Eliana Willis

Queens, New York has hosted the World’s Fair twice: once in 1939, and then again in 1964. Now the borough is home to something else: “The World’s UnFair,” a feverish carnival of attractions that evoke the look of those old 20th-century expos—but not their nationalistic aims. New Red Order, the group of Native artists behind the public art project, has an altogether different agenda in mind: the return of all Indigenous land.  
The Creative Time-presented exhibition opened this month in a raw, half-block lot that is owned by a developer, but not yet developed. In theory, that sense of provisionality teases the possibility that the site could be restituted. For now, it feels like it’s been hijacked. Wheatpaste posters styled like men’s magazine ads tote “rematriation services” on the lot’s walls. So do sandwich boards inside. Tribal flags are staked in Home Depot buckets and strung like banners at a car lot. A film, pitched like a corporate commercial, reminds us to “Never Settle.” It plays inside a sculpture that is half cheval de frise, half white picket fence, while an animatronic beaver and tree chat about settler colonialism nearby. 
This is a body of work that is not afraid to hit you over the head with what it has to say, even if that means mocking pockets of its audience along the way. But the cumulative effect is powerful. It’s the most essential show in New York right now. 
New Red Order, Dexter and Sinister (2023). Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
New Red Order defines itself as a “public secret society composed of networks of informants and accomplices dedicated to rechanneling desires for indigeneity towards the expansion of Indigenous futures.” If that description sounds elaborate, it’s because it was designed that way. “We don’t want to be contained to just being an art collective,” New Red Order said in a recent interview. (The three founding founders interviewed for this article—Adam and Zack Khalil, both of the Ojibway, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and Jackson Polys, of Tlingit heritage—prefer to be identified under the collective banner of the group.)  
The language of the mission statement is also coded with New Red Order’s argot. By “informants,” it means people who share knowledge of their own communities and cultures. “Accomplices” are those who support informants. The shadowy tone of it all echoes, with knowing irony, the group’s namesake, a 19th-century white fraternity called the “Improved Order of Red Men.” (The organization, which once counted Presidents Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt as members, often used Native designs and rituals.) 
But not all of New Red Order’s messaging is that complicated. The group’s central refrain—and the title of its main, ongoing body of work—leaves little room for misinterpretation: “Give it back.” It is both a provocation and a demand: Give back all land to the peoples who were forcibly displaced from it by colonialists. Give it back now.  
Installation view of “New Red Order: The World’s UnFair,” September 15 October 15, 2023. Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
Throughout “The World’s UnFair,” you’ll find variations of that message presented through the visual language of agitprop, infographics, recruitment videos, real estate placards, and other pieces of media that, in their ordinary states, are used to sell the idea of a better life. Many of these works also feature the same recurring character, played by veteran actor—and frequent New Red Order collaborator—Jim Fletcher. He is the apparent ringmaster of this weird pageant, but also something of a mascot. The group first met the white actor after he donned Native American garb in a 2014 stage Wooster Group play called “CRY, TROJANS!” The incident stoked backlash among Native communities. 
Regretful of the decision, Fletcher—who now identifies as an “accomplice” and a “Native American impersonator”—has since given himself over to a number of New Red Order projects. For a 2017 Artists Space performance conceived by the group, he stripped naked, put on a department store “Indian” costume, and apologized for his role in “CRY, TROJANS!” Even when the joke is on him, Fletcher, to his credit, is game. 
“It’s Jim Fletcher playing Jim Fletcher,” New Red Order said of the layers to the actor’s performance in “The World’s UnFair,” referring to him as a proxy. “If we say ‘Give it Back,’ I worry that it gets dismissed by many people. But if a successful middle-aged non-Native performance artist says it, maybe it has a chance of making it out of the echo chamber.” 
Installation view of “New Red Order: The World’s UnFair,” September 15 October 15, 2023. Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
With its puppets and punny riffs of self-help speak and jingoistic lingo, “The World’s UnFair” is very funny (one banner reads “Mission Accomplice,” referencing the infamous George W. Bush proclamation). The tone is a welcome twist on the solemnity that typically categorizes projects about indigeneity or repatriation, though it has its risks as well.  
“At times, humor has been a roadblock for some people to engage, because they don’t want to be made fun of,” said the group. “We find it’s a necessary way to engage, to crack open really uncomfortable conversations in ways that don’t lead to the expected places, to keep people on their toes… so they can’t easily categorize it in ways that they already understand.” 
But in putting together “The World’s UnFair,” New Red Order’s members also found themselves drawn to an earnestness that hasn’t always been present in their past work. Playing on several screens throughout the show are examples from their ongoing Give It Back series of documentary-style films highlighting people who have voluntarily repatriated land to Indigenous communities, tribes, or non-profits. Surrounded by works barbed with wit, these clips have a refreshing sincerity. 
“We found a need to [lean] a little bit more toward sincerity and transparency,” New Red Order explained. “That way, the real, powerful actions that real people are taking to address settler colonialization and the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land isn’t disregarded as a fantasy or as a joke, but seen as something real.” 
“New Red Order: The World’s UnFair” is on view now through October 15, 2023 at 24-17 Jackson Ave. in Long Island City, Queens.
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Hold onto your cowboy hats. This is no ordinary Western art show.
The simply titled “Cowboy” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver on September 29 and it’s sure to garner major attention in the Western U.S. and beyond.
The show, organized by curators Nora Burnett Abrams and Miranda Lash, takes aim at the mythic figure, which they describe as “one of the most fraught and persistent figures in contemporary American culture.” The show raises questions such as how the myth of the cowboy exists today and how this archetype of masculinity shaped how we think about gender now. It further delves into cowboys’ relationship to the land through a series of broad perspectives and aims to debunk the homogenous concept of the cowboy as a white male.
Karl Haendel, Rodeo 11 (2023). Image courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles, Mitchell- Innes & Nash, New York, and Wentrup Gallery, Berlin
“There is no mythic figure who is more grand and complicated than the cowboy,” said Burnett Abrams in a phone interview. Originally, she said, she was looking into the history of the Black cowboy, but over the course of years of conversations, the concept was broadened.
“We approached it from all angles,” said Lash, including very much from the side of satire and critique, but also from the perspective of “homage,” with artists incorporating the stories of their own family members. “The stories range from the deconstructive impulse to the very personal. Cowboys are just so much more diverse than what gets depicted in the mainstream media.”
While the show starts with some classic blue-chip names and works like a John Baldessari (The Space Between Hat Rock and Shadow), Richard Prince’s famous Marlboro Man photo, and Andy Warhol’s film of a horse, it quickly delves into the contemporary and ultra-contemporary realm with 27 artists spanning 70 works.
Stephanie Syjuco, Set Up (The Broncho Buster 2) (2022). Image courtesy the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; RYAN LEE Gallery, NewYork; and Silverlens, Manila.
Take for instance Stephanie Syjuco’s photographs of Frederic Remington’s famous bronze sculptures of bucking broncos in the Amon Carter collection that depict them being measured with tape and alluding to the popularity of—and poking fun at—the sculptures and replicas on CEO desks across the country as symbols of bravura. “She jokes about how it’s such a popular bronze on the desks of corporate executives because it connects so deeply with this idea of the rugged individual, the entrepreneur, the man who sets his own terms,” said Lash.
The two curators said the tagline for the show could be: “This is not your grandfather’s Remington.”
Another topic that the show tackles is the “very problematic binary of the cowboy versus Indian, which is just an invention,” said Burnett Abrams.
Grace Kennison, I Remember Being Alone (2023). Image courtesy the artist.
One of the artists included in the show is Oklahoma native Nathan Young, whose art delves into his family history with parents who are of the Pawnee and Delaware Tribe. The multi-disciplinary artist delves into Pawnee rodeo culture in this series of work in the show.
And four contemporary artists, including Rafa Esparza, Young, and Colorado-based artists R. Alan Brooks and Gregg Deal were commissioned to make work for the show.
“There are those who are Native American or are of Native American descent who actively participate in cowboy culture,” said Lash. “There is not that distinction or binary.”
Burnett Abrams said: “Our ambition is to expand the story and I think that for those who are ready to be a part of that, it’s going to be amazing.”
“Cowboy” is on view at MCA Denver, 1485 Delgany Street, Denver, through February 18, 2024.

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When the animal kingdom met the artistic imagination, the result was a whole zoo full of fantastical creatures from dragons to unicorns, phoenixes to sphinxes. These strange mythological beasts haven usually taken on symbolic significance, and reappeared time and again in art made by different cultures across time, as shown by an ambitious new survey of more than 250 objects opening this fall at the Louvre-Lens.
This wide-ranging, whistle-stop tour starts off in the Bronze Age. The oldest surviving fragments of cave art are proof enough that humans have long been driven to depict the wonders of the natural world, but it wasn’t long before we started taking a bit of creative license. One of the show’s earliest exhibits, a Mesopotamian seal cylinder that dates back to 3300–3000 B.C.E., features a lion-headed eagle.
As pagan beliefs died out in favor of modern religion, biblical tales still kept audiences in awe by having their brave saints slay the same dragons that had once been popularized by ancient Greek mythology. Majestic, make-believe beasts were not always our adversaries, however, but often had magical powers of healing or protection.
The exhibition won’t leave visitors in the dark ages, but instead goes on to explore how mythological creatures have continued to enthrall new audiences. It turns out that the wild visions of Romantic artists like Henry Fuseli and the Pre-Raphelite painter Edward Burne-Jones have plenty in common with the science fiction and comic books that are so popular today.
“Fantastic Animals” is on view at Louvre-Lens, 99 Rue Paul Bert, 62300 Lens, France, from September 27, 2023 through January 15, 2024.
Preview artworks from the exhibition below.
Jean Gargot, Big Ghoul (1677). Photo: Christian Vignaud, © Musée de Poitiers.
Nicolas Buffe, Peau de Licorne (2011) Photo: © Cité internationale de la tapisserie, Aubusson, © Nicolas Buffe.
Jean-Auguste-Dominqiue Ingres, Roger freeing Angelica (1819). Photo: Franck Raux, © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre).
Figurine of the demon Pazuzu (911-604 B.C.E.). Photo: Thierry Olivier, © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
Will Cotton, Roping (2019–20). Photo courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris-Bruxelles-New York, © Will Cotton © ADAGP, Paris 2023.
Henry Fuseli, Thor fighting the serpent of Midgard (1790). Photo: © akg-images, Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Molding of a relief depicting a mythological scene, (c. 1200-1100 B.C.E.). Photo: Raphaël Chipault, © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
Paolo Uccello, Saint George Fighting the Dragon (c. 1440). Photo: Agence Bulloz, © RMN-Grand Palais.
Thomas Grünfeld, Misfit (flamingo-pig) (2005). Photo: © Galerie Jousse Lothar Schnepf © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
Gustave Moreau, The traveler or Oedipus the traveler (1888). Photo: René-Gabriel Ojeda, © RMN Grand Palais.
Walter Andrea, Dragon-serpent on Ishtar Gate (1902). Photo: Andres Kilger, © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
Cylinder seal depicting lions and an eagle (3300-3000 BEC). Photo: Franck Raux, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre).
Edward Burne-Jones, The Doom Fulfilled (1884-1885). Photo: Paul Carter – Bridgeman Images, © Southampton City Art Gallery.
An acquamanile (vessel). Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre).
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A new series of presidential portraits by Kehinde Wiley just went on view in Paris—but you won’t find Barack Obama’s face among them. On view, instead, are ornate paintings of Macky Sall, Nana Akufo-Addo, and other African heads of state. 
These make up Wiley’s “A Maze of Power” series, which the artist has quietly been working on since 2012—years before he was tapped by President Obama. The new artworks are, in Wiley’s words, an effort to look at the African presidencies through the lens of Western European art history. 
“What happens when we use the language of aesthetic domination in the context of Africa in the 21st century?” the artist said in a short film he made to accompany the project. “Is it possible to use the language of empire, as it related to painting, in an African context, and arrive on the other side with something completely new? This body of work supposes that there is.” 

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The portraits debuted today in a Galerie Templon-sponsored exhibition at Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Among those depicted in the show are Olusegun Obasanjo, the former President of Nigeria; Hery Rajaonarimampianina, the former leader of Madagascar; and Félix Tshisekedi, the current President of Democratic Republic of Congo.  
Wiley, who initially set out to paint all 54 African presidents, visited each of his subjects on their own turf, in sites of their choosing. He brought with him a book of aristocratic, noble, and military portraits from the 17th to 19th centuries, introducing what he called a “vocabulary of power that each one of the presidents could choose to work with, or choose to ignore.” 
Installation view of “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” at The Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac museum in Paris, 2023. Photo: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images.
The “Maze of Power” referred to in the show’s title is one that exists between Wiley and his subjects, the artist explained. “‘The Maze of Power’ is the maze that’s being run by me the artist, but also by the sitter—the sitter deciding how they want to be seen, me responding to their set of decisions,” Wiley said in his film. “Each one of us are responding to a received history of image-making, power, and the ways in which art function within that dynamic.” 
Portrait of Denis Sassou Nguesso, President of the Congo’s Republic (2023) on view at “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” at The Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac museum in Paris, 2023. Photo: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images.
In producing his series, Wiley made a point not to talk politics, just pictures. The series, he explained, is not a “celebration of individual leaders,” but a “look at the presidency itself.”  
“The very act of creating a set of portraits in Europe, and now using that language in Africa, creates an… interesting provocation,” the artist went on. “This is an invitation for the viewer to expand the possibilities of what it means to look at art in Africa, about Africa, and about power.” 
“Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” is on view at Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 37 Quai Jacques Chirac, Paris, France, through January 14, 2024.

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