Jacobson; and their five-and-a-half-year-old son, Mateo, as they look to move forward in the months following the Eaton Fire. The family was among the thousands of people in Altadena, many of them artists, who lost their homes in the blaze.
“The hard part was losing my entire history and losing my entire archive,” Knuth said. “Every artist has this dream that one day the Hammer or whatever will do our retrospective, right? So it was crushing, losing 25 years of work.”

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The paintings and sculptures in “Hot Garden” are the first that he’s made in the aftermath of the disaster, a kind of literal rebirth for the artist in the wake of a climate change-fueled disaster.
A particularly hopeful moment comes in a work that incorporates a painting by Knuth’s son, who has grown up making art side by side with his dad. Titled Mateo Knuth, the best painter in the family, the work is a sweet tribute to their relationship, melding childhood innocence and the beauty of nature.
John Knuth, Mateo Knuth, the best painter in the family (2025). Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown, New York.
The “sculpture garden” that the flies helped paint on site at the gallery includes fragments pulled from the ashes of Knuth’s home from his collection of work by other artists. His friend, Chet Glaze, even contributed a new work, a small wooden pyramid clad in sheets of copper. And then Knuth also fabricated miniature versions of famous pieces in nearby museums that were threatened by the fires, including The Thinker by Auguste Rodin and Little Dancer by Edgar Degas.
“The Getty Villa was on the edge of burning. The fires reached two miles from the Norton Simon. None of those spaces are safe,” Knuth said. “We think of museums as being forever. And these fires taught me that nothing is forever.”
John Knuth, Edgar Degas, The Fourteen Year Old Dancer (2025). Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown, New York.
Another piece in the show is a fly painting executed on a copy of the New York Times article interviewing Altadena artists about the destruction of their homes in the fire. The headline quotes Knuth—“This Is Our Pompeii”—but the text is partially obscured by a plethora of tiny red and blue flyspecks. (It’s one of two works in the show that have been purchased by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.)
A large diptych, titled January 7, also alludes to the date of the fire, and is inspired by the ominous clouds of smoke in the sky as Altadena went up in flames. The artist thinks of these paintings as “distorted landscapes.”
John Knuth, This is our Pompeii (2025). Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown, New York.
The Surprising Beauty of Fly Vomit
Harnessing the power of flies in the name of art took some trial and error. For one thing, it’s almost inevitable that the flies escape from Knuth’s makeshift painting studios.
The artist has lost deposits on studio spaces due to infestations, and his wife isn’t all too keen on the process either. “It drives her crazy,” he said. (Thankfully, Knuth has developed a more effective enclosure system, keeping the fly colonies inside a large camping tent while they work.)
John Knuth’s fly painting set up. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
But even more important than controlling the environment was perfecting the paintings themselves.
“The first paintings I made with the flies, they’re all brown. I was feeding them Taco Bell and McDonald’s,” Knuth said. “After a while I realized, those are cool conceptual art pieces, but they’re not great paintings. They’re intriguing objects, but they don’t entice your eye.”
“John Knuth: Hot Garden” at Hollis Taggart Downtown. Photo: courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown, New York.
So Knuth began feeding his flies acrylic paint mixed with sugar water. The results were far more vibrant and visually interesting. (And, he’s pretty sure, still won’t get him into trouble with PETA, as his flies are living normal lifespans and remain sexually active.)
“I’ve really pushed the fly works to this point of being transcendent, beautiful paintings,” Knuth said of the resulting works, which he considers a kind of abstract pointillism.
John Knuth, Untitled (2025). Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown, New York.
Each piece is a true collaboration, an underpainting made by Knuth complemented by a flyspeck overlay, sometimes made by several generations in varying colors, the density of marks radiating out from the carefully placed food sources.
“All the compositions are very planned out,
 very intentional,” Knuth said. “There are some unknowns in terms of how the flies are going to react, but I do a lot of sketches and preparatory paintings to create each of the paintings. So they’re not just random.”
John Knuth, The Spark (2025). Photo: Evan Walsh, courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown, New York.
His dream would be to turn the entirety of the spiraling, white-walled rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum into one giant fly painting—created in front of visitors, with museum-goers walking through swarms of flies making their mark on the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed landmark.
“I live with the flies,” Knuth said. “I’d like other people to have that experience.”
“John Knuth: The Hot Garden” is on view at Hollis Taggart Downtown, 109 Norfolk Street, New York, New York, through August 16, 2025. More

When the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) opened its cavernous East London Storehouse in May of this year, it promised visitors a radical new cultural experience, offering an up-close view of conservators at work and immediate access to its archive of more than half a million works.
Soon afterwards, Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, stopped by V&A East for a tour, taking in the largest Picasso in the world and watching on as museum staff photographed collection items for the online archives. Middleton, who studied history of art at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, praised the museum’s transparency and the opportunity for the public to access the museum’s “historic” and “eclectic” collection.
It now appears that the royal V&A patron may also have been scoping out some objects to place within her very own exhibition, titled “Makers and Creators,” which the museum calls a mini display. Middleton has played curator selecting nine works that span art forms and the globe.
Installation view of “Makers and Curators,” a mini display curated by Kate Middleton at V&A East. Photo: David Parry / V&A.
Front and center in Middleton’s gridwall and glass display is a fairy costume designed by Oliver Messel for the Royal Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty. It was Messel’s most enduring production running for 15 years with the fairy costumes a mélange of English, Spanish, and French styles from the 17th and 18th centuries. The tutu and its accompanying headdress features morning glories, Messel’s favorite flower, with their flowers and leaves woven together with golden-brown thread for branches.
Resting against the back wall is a hand quilted bedcover that was made in Wales in the 1830s. Nearby is A Woman Holding a Marguerite (ca. 1880–90), a painting by the American-born, Paris-trained painter George Henry Boughton. Also known as La Penserosa, “the thoughtful one” in Italian, it’s one half of a pair that explores the introverted and extroverted sides of a woman’s character. Here, Boughton presents innocence, faith, and curiosity in the form of a modestly dressed figure contemplating a daisy. A fun visual play arrives directly below with the sculpted stone hands of Clemence Dane, a pioneering 20th-century English novelist and playwright.
The mid-20th century sculpture by Clemence Dane alongside George Henry Boughton’s painting, on view in “Makers and Curators,” curated by Kate Middleton at V&A East. Photo: David Parry / V&A.
Below are two items related to Beatrix Potter, the children’s illustrator and author best-known for creating the world of Peter Rabbit. The first is a small watercolor and the second is a childhood photograph album that belonged to her father, turned to a spread of family photographs.
Rounding out “Makers and Creators” is a Qing dynasty porcelain vase crafted in the Imperial kilns of Jingdezhen, China, and a set of 15th-century earthenware tiles from a church in southern England. Resting outside is a three-panel screen crafted by William Morris’s eponymous design firm in the first decade of the 20th century drawing out the flowers from Middleton’s selection.
The Princess of Wales visiting the V&A East Storehouse in early June. Photo: Getty Images.
“A collection of objects can create a narrative, both about our past and as inspiration for the future,” Middleton wrote in the text accompanying wall the mini display. “This display celebrates our past makers and creators and illustrators how much historic objects can influence fashion, design, film, art, and creativity today.”
This is far from Middleton’s first curatorial outing. In 2022, she selected a group of images for the major exhibition “Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography” at London’s National Portrait Gallery, which featured in a Patron Trail. Earlier this year, she launched an interactive installation at the same museum, intended to support the social and emotional development of young children. More

British cuisine is often the butt of jokes, but one thing the Brits do so well that it’s spread throughout the world is fish and chips—battered and fried fish, served with deep-fried potatoes. But as the BBC reported in 2009, the number of “chippies,” the shops where Brits buy what is often considered the U.K.’s national dish, had dropped to about 10,000 from a high of about 35,000 in 1929. And by 2023, NPR would report that in the aftermath of the pandemic and high inflation, shops were closing all over the U.K., and “one of Britain’s favorite foods is fast turning from a staple into a luxury.”
So there’s no small dimension of nostalgia to the newest project by British artist Lucy Sparrow, who on August 1 opens Bourdon Street Chippy, a recreation of a fish-and-chips spot, filled to the brim with some 65,000 hand-stitched items, from the fish and chips, to the refrigerators for drinks, to the baskets the cook would use to immerse the food in oil, to tiny paper packets of salt and the photos of celebrity customers hanging on the wall. It all takes place at Lyndsey Ingram, on Bourdon Street in London’s posh Mayfair neighborhood.
In the past, Sparrow has sewn together a McDonald’s restaurant, a New York City bodega, a supermarket, and a famer’s market, the latter featuring English musician Fatboy Slim slinging groceries. This time around, the artist and a handful of studio assistants labored for eight months to lovingly recreate every item in the chippy—down to the 15 distinct chip shapes in five colors.
Items from Lucy Sparrow, The Bourdon St Chippy (2025) at Lyndsey Ingram, London. Photo: Alun Callender for Jo Brooks PR Ltd.
“It’s definitely my favorite takeaway food,” said the artist in a video chat from the shop, decked out in a custom Bourdon Street Chippy apron and baseball cap. In her view, the meal is not as good anywhere else in the world. It’s funny, of course, to put this tiny shop cheek-by-jowl with art galleries like Hauser and Wirth and David Zwirner, and auctioneers Christie’s and Sotheby’s. But then, you can buy the offerings at Bourdon Street Chippy, too. “You’ll pay £5 [about $6] for a salt sachet up to £50,000 [approximately $66,400] for the drinks fridge, and a large fish and chips is £450 [about $600].” 
Sparrow took me on a quick video tour of the store, pointing out the corkboard where people put up flyers advertising services like dog-walking; the celeb photos of a very British bunch including Michael Caine, Judy Dench, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Nigella Lawson, George Michael, Alan Rickman, and Amy Winehouse; the seated section of the shop and the takeaway counter; a whole wall of sauces; and health and safety posters.
Lucy Sparrow at The Bourdon St Chippy at Lyndsey Ingram, London. Photo: Alun Callender for Jo Brooks PR Ltd.
Food has become distinctly personal for the artist in a new way since she revealed this summer that she has struggled with anorexia since her teen years. 
“I never thought there was a connection because I was so deep in it,” said Sparrow, though others saw it right away. “When I first arrived at getting help, people said, ‘You’re an artist and you make things out of food.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s my art! That has nothing to do with my illness!’ And four or five weeks into treatment, the penny dropped. Having an eating disorder is a very obsessive illness. There’s a reason why perfectionists fall victim to it.”
Sparrow was even concerned that if she treated the eating disorder, she might not be able to be the same kind of artist. “I can still make the work,” she said. “But I have to eat to have the energy to make the work and not the other way around.” More

Marking the final flourish of aristocratic splendor before the upheaval of World War I, the Edwardian era is remembered for its opulence, leisure, and devotion to style. A new exhibition at Buckingham Palace’s King’s Gallery, “The Edwardians: Age of Elegance,” captures that gilded moment through more than 300 works drawn from the Royal Collection.
Edward VII, his wife Queen Alexandra, and their successors King George V and Queen Mary, were two of Britain’s all-time most fashionable royal couples. As well as throwing endless parties, concerts, and sporting events, they expressed their elevated tastes through the acquisition of hordes of art, fashion, and jewelry. Each gallery practically glitters with all of the expected treasures, including tiaras and bedazzled opera glasses, sumptuous ball gowns, gilt porcelain, silverware, and adorable Fabergé animals cut from an array of precious stones, like lapis lazuli, sapphire, and ruby. Ceremonial and other handcrafted items from across the globe are included courtesy of king and queen’s international tours to British colonies, including Malta, the Cook Islands, New Zealand, and India.
Portraits of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, installed in “The Edwardians: Age of Elegance,” at King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace in London through November 23, 2025. Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
As well as the expected stately portraits by leading painters like John Singer Sargent and Philip de László, the exhibition reveals the monarchs’ support for a wide range of their era’s leading lights, including Oscar Wilde, Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and important women artists and actors like Rosa Bonheur and Sarah Bernhardt.
Installation view of “The Edwardians: Age of Elegance,” at King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace in London through November 23, 2025. Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
On account of being housed in Buckingham Palace and drawn from the U.K.’s Royal Collection, the exhibition centers heavily on the the Edwardian royals, telling a story about the early 20th century that stops short at old-school splendor and excludes any mention of the avant-garde. It also evades any responsibility to apply a critical lens on Britain’s colonial past. However, visitors seeking to be dazzled by opulence need look no further.
Here are five highlights that are sure to impress.
John Singer Sargent, Louise, Duchess of Connaught (1908)
John Singer Sargent, Louise, Duchess of Connaught (1908). Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
One hundred years after Sargent’s death in 1925, he remains a firm favorite among art lovers, as evidenced by one celebratory blockbuster show currently on view at the Met and set to travel to the Musée d’Orsay this fall. King Edward VII was certainly a fan, describing Sargent as “the most distinguished portrait painter in England.” His brush was so coveted and his list of commissions so exhausting that, in around 1907, Sargent retired from painting large-scale portraits. This 1908 image of the King’s sister-in-law, Louise, Duchess of Connaught, was one of his very last. Its sense of character and richly opulent fabrics are hallmarks of the Sargent’s style.
After 1910, Sargent occasionally accepted commissions for charcoal sketches that could be easily completed during one two-hour sitting. An example of Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, from 1920 is also included in the exhibition.

Rosa Bonheur, A Lion’s Head (c.1870-91)
Rosa Bonheur, A Lion’s Head (c.1870-91). Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
In the years before their coronation, when Edward and Alexandra were still Prince and Princess of Wales, the couple had plenty of time to develop their artist interests. The keen collectors sought to fill the walls of their two residences, Marlborough House in London and Sandringham House in Norfolk. One of their particular passions was paintings of animals, so they leapt at the chance to acquire a work from the celebrated French artist Rosa Bonheur’s estate sale in 1900.
This painting of a lion seen in profile is suitably majestic and calls to mind the dignity usually afforded important human subjects. Bonheur is one of the most famous women artists of the 19th century and her works were exhibited in the Paris’s most prestigious venues, including the Musée d’Orsay and the Salon of 1848.

Frederic Leighton, Nanna (Pavonia) (1859)
Frederic Leighton, Nanna (Pavonia) (1859). Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
Edward and Alexandra collected several paintings by the English painter Frederic Leighton, of which Nanna (Pavonia), featuring his preferred model Anna Risi, is the standout. The future king wrote about the experience of encountering the work at Leighton’s studio in Rome in 1859, when he was just 17 years old, recalling how he “admired three beautiful portraits of a Roman woman.” He hung the painting in his college rooms in Frewin Hall while studying at the University of Oxford.
The Prince of Wales later paired the work with another Leighton painting in the exhibition, Bianca (1862). Though it is equally elegant and classicizing, this work is much lighter and less brooding. Leighton’s academic style was highly sought after in his lifetime and in 1878 he became president of London’s Royal Academy for nearly two decades.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, God Speed (c.1893)
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, God Speed (c. 1893). Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
The London-based Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema was another royal favorite who was also Edward and Alexandra’s friend and artistic advisor. He even assisted with the with decorations for the king’s coronation in 1902 and later, in 1908, recalled how “the golden hours I had the honor of passing at [the royal residence of] Sandringham cannot be forgotten.”
This painting, in which a woman scatters roses like confetti in an imagined Mediterranean setting, was a gift celebrating the wedding of the future King George V to Queen Mary in 1893. Alma-Tadema was hugely popular in Victorian Britain for gracefully decadent scenes that were heavily inspired by the classical world,

Fabergé, Norfolk Sow (1907-9)
Fabergé, Norfolk Sow (1907-9). Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
Edward and Alexandra’s strong links with European royalty also influenced the breadth of their collection. Alexandra had been born a Danish princess in Copenhagen and after her sister, Dagmar, married Alexander III, Emperor of Russia, she introduced the couple to the Russian jeweller Fabergé. Their patronage hugely boosted the firm’s popularity in Britain. Several exceptional pieces are on display, including an Art Nouveau cigarette case decorated with a diamond snake biting its tail, lavish photo frames, and a group of animal figurines, including a pigeon, a Norfolk Black turkey, and this Norfolk sow. It was made in 1907-9 from aventurine quartz and rose diamond.
“The Edwardians: Age of Elegance” is on view through November 23 at the King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London. More

How apt that an exhibition exploring Bob Dylan’s engagement with political and social justice should land in New York’s Greenwich Village. It was here, after all, where the musician lived and worked in the 1960s, and where he emerged with his first politically charged folk songs. They were numbers that aligned him—then and forever—with the era’s burgeoning civil rights and anti-war movements. “I’m just writing it,” he said in 1962, “as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.”
Opening in August at New York University’s Gallatin Galleries, “How Many Roads: Bob Dylan and His Changing Times, 1961–1964” revisits how the winds of change and protest intersected with (and inspired) Dylan’s early career. The show, which originates from the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, brings together a host of archival material and nine newly created documentary films that explore the songwriter’s response to current events.
Town Hall flyer, 1963. Courtesy of American Song Archives.
“The exhibit centers on Dylan’s music as a lens through which to view some of the most defining events of the 20th century,” curator Mark Davidson said in a statement. “The early ’60s were a time of rapid change for America, and Dylan paced alongside, documenting.”
These changes were spurred on by campaigns for desegregation, organizations around fair housing and voter registration, student protests, and marches demanding meaningful civil rights laws. Dylan registered these events in piercing compositions that, as he wrote in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One, “didn’t come gently to the shore.”
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform at a rally during the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Photo: Rowland Scherman / National Archive / Newsmakers.
“Paths of Victory” was a paean to civil rights marchers, and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” mused on the nuclear threat, while “Masters of War” hit out at war profiteers. Other songs chronicled the racially motivated killings of Emmett Till, Hattie Carroll, and Medgar Evers. His most enduring folk songs arrived in the form of 1962’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and 1964’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which were less topical but universal in meaning.
The exhibition weaves the decade’s upheavals with Dylan’s music. Among the objects on view is rare footage of the 1963 voter registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the historic March on Washington (where Dylan and Joan Baez performed), along with photographs and ephemera from the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, during Dylan’s first visit to the event (where he arrived, curiously, with a bullwhip).
Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, Newport Folk Festival, July 28, 1963. Photo: Daryl Matthews. Courtesy of American Song Archives.
Fellow musicians who figured in Dylan’s early career—including Baez, Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, and Len Chandler—will also be spotlit, as well as publications centered on topical songs and the protest movement, such as Broadsheet.
“The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s is an important part of our national consciousness,” Davidson told Tulsa World when the exhibition opened at the Bob Dylan Center, “and we have a unique ability to talk about that story through the songs that Dylan was inspired to write during those years.”
Carnegie Hall flyer, 1961. Courtesy of American Song Archives.
This phase of the music icon’s trajectory was recently adapted for the big screen in A Complete Unknown (2024), which starred Timothée Chalamet as a young Dylan. The film dramatized the songwriter’s time within New York’s folk circles as he rose through and then outgrew the protest movement and the traditional folk genre. Chalamet clinched a Golden Globe award for his work on the film.
The NYU show, part of the school’s new Arts and Impact initiative, is complemented by a guided walk through Greenwich Village on September 20. The route will take participants through the neighborhood’s sites and locations that are central to Dylan lore—Great Jones Street, Washington Square Park, the Chelsea Hotel—before concluding at iconic folk haunt the Bitter End.
“How Many Roads: Bob Dylan and His Changing Times, 1961-1964” is on view at the Gallatin Galleries, 1 Washington Place, New York, August 25–October 15. More

Tucked in the northern reaches of the Bronx is an art garden oasis that many New Yorkers don’t even know about.
Wave Hill, a 28-acre 19th-century estate in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, crowns an overlook on the Hudson River with views onto the Palisades cliffs in New Jersey. Home to a resplendent botanical garden and two houses, the estate, which was gifted to the City of New York in 1960, today serves as both a garden and a cultural art center. Temporary exhibitions are hosted in the Glyndor House Gallery, a 1927 home turned contemporary art venue; Wave Hill is also home to an artist residency.
Sara Jimenez , Folding Field (detail) (2025) commissioned by Wave Hill for the exhibition Trees, we breathe , 2025, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Stefan Hagen.
This year marks Wave Hill’s 60th anniversary as a green space open to the public, and this hidden art gem is marking its diamond anniversary with four contemporary art exhibitions that explore the rich interconnectedness of nature and creativity.
Wave Hill’s History
Wave Hill is a New York City hidden gem with vivid history. Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and even Arturo Toscanini have stayed on its grounds.
Wave Hill, as it exists today, is the outcome of the changing tides of New York history. The first Wave Hill House was a 1843 mansion built for lawyer William Lewis Morris and his wife Mary Elizabeth Babcock, and their seven children, as a rural escape from the city. It is thought that Babcock may have given Wave Hill its name. After Babcock’s death in 1851, the family returned to the city, and by 1866, the property was owned by the publisher William Henry Appleton, who expanded the house in several stages and established gardens on the property.
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, What we hold in time’s tender keeping  (2025). Installationview. Commissioned for the Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill. Courtesy of the artist.Photo: Stefan Hagen.
He brought some of the most famed guests to his summer property.  Theodore Roosevelt’s family rented Wave Hill during the summers of 1870 and 1871, when he was still a child. Mark Twain leased it from 1901 to 1903 and wrote to his daughter of the property, “This dining-room is a paradise, with the flooding sunshine, the fire of big logs, the white expanse of cushioned snow and the incomparable river… And how the stormy winds do blow, as the sailor ballad says.”
Sarah Ahmad, Fractured Alchemy (2024) (Triptych) (walls) and Carlie Trosclair, Woodland Terrains (2022) (floor), on view in “Trees, we breathe at Wave Hill, 2025. All works courtesy of the artists. Photo: Stefan Hagen. Courtesy of Wave Hill.
In 1903, George Walbridge Perkins, a businessman and politician, purchased the property and gave Wave Hill much of the shape and mission it holds today. He expanded Wave Hill, purchasing an adjacent property, home to the house today known as Glyndor (it was rebuilt in 1927 following a fire). Perkins added extensive landscaping and made major additions, including a three-story subterranean building that housed a bowling alley and recreation hall, and is today the grounds Ecology building. Perkins was a progressive who devoted himself in retirement to a long list of causes.  After his death, his wife, Evelina Ball, continued this legacy, ultimately deeding the property and its extensive grounds to the City of New York. Today, Wave Hill is a New York City designated landmark. It opened to the public in 1965 after extensive conservation.
Wave Hill Today 
In the 60 years since its opening, Wave Hill has become at once an oasis in the city, a case-study in urban conservation, horticulture, and biodiversity, and a platform for artists exploring the intersection of art, science, community, and nature. Currently, Wave Hill hosts a circulating roster of artist residencies as well as curated exhibitions.
Andrea Bowers, Don’t Let Our Children Inherit Tree Stumps Coffee Table Library (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery. Photo: Stefan Hagen. Courtesy of Wave Hill.
On view now is the group exhibition “Trees, we breathe,” which brings together works by artists including Sarah Ahmad, Andrea Bowers, Sara Jimenez, Yoko Ono, and Rose B. Simpson, among many others. The exhibition spans both galleries in the Glyndor House and expands onto the grounds of the property. The exhibition examines trees’ unique communication systems and ancient histories; trees emerge here as more than objects of majesty and beauty but as wise beings who bear witness to human history and folly, deserving of honor.
Sonja John, Floral Larceny (2025). installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Stefan Hagen.
In the sunroom of the Glyndor House, the work of two of the garden’s artist residents is on view. Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya presents “What we hold in time’s tender keeping”,  which centers on a suspended, spirit-house-inspired canopy that includes crowd-sourced objects in a vivid depiction of community storytelling. On view beside this is Sonja John’s dazzling ‘Floral Larceny’ an installation that blends botanical imagery and imagery from the artist’s family archives, to create stained glass-like mylar panels mimicking breeze block motifs—linking ecology, diaspora, and personal memory. Lastly, Wave Hill invites visitors to soak in views of the grounds by making use of ‘You’re Soaking in It!’, an interactive sculpture by SuRan Song and William M. Weis III. The work unfolds into a hybrid bed-stage and asks ethical questions surrounding sleeping in public and the dreams each of us possesses.
There’s much more in store, too, as this summer, Wave Hill will also be hosting a range of other public programming that celebrate its unique history as an oasis of art and nature in New York City. More

Earlier this year, a woman in Pennsylvania bought a nude charcoal sketch for $12 at a local art auction. Something about the depicted woman’s downward gaze, the hang of flesh around her waist seemed familiar, and so she got in touch with an appraiser. “Congratulations,” they responded—she’d snagged a Pierre-Auguste Renoir drawing. It may now be worth six figures.
The story of work by a celebrated artist being unwittingly rediscovered is hardly uncommon, but in the case of a Renoir drawing, it’s somewhat telling: it’s a part of his practice that’s been largely overlooked by collectors and curators alike. In fact, the last time a show dedicated to Renoir’s works on paper was staged, it was 1921 and the one-time Impressionist was only two years dead.
This fall, the Morgan Museum and Library is breaking the dry spell with “Renoir Drawings,” which as advertised will bring together more than 100 drawings, pastels, watercolors, and prints by the 19th- and 20th-century artist.
Auguste Renoir, View of a Park (1885 to 1890). Photo: Morgan Library and Museum.
One reason for the lack of attention paid to Renoir’s drawings may simply be the preponderance of his paintings. Renoir lived long and worked continuously; conservative estimates suggest he produced around 4,000 paintings, spanning his Impressionist forays alongside Monet et al, before enjoying various stints channeling Classicism, Rubens, Titian, florid 18th-century French art, and his own kind of modernism in later life experiments. There is, in short, much to pick through. A premise of the Morgan show is that the drawings can help us understand these phases—except, perhaps, that fabled decade when Renoir painted boats and bathers en plein air and without preliminary sketches.
“Unlike Degas or Cezanne, Renoir’s use of drawing was episodic and only quite recently has his corpus of works on paper been catalogued,” Colin Bailey, the show’s curator, said over email, noting that there may be as many of 1,000 works on paper, some of which have not yet been located. Renoir’s early innovation may have been to throw sense and intuition directly onto the canvas, but he would return to drawing in more measured times. “Having trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in the early 1860s, he always regarded drawing as foundational and we see this particularly in his return to drawing in the late 1870s and 1880s.”
Bailey, who is enjoying his tenth year as the Morgan’s director, has been working on Renoir for three decades and has seen the institution add to its collection of Renoir works on paper. Nonetheless, the show has necessitated major loans, including from the MFA Boston, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Vienna’s Albertina Museum, and most numerously from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which has been a collaborative partner on the exhibition and will go on to stage “Renoir Drawings” from March to July in 2026.
Auguste Renoir, Study for The Judgement of Paris (1908). Photo: The Phillips Collection.
Auguste Renoir and Richard Guino, The Judgment of Paris (1914). Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
Organized thematically, the show will cover Renoir’s academic studies, sketches of modern life, and portraits, both formal and casual. At its most literal, the exhibition will reunite Renoir’s finished works with their preparatory drawings; here, the Musée d’Orsay provides two key works: Dance in the Country (1883) and The Judgment of Paris (1914). In the first, we see Renoir tiptoeing away from Impressionism in a style of greater clarity. The painting is accompanied by studies that see him testing out background details and just how joyful his female dancer should be. The second belongs to the sculptural works Renoir made alongside Richard Guino in the early 20th century. Accompanying chalk drawings show Renoir working over the choreography of the classical scene.
Auguste Renoir, Dancers (1883). Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
Auguste Renoir, Study for Dancers (1883). Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.
One highlight promises to be the presentation of The Great Bathers (1884–87), on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and placed alongside seven preparatory drawings. The work was a slog and saw Renoir trying to assimilate elements of sculpture, 18th-century French painting, and the modern treatment of water and greenery he was well-versed in. It was broadly panned by critics upon its unveiling and Renoir never again spent so long on a single painting.
Auguste Renoir, Study for The Great Bathers (1884 to 1887). Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum.
The painting is making its first appearance in New York and it was the accession of the large red-and-white chalk preparatory drawing in 2018 that provided the first spark for the exhibition. There’s the sense that Renoir’s drawings haven’t been given a chance, something Bailey explains by way of an anecdote.
“In 1886, Berthe Morisot was treated to a private viewing of Renoir’s drawings. She was most impressed and noted in her diary that it would be most desirable for the public, who thought the Impressionists worked with the greatest casualness, to see such drawings,” Bailey said. “In some ways, our exhibition is a response to her insight.” More

A decade after their debut, Paul Rucker’s Klan robes remain as shocking as ever, their pointed hoods reimagined in an array of bold and colorful fabrics with striking prints. A circle of nine of these menacing figures, surrounding three tiny toddler Klansmen, greet visitors to “Rewind Resurrection” in New York, the 10-year anniversary restaging of the artist’s traveling exhibition delving into the long history of racism in the U.S.
“They each symbolize some things. The pink robe is about how the Ku Klux Klan did not like gay people, just like the Nazis did not like gay people. The Kente cloth is about the Dutch wax fabric, which is a product of African colonization by the Dutch, and also about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Klan, who was also a millionaire slave trader, connecting Africa and the Ku Klux Klan,” Rucker told me.
“The signature piece of the show is the camouflage robe, which is about the stealth aspect of racism, how it hides in plain sight,” he added. “You don’t have to be in an outfit.”
It was the robes that led to the censoring of “Rewind” at York College of Pennsylvania in 2017, after a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that year. The college closed the show to the public, only allowing students and faculty to visit. The show had traveled without issue before that. It debuted at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore and then the Baltimore Museum of Art before appearing in Seattle; Ellensburg, Wash.; and Ferguson, Mo. But this is its first outing since.
A case of KKK memorabilia collected by Paul Rucker on view in “Rewind Resurrection.” Photo: by Nehemiah A Prince, courtesy of the artist.
“I’ve gone where people have asked me to come and bring the work,” Rucker said. “I went to Eastern Washington because someone there was recruiting for the Klan, and the community invited me. I went to Ferguson
after Mike Brown’s killing because the community reached out.”
This is the artist’s first show in New York, and it’s entirely self-funded, in a rented Chelsea gallery. Rucker is hoping that an institution will acquire the exhibition, which he considers a collective installation, in its entirety.
The show may seem especially timely now, as President Donald Trump looks to ban museums and schools from acknowledging the destructive legacy of enslavement and racism as an underpinning of our society. But Rucker warns that his show is bigger than any single administration, and that Democrats are far from blameless.
“It’s about the general culture of our country, which went seamlessly from enslavement to incarceration,” he said.
Paul Rucker in 2015. Photo: by Mike Morgan, courtesy of the artist.
Part of the display is of shocking artifacts that Rucker has spent years collecting, such as racist books, Nazi armbands, a real KKK hood, and the physical restraints that kept enslaved people in bondage. (He is also building an art space, called Cary Forward, in Richmond, Virginia, to showcase similar objects.)
And then there are his own artworks, such as blankets he ordered online to reproduce historic lynching postcards and other found images on woven tapestries. (Despite the disturbing nature of the images, none of the business owners ever questioned these orders.) There are videos visualizing data of the shocking proliferation of prison facilities, and gorgeous wooden relief sculptures recalling the silhouette of string instruments, with f-holes, each paying tribute to a different victim of racial violence.
“These are people who may not be well known as the civil rights leaders that we talk about all the time Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. These are lesser-known people like the Scottsboro Boys, or Jesse Washington, who was burned alive in 1916, or James Bird Jr., who was killed in Jasper, Texas, in 1998.”
Paul Rucker, Proliferation, an animation of new facilities being built for the U.S. prison system. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
Rucker carries the weight of history on his shoulders, uncovering the tragic stories of all-but forgotten individuals and events, such as the Red Summer race massacres of 1919. And while art is a tool to keep the evils of the past of being forgotten—even as some are now seemingly being repeated—he is aware that it is not enough.
“Art by itself will inherently fail to get people to move. It will help bring awareness to these atrocities of the past, and it will make people feel something, but to have real action beyond that takes another step beyond art,” Rucker said. “Hitting a like button on Instagram is not enough. We have got to move beyond following the algorithms that make us feel good because we have someone that validates our feelings with a post.
It’s very dangerous right now to feel that we’re making progress by hitting a like button.”
“Rewind Resurrection” is on view at 545 West 23rd Street, New York, New York, July 1–23, 2025. More