Eliana Willis

Maria Lai (1919–2013) once said, “I wasn’t born in Sardinia—I am Sardinia.” This declaration captures the essence of an artist who fused the ancient traditions of her native island with radical experimentation. During the 20th century, Lai developed a singular visual language that combined abstraction, Arte Povera, and craft. Though celebrated in Italy as a key figure of 20th-century art, her name remained relatively unknown abroad during her lifetime. Now, more than a decade after her death, Lai is finally receiving her first North American museum show at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, N.Y.
The retrospective offers a sweeping reappraisal of a singular artist who wove together abstraction, Arte Povera, and craft into something wholly her own. Curated by artistic director Paola Mura, the show is the brainchild of Magazzino founders Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, who have known and collected Lai’s work for over three decades. The nearly 100 works are drawn from their personal holdings, as well as the artist’s foundation and the collections of various Italian museums. Magazzino also just installed Lai’s 1992 cement sculpture Colombe di Cemento as a permanent addition to its grounds.
“It was through a chance encounter that I met Maria Lai’s niece Maria Sofia Pisu, president of the Maria Lai archive, which began my investigation and education in her work,” Olnick told me, adding that from the outset she was captivated by its uniqueness, complexity and variety. The more she learned about her personal life and indomitable nature, the more she wanted to know about her.
“Why it took so long for her to be recognized is beyond me,” she said. “But I hope that all the work that went into mounting this exhibition will signal others to explore her work and her genius.”
Olnick and Spanu have long been dedicated to the promotion of Postwar and contemporary Italian art, and they have been instrumental in helping raise Lai’s profile. In 2017, Magazzino loaned works by Lai to Documenta 14 and the Venice Biennale, exhibitions that gave Lai a major international boost after a seven-decade career spent in relative obscurity. The following year, Lai hit a record high at auction that still stands, with a £150,000 ($195,236) sale of the seven-and-a-half-foot wide embroidered 1989 piece Lenzuolo (Bed Sheet) at Christie’s London, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Installation view of “Maria Lai. A Journey to America” at Magazzino Italian Art. Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art. Photo by Marco Anelli/Tommaso Sacconi, ©Archivio Maria Lai, by SIAE 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Who Was Maria Lai?
Lai was born in 1919 in Ulassai, a remote village in the mountainous interior of Sardinia.
“Maria Lai was an anomaly for a woman at that time and place, as she rejected the expected role of wife and homemaker,” Olnick said. “She expressed that she would always be grateful to her father for letting her go to study in Rome to pursue her art and live as an independent woman.”
In the 1940s, she studied in Rome under sculptor Renato Marino Mazzacurati and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, where she was the only woman in her class. But it was back home in relatively isolated Sardinia that she truly developed as an artist. She showed during her lifetime, but only intermittently, opting not to exhibit, for instance, in the 1960s.
Maria Lai, Composizione Polimaterica (1964). Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo by Marco Anelli, ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
She began her career painting the rugged local landscape, but by the 1960s, Lai began moving away from figuration and eventually abandoned traditional painting altogether. Instead, she turned to humble materials like stone, cork, fabric, and thread—transforming them into complex, richly textured works that evoked memory, mythology, and the handmade traditions of her homeland.
Among the most captivating works in the Magazzino exhibition are Lai’s hand-bound “Libri cuciti” (sewn books), which she created between 1975 and 2011. These sculptural books are filled not with the written word but dense lines of thread—sewn symbols and marks that speak in a language of their own. As a child, before she learned to read, Lai believed her grandmother was stitching stories into bedsheets as she mended them.
This belief sparked Lai’s lifelong exploration of thread as a form of writing and storytelling. That also included sewn geographies, abstract works in which she literally stitched the landscape, lines of thread standing in for the horizon.
Maria Lai, Voce di infinite letture (1992). Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo by Marco Anelli, ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
“There’s a poetry in all her art—the sewn books, the geografia, the ceramics and stones… I could go on and on,” Olnick said.
Lai even dabbled in the fashion world. In May, Magazzino opened a supplemental exhibition featuring a collaboration with Lai and designer Antonio Marras, a fellow Sardinian. The 2003 piece, Llèncols de Aigua (Sheets of Water), is a circular structure formed by a hanging white sheet on which the artists have stitched antique nightgowns and embroidered quotes from children in red script.
Installation view of “Antonio Marras and Maria Lai: Llèncols de Aigua.” Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo: by Marco Anelli/Tommaso Sacconi. ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2025/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
A Long History of Craft
Indeed, local craft of hand weaving—a traditional form of women’s work—was a touchstone for Lai, who drew on millennia of craft history. In the early 1970s, she began making what she dubbed “Sewn Canvases,” and three-dimensional “Telai” works, which is the Italian word for loom.
“The loom is the oldest tool, tied to patience and the ability to weave and hold things together. It is not just a work tool; it is a tool for relationships,” Lai said, as quoted in an exhibition gallery text.
“Behind me, I have thousands of years of silences, of attempts at poetry, of loom threads,” she added.
Maria Lai, Telaio in sole e mare (1971). Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo: Marco Anelli. Courtesy ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
And Lai was a pioneer of what is now known as relational art, creating interactive performance art pieces that highlighted the intricate web of relationships between people, animals, and the environment.
In 1980, Lai’s hometown of Ulassai asked her to create a monument to the fallen. Instead, she paid tribute to the living, inviting the remote mountain village’s roughly 1,000 inhabitants to participate in the first relational art piece in Italian art history. Titled, Legarsi alla montagna (To Tie Oneself to the Mountain), it was a collective performative piece that literally tied them all together. The Magazzino exhibition presents photos and a video of the ambitious project, which Lai considered her masterpiece.
“By fostering this connection of people, she provided a platform for a shared experience through creative expression, ultimately promoting social coherence and a sense of belonging,” Olnick said.
Maria Lai, Legarsi alla montagna, intervention on a photograph by Piero Berengo Gardin (1981–82). Courtesy ©Archivio Maria Lai. ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2025 1981–82.
The 1981 work, carried out over a period of three days, was inspired by a local legend of a young girl who narrowly escaped a deadly rockslide when she spotted a ribbon blowing in the wind and followed it to safety. Overcoming longstanding feuds to work together on the artwork, villagers wove a 16-mile-long blue denim ribbon through the municipality, connecting each and every home.
“Art should… make us feel more united,” Lai said in 2009. “Otherwise we’re not human beings.”
“Maria Lai. A Journey to America” is on view November 15, 2024–July 21, 2025 and “Antonio Marras and Maria Lai: Llèncols de Aigua” is on view May 17, 2025–January 27, 2026 at Magazzino Italian Art, 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, New York. The exhibitions are part of Upstate Art Weekend, taking place at 158 art organizations across the Catskills Mountains and Hudson Valley, July 17–21, 2025.  More

“Before me,” Elsa Schiaparelli once insisted, “everything was black or navy blue or gray or brown or beige.” She’s not wrong. An unconventional designer, Schiaparelli would leave her mark on 20th-century couture by injecting it with fantasy, play, and unpredictability. Hers was revolutionary work that swept fashion’s dusty tones away in favor of the electric shade.
Next March, Schiaparelli is getting her first institutional spotlight in the U.K. at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art.” The exhibition will gather a whopping 200 objects—from garments and accessories to sculpture and paintings—to capture the history and sensibility of the innovative couturier.
“The V&A holds one of the largest and most important fashion collections in the world, and the foremost collection of Schiaparelli garments in Britain,” the museum’s director Tristram Hunt said in a statement. “Schiaparelli’s collaboration with artists and with the world of performance make the Maison and its founder an ideal subject for a spectacular exhibition at the V&A.”
Ankle-length coat of black silk jersey with facial profiles forming a rose-filled vase, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Cocteau and Lesage, London, 1937. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Born in Rome, Schiaparelli opened her first atelier in Paris in 1927. There, she dreamed up trompe l’oeil designs, experimental textures, shocking colors, and vivid prints—a groundbreaking vision that thumbed its nose at the staid codes of haute couture. They were provocative designs that stemmed from her commitment to personal freedom and self-expression, as much as her close ties to the Surrealist set.
A chance encounter with Dadaist Francis Picabia and his wife during a 1916 trip to America brought Schiaparelli up close to Paris’s Surrealist scene. She was swift to weave it into her practice. Throughout the 1930s, her atelier produced collaborative pieces including an evening coat embroidered with an optical illusion by Jean Cocteau, a fur bracelet concocted by Meret Oppenheim, spiral glasses designed by Man Ray, and with Salvador Dalí, a host of objects from the iconic Shoe Hat to the Lobster Dress.
Tears Evening dress and head veil, designed by Elsa Schiaparelli, February 1938 for Circus Collection, summer 1938. Fabric designed by Salvador Dalí. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
“Working with artists like Bebe Berard, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Vertes, Van Dongen, and with photographers like Hoyningen Huene, Horst, Cecil Beaton, and Man Ray gave one a sense of exhilaration,” Schiaparelli once reflected. “One felt supported and understood beyond the crude and boring reality of merely making a dress to sell.”
Schiaparelli’s theatrical designs also made her work a great fit for film and stage productions. She famously designed Mae West’s costumes for 1937’s Every Day’s a Holiday, tailoring them on a mannequin sculpted to the star’s proportions. The model would inspire the bottle for Schiaparelli’s Shocking fragrance, designed in collaboration with Leonor Fini.
Advertisement for the perfume Shocking by Schiaparelli. Photo: Apic / Bridgeman via Getty Images.
These creative partnerships sit at the heart of “Fashion Becomes Art.” Heading out on view will be some of the V&A’s holdings such as Schiaparelli’s Skeleton and Tears dresses, and the Shoe Hat, all created alongside Dalí. They’re joined by artworks by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Man Ray, which help illustrate the designer’s creative milieu. The museum also promises to unveil research that sheds new light on these collaborations.
After the designer’s death in 1973 and following decades of fits and starts, the new House of Schiaparelli was established in 2014. Texas-born design Daniel Roseberry took the helm as creative director in 2019, becoming the first American to lead a French couture label. He has sought to craft a new voice for the house, while keeping its Surrealist heritage in view.
“The more I reference her work and use it as a starting point, the better it makes my work,” he’s said about Schiaparelli. “Her legacy feels like an untold story.”
Schiaparelli by Daniel Roseberry. Long sheath gown, Matador Couture collection. Haute couture fall-winter 2021–2022. Patrimoine Schiaparelli, Paris. Photo courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum.
The exhibition will nod to Roseberry’s work, featuring pieces such as his gilded brass lung necklace from Fall 2021, which Bella Hadid donned at the Cannes Film Festival to viral effect. These designs, said the house’s CEO Delphine Bellini, “honor and reinvent [Schiaparelli’s] vision for a new century.”
“Schiaparelli’s fearless imagination and radical vision redefined the boundaries between fashion and art,” she added. “This exhibition celebrates her enduring influence through iconic collaborations with 20th-century masters and a pioneering fusion of creativity and commerce.”
“Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” is on view at the V&A Museum, Cromwell Rd, London, March 21–November 1, 2026. More

Over the centuries, many artists have made their name for an implausible ability to turn paint into flesh. But when British artist Jenny Saville shot to fame in the 1990s, it was clear that she was going to offer something new. “I paint women as most women see themselves,” she once explained. “I try to catch their identity, their skin, their hair, their heat, their leakiness.”
Despite Saville’s quick rise and enduring appeal, she has only just received her first major solo exhibition at a London museum. “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting” at the National Portrait Gallery spans three decades of the artist’s varied practice across some 50 paintings and drawings. The exhibition, which will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas this October, takes the viewer on a chronological journey from the artist’s beginnings as a YBA who made a splash with vast but surprisingly sensitive paintings to her recent production of luridly eye-catching heads that belong firmly in the digital era. Every stage of Saville’s practice as presented in this show is united by their commitment to offering a fresh lens on women’s bodily experiences and rethinking how the female form has been represented throughout Western art history.
Jenny Saville, Reverse (2002–03). © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Indeed, she has painted women of all dimensions and ages, including pregnant women and trans women. She has also proven to be unusually daring in her appetite for ongoing stylistic evolution, one that has had no trouble maintaining collector interest (she has been represented by mega-dealer Gagosian since 1997).
Reclaiming the Nude
In 2018, the $12.4 million sale of Propped at Sotheby’s London made Saville the highest-selling living female painter. (As of this past May, that title is now held by Marlene Dumas.) It is little surprise that the 1992 painting set a record when you consider its lore. The seven-foot-tall canvas debuted in Saville’s graduation show at the Glasgow School of Art, where it was positioned in front of a mirror so that viewers could read its reversed scrawled text. “If we continue to speak in this sameness—speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other,” it reads, which are words borrowed from French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. The work made enough of a splash to feature in an article about British art in the London Times, where it soon caught the eye of notorious art dealer Charles Saatchi. He acquired it and supported Saville while she worked on her first solo gallery show in 1994. In 2004, it was acquired by the late collector David Teiger.
Jenny Saville, Propped (1992). Image: © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of Gagosian.
The work, though lauded, also proved controversial for its unidealized and confrontational composition. Some have been surprised to discover that the nude perched on a stool is Saville herself, and that the unusual configuration results from her own perspective. To the viewer, the towering figure is unidealized yet raised precariously on a pedestal. “I wanted to create these mountains of flesh, so your eye traversed up and over the model’s body,” Saville said in the show’s catalogue.
Saville’s paintings still regularly command impressive prices. Just the other week, Saville’s 1994 painting Juncture sold for $7.3 million at Sotheby’s London while her drawing Mirror (2011–12) surpassed its $1.65 million high estimate to fetch $2.11 million, marking a record in the medium for the artist.
Jenny Saville, Ruben’s Flap (1998–99). © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Though well-known and appreciated by collectors, the artist’s unconventional approach to picturing the human form still invites some academic debate. The National Portrait Gallery’s current show has raised the question of whether or not Saville’s work counts as portraiture. Though real people feature in her work—most notably Saville herself and her children—she does not make portraits in the traditional sense as she is less concerned with subjectivity than with the experience of inhabiting a body. In a work like Trace (1993–94), the canvas is filled with the pasty back of an anonymous figure, still imprinted with the recognizable markings of tight underwear.
Some of Saville’s works, like Plan (1993), turn the body into a topography marked with the kind of contour lines that might be made by a plastic surgeon’s scalpel, or the mind of an obsessive dieter. Developing this idea, Saville herself sat in on plastic surgeries at a clinic in New York, an experience that resulted in the painting Ruben’s Flap (1998–99), so named after one breast reconstruction technique. The composition seemingly merges together three big-breasted torsos, each topped with a different angle of Saville’s own head.
Though the body has been spliced up, the effect is to multiply its pleasingly real, imperfect appeal. The act has unavoidably feminist undertones, though Saville has insisted that the works have no particular agenda and are instead impartial observations about the ways in which women inhabit their bodies.
Renaissance Influences
Many of Saville’s greatest hits also bare the traces of painting forebears like Rubens—as the title of Ruben’s Flap (1998–99) implies—as well as Rembrandt, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud. Yet, Saville’s gestural, diffusive application of paint also encroaches on abstraction, and she has named Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly among her heroes.
Jenny Saville, One out of two (symposium) (2016). © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of Gagosian.
A significant chunk of Saville’s corpus is heavily influenced by the sketches of Italian Renaissance heroes like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. As a child, the artist would admire her parent’s copy of Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist (ca. 1500). “I liked how you couldn’t really tell whose leg belonged to whom, and how it became a kind of collective image,” she recently told the New Yorker. She sought to bring a similarly layered dynamism to a new body of work that would capture the cascading effects of time and movement.
In works like One out of two (symposium) from 2016, the results are almost orgiastic and the composition is further energized by a frenzy of deep red scribbles. “I built the figures thinking about sculptural form,” Saville said in the show’s catalogue. “It’s an organic process, developing one figure after another until the mass of humans have a solidity. It’s one of my favorite ways of working, because you visually build something trying to embody a strong armature. Although this particular grouping of figures couldn’t exist in real life, it hopefully has a believable feeling of a sculptural, human mass.”
Jenny Saville, Aleppo (2017–18). © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of NGS.
Saville did not only use this technique to invent human masses but also to capture something true about her experiences of motherhood that had been sorely lacking from the history of art. While countless men have depicted infants as impossibly docile, Saville sought to record the chaotic, squirming reality in a series of drawings that stand out for their tangle of limbs.
Unusually, the title of Aleppo refers to the Syrian civil war, setting it apart from Saville’s other depictions of early childhood. The painting’s central motif echoes Michelangelo’s Pietà, a universal symbol of parental grief that foregrounds the devastating impact of such conflicts on civilians of all ages.
Stylistic Evolution
Her most recent work—glossy, mesmeric, and artificially-colored, in pastel pinks, purples and oranges—evokes our over-filtered existence in the digital age. It is a far cry from her monumental YBA-era blockbusters and, over three decades, her practice has taken many more unpredictable turns.
Jenny Saville, Chasah (2020). © Jenny Saville. Courtesy of Gagosian.
This new direction grew out of a trip to Moscow in 2019, when Saville began photographing local models. The subjects of these paintings are very conventionally attractive young women but, in some cases, their faces have been fractured, alluding to the conjuring of identity in the digital world. Saville has spoken often about her fascination with the way in which life navigated with a smart device in hand layers different realms over each other, requiring us to continuously shift between them.
“[I tried] to put everything [I] can into articulating what it feels like to live now,” Saville said about an exhibition of some of these works at Gagosian New York in 2020. “What is pictorial space in a time of panels of floating realities on a computer screen?”
In this example, the subject is named as Chasah, an Ecology student. Additionally, observant viewers will note a self-portrait of Saville’s silhouette hovering in the woman’s left eye. It might be read as an easter egg referring to the artist’s recurrent appearances in her own paintings since the early 1990s. Once again, however, Saville has emphasized that these latest works cannot be easily categorized as portraits of an individual.
“This new work evolved slowly, out of a whole lot of things,” she explained, citing also ancient sources like cave paintings and Egyptian art. “I’m trying to get to something that has a more universal feeling.”
“Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting” is on view through September 7 at the National Portrait Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London. More

Not content with writing soft-focus rock numbers about love and loss that have made him one of the planet’s top-selling artists, Ed Sheeran is now unveiling his debut collection of paintings, which he began creating in 2019. And, well, it’s good thing he still has his day job.
The series of multi-colored drip and splash works is called “Cosmic Carpark Paintings” for the simple reason that it was painted in a carpark. Presumably, the cosmic part comes from the fact that abstraction makes people think about the cosmos and also because alliteration sounds good.
Ed Sheeran at work. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates/HENI
In Sheeran’s telling, while in between tours last year, the London-based singer songwriter would run to a disused carpark in Soho each morning to paint (whether he was running for excitement, exercise, or some other reason remains unclear). After arriving at the site, Sheeran would don a white protective suit and throw colorful splashes of house paint at canvases.
The painting might have remained a hobby, a fun little way to let off steam amid a grueling schedule, but Sheeran happened to mention his carpark forays to his “good friends” Damien Hirst and Joe Hage, the founder of art services company HENI, who had an idea. Why not stage an exhibition, at HENI’s gallery in Soho? And so, for the month of July, fans of Sheeran will have the chance to buy original works on canvases and prints for £900 ($1,200) a pop.
Ed Sheeran, Unfolding Cosmos (2024). Photo: courtesy Prudence Cuming Associates/HENI
The first thing to clarify here is the cause. Sheeran has a long track record of using his platform for good and is donating 50 percent of his proceeds to the Ed Sheeran Foundation, which aims to boost youth access to music in the U.K. through funding grassroots music projects and music programs in schools.
Ed Sheeran, Galaxies We’ve Known (2024). Photo: courtesy Prudence Cuming Associates/HENI.
The other is the obvious influence of Jackson Pollock in the “Cosmic Carpark Paintings.” Throw globs of paint randomly at a canvas and the comparisons are inevitable. But here, unlike his art world booster, Sheeran has been fairly straightforward about the shadow of the American Abstract Expressionist. As he noted in a social media post announcing the exhibition, “it’s mostly just splashing colors on canvases, think Jackson Pollock.”
As to how seriously audiences should take the paintings, Sheeran again provides answers. “I am by no means ‘an artist’, but I do love making art, it makes me feel great, and I love the end result.” The extent to which the public will share Sheeran’s enthusiasm remains to be seen.
“Ed Sheeran: Cosmic Carpark Paintings” is on view at HENI Gallery, 1st Floor, 6-10 Lexington St, London, July 11–August 1. More

“I’d describe her as a visionary,” said writer and curator Lina Ramadan, speaking of the late Qatari artist Wafa Al-Hamad. “She had a rare ability to sense how the rapidly changing world around her could open onto many possible futures. She approached Arab and Islamic art with openness, not to repeat what had been done, but to imagine what it could become.”
Ramadan recently curated “Wafa al-Hamad: Sites of Imagination” now on view at the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, the first solo museum exhibition dedicated to the late Qatari artist (on view through August 9). “This exhibition seeks to uncover the overlooked legacy of a pioneering Qatari woman artist, shining a light on a presence that has often been marginalized,” she explained.
“Wafa Al-Hamad: Sites of Imagination” 2025. Wadha Al Mesalam, courtesy of Qatar Museums ©2025.
A Reintroduction, Even For Those Who Knew Her Work
Al-Hamad, who was born in 1964 and passed away in 2012, was relatively well-known during her lifetime in the Gulf Region. She was one of the first female students to join the Qatari Free Atelier in 1981, where she took workshops and later contributed to art education. In those years, she actively exhibited across the Gulf with multiple exhibitions including “The Arab Youth Exhibition” in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (1983), the “6 Gulf Women Artists” exhibition in Sharjah (1994), and Sharjah Biennale 4 (1999). A passionate arts educator, she later became a professor at Qatar University.
Wafa al-Hamad, Khida’a Al Basar (Optical Illusion) (1985). Collection Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.
Despite inclusion in those group shows, Al-Hamad herself never became a major name, however, and for many, even in the Gulf Region, the exhibition is an introduction to her work. It is one marked by exploration. Over the 40 years of her career, Al-Hamad experimented freely, working across mediums including ink, watercolor, pastel, collage, and even, in her later years, digital work. The exhibition delights in this diversity, showcasing figurative and landscape paintings, abstractions filled with luminous shapes, op-art-inspired moments, paper-cut works, and much more. Her works can look vastly different even within a single year. Take two works, both made in 1985, Atlal (The Tower of Barzan), a painterly landscape showing a castle set against a blue sky, and Khida’a Al Basar (Optical Illusion), a geometric work made of black lines (she was familiar with the work of Vasarely and her works certainly nod to his legacy at times). The exhibition suggests that these various modes of representation informed one another, creating parallels or “overlapping languages” that might draw out unexpected connections—and, looking closely, they do emerge.
Wafa al-Hamad, Atlal (The Tower of Barzan) (1985). Collection Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.
“She often played with perspective and optical illusion, not to trick the eye, but to guide it toward something more intuitive or spiritual,” said Ramadan “Her abstraction is rooted in real places: traditional architecture in Qatar and the Gulf, the land around her, faces she knows. She didn’t make abstract work just for its own sake—it was a way to explore the many layers of reality across the canvas. To me, that’s poetry in visual form.”
A sensitivity to color unites her works across their many forms; bright yellows, blues, and pinks radiate throughout (the exhibition design emphasizes this with bold and bright wall colors). Her forms often draw back to her training in mafrooka, an Islamic decorative technique she learned at al-Marsam al-Hurr in Doha. At times, elements of Arabic calligraphy emerge, and she incorporates Qur’anic verses and Arabic proverbs.
“Even in her digital pieces, which we’re showing for the first time in this exhibition, these elements come together—the depth of space, layers of meaning, and careful attention to rhythm and light,” Ramadan added.
Wafa al-Hamad, Geometric Composition (1988–1998). Collection Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.
Experimentation Driven by Imagination
Al-Hamad’s most luminous works are a series of biomorphic abstractions, where forms float in gauzy veils. A gem of the exhibition is Lailat Al Hena (Henna Night) (1992), where ovoid forms in acid pastel colors suggest women gathered around on cushioned seats (in the upper right, she includes a teapot). As in the dream world, the image vacillates, with no one logic dominating.
“Her work creates what I often think of as ‘sites of imagination’, spaces where familiar forms are transformed, layered, and opened up to the dreamlike, the abstract, and the unknown,” Ramadan said of this gauzy fluidity.
The exhibition also highlights the artist’s role as an educator. In 1998, Al-Hamad earned a PhD in Art Education from the University of Northern Texas and became one of the first women to teach art at Qatar University. Al-Hamad’s doctorate dissertation is included in the exhibition, “adding an essential layer to understanding her theoretical framework and artistic intent.”
“Wafa Al-Hamad: Sites of Imagination” 2025. Wadha Al Mesalam, courtesy of Qatar Museums ©2025.
“I had the privilege of engaging closely with her life and practice while writing her biography in discussion with her family. That process was pivotal. It opened up space to study her work not just through the lens of form or technique, but through the textures of her personal history, her conceptual language, and her dreamlike visual worlds,” she added.
A closing section of the exhibition positions Al-Hamad’s works among those of other pioneering Arab women artists, including Madiha Omar, Nadira Mahmoud, Balqees Fakhro, Samia Halaby, Naziha Salem, and Helen Khal. Ramadan believes drawing attention to overlooked women artists such as Al-Hamad is essential for a younger generation of women artists with ties to the region earning worldwide attention.
“Wafa Al-Hamad: Sites of Imagination” 2025. Wadha Al Mesalam, courtesy of Qatar Museums ©2025. 
“While contemporary Gulf artists such as Sophia al-Maria, Farah al-Qassimi, and Monira al-Qadiri receive deserved international recognition today, this show creates a vital link to those who paved the way, artists like Wafa al-Hamad, whose contributions have been historically underacknowledged,” Ramadan explained. She hopes the exhibition more firmly situates her legacy within the context of the artists who exhibited alongside her and helps catalyze an evolving narrative of Gulf modernism.
She also sees the exhibition as speaking to our times, when new ways of seeing feel essential. “In curating this project, I was particularly drawn to the ways her work invites new readings, how it gently unsettles fixed narratives and instead proposes open, imaginative encounters,” she said. “Wafa’s work is rooted in Qatar but always open to broader ideas. Through it, she offers us a different way of seeing, one that remains profoundly resonant today.” More

In 2022, the heirs of John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) made a major donation spread across seven museums in the U.S. and the U.K. These works were not by the famed Gilded Age society portraitist, but his younger sister Emily Sargent (1857–1936)—an accomplished artist in her own right, being recognized for the first time.
Now, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is hosting “Emily Sargent: Portrait of a Family,” its first show of the watercolor paintings it received in that gift. Emily’s works were actually lost for decades, until some of her relatives found a forgotten trunk in storage containing hundreds of her paintings.
“There’s a sense of discovery seeing them,” Stephanie L. Herdrich, the Met’s curator of American painting and drawing, told me. “We’re just starting to understand more about how she worked.”
The exhibition at the Met is one of the first opportunities for museumgoers to see these newly rediscovered works, which showcase Emily’s experiments with different painting techniques as she developed her own personal style.
Emily Sargent, Avila (ca. 1900–10). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, anonymous gift, at the request of members of the artist’s family, 2021.
There was a small Emily Sargent exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester in 2022, an expanded version of which appeared at the nearby Sargent House, the family’s ancestral home, the following year. And the Met included a couple of Emily’s works in last year’s “A Decade on Paper: Recent Acquisitions, 2014–2024.” But the new show shines a spotlight on her watercolors like never before.
“They’re in amazing condition. If they were ever shown, they were maybe hung in private homes, but to our knowledge they were never exhibited,” Herdrich said.
Emily Sargent, Alhambra (1903). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, anonymous gift, at the request of members of the artist’s family, 2021.
To preserve the delicate works, the museum will rotate in new pieces about halfway through the show’s run. Altogether, the exhibition will showcase about 20 of the 26 paintings by Emily in the donation.
The show complements the museum’s current blockbuster, “Sargent and Paris,” about John’s years making a name for himself as a young artist in the French capital, and the creation of his famed masterpiece Madame X.
Emily Sargent, Park Scene (1902). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, anonymous gift, at the request of members of the artist’s family, 2021.
The Met actually already had some watercolors in the collection that it now believes are by Emily’s hand. They were part of a large donation of works on paper in 1950 that also included a sketchbook by the siblings’ mother, Mary Newbold Sargent (née Singer), which is also on view in the new show.
Since the family’s gift, scholars have begun researching more about Emily, a previously overlooked figure in the annals of art history.
John Singer Sargent, Spanish Midday, Aranjuez (1903). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Francis Ormond, 1950.
“I basically knew nothing about her,” Herdrich admitted. “There’s archival material and some letters from her at the collection of the MFA Boston, which are being catalogued and transcribed. But so much of what we know about her is still shaped by what we know about her brother. So I think letting her works be seen is a good start.”
In comparing the family trove of Emily’s works to its existing holdings of her brother’s work, the Met was excited to discover that the two had sometimes even painted the same scenes. As part of the Emily Sargent gift, the museum was able to select some pieces that matched examples of John’s work it already owned, as well as a watercolor that the two created together in northern Italy, titled The Brook, Purtud.
Emily Sargent and John Singer Sargent, The Brook, Purtud (1906–08). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, anonymous gift, at the request of members of the artist’s family, 2021.
Though the Sargent children were American, they were born in Europe, and were adults the first time they set foot in the U.S. Neither Emily nor John ever married, and the two traveled extensively, often together, documenting their travels in their art.
While Mary insisted on drawing lessons for all of her children, only John got a formal art education. Emily, who suffered her entire life from the effects of an childhood spinal injury, only began painting in earnest in her 30s.
Emily Sargent, Sea & Shore, Hammamet (1929). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, anonymous gift, at the request of members of the artist’s family, 2021.
The exhibition features her architectural studies and landscapes, some of which border on abstraction. Emily’s talents are obvious, which makes the contrast with her brother’s remarkable career, as the great portraitist of the age, all the more dramatic.
It’s bittersweet to imagine what Emily could have achieved, and the heights she could have reached, had she had the same opportunities afforded to John. But this show gives a glimpse into her talent, finally scratching the surface of the lesser-known Sargent.
Emily Sargent, Garden Scene with Building, Villa Varramista (1908). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, anonymous gift, at the request of members of the artist’s family, 2021.
“There’s still so much to learn about her,” Herdrich said. “We just wanted to get her works out there and bring her to the fore—let people get to know her.”
“Emily Sargent: Portrait of a Family” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, July 1, 2025–March 9, 2026. 
“Sargent and Paris” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, April 27 to August 3, 2025. It will travel to the Musée d’Orsay, Esplanade Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, 75007 Paris, France, as “Sargent: The Paris Years (1874–1884),” September 23, 2025–January 11, 2026. More

The countdown to the 250th anniversary of America’s independence has begun, and museums are already lining up celebrations to mark the milestone. Far from empty flag-waving exercises, these exhibitions richly explore the nation’s founding ideals and contested histories through the lenses of art and artifacts. What did independence mean then—and what does it mean now? Here are 10 shows that encourage reflection as much as a deep reckoning.

Through the Artistic Imagination
“Democracy Matters” at The New York Historical, New YorkJune 19, 2026–January 10, 2027
Johannes Oertel, Tearing Down the Statue of King George III (1852-53). Courtesy of New York Historical.
Why does democracy matter? What does it look like in action? These are some of the questions posed by this show, which inaugurates the Tang Wing for American Democracy at a moment when this form of government is under profound threat all over the world. The show will get into issues like voting, freedom of speech and of worship, and land rights. Works by historical artists like Thomas Cole and contemporary artists like Mel Chin, Fritz Scholder, Nari Ward, and Lady Pink will appear alongside historic documents such as an early printing of the Declaration of Independence—and its counterpart, the loyalists’ Declaration of Dependence (actually a thing!). One piece that resonates strongly with recent U.S. history is Johannes Oertel’s painting Tearing Down the Statue of King George III (1852–53), showing that a moment of Black Lives Matter-inspired iconoclasm in the U.S. has historical precedents. —B.B.

“America at 250” at Museum of Fine Arts, BostonOpening June 19, 2026
Fritz Scholder (La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians and American), Bicentennial Indian (1976). Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The MFA Boston is reshuffling its 18th-century galleries for the first time in 15 years for this show, which integrates fine and decorative; Native and non-native; North, South, and Central American; and Caribbean art to dig into how artists have contributed to or resisted concepts of nationhood and identity. Get ready for some bold juxtapositions, like Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished 1796 portrait of George Washington with a recently acquired work by Mohawk artist Alan Michelson, who offers a critique of the Father of America, known to the Mohawk Nation as “Town Destroyer.” Also included will be Paul Revere’s Sons of Liberty Bowl (1768), an early piece of American protest art that pays tribute to a group of rebels who paved the way for the Revolution, and a ceramic jar, inscribed with a written message, by the enslaved potter and poet David Drake that exemplifies literacy as an act of resistance. —B.B.

“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.September 19, 2025–February 22, 2026
Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2014). Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art.
Sherald’s comprehensive retrospective—which originated at SFMOMA before traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York earlier this year—touches down at the NPG in time for the institution to mark the nation’s semiquincentennial. The sweeping survey celebrates the painter’s evocative portraiture, which recenters the Black figure in the contemporary canon; her powerful images of Breonna Taylor and First Lady Michelle Obama are featured. The show is a homecoming of sorts for Sherald: the artist debuted her work at the museum in 2016, when her portrait Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) took the top prize in its Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. With “American Sublime,” Sherald also becomes the first contemporary Black artist to open a solo show at the NPG. —M.C.

“A Nation of Artists” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PhiladelphiaApril 12, 2026–September 2027
Frederic Edwin Church, Pichincha (1867). Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Two venerable institutions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, join forces on this show, which features pieces from the collection of Phillies owner John S. Middleton and his wife Leigh. Including over 1,000 works of fine and decorative arts, it will be the city’s most extensive show of American art ever. It will feature historic artists like Mary Cassatt, Frederic Edwin Church, and Horace Pippin as well as contemporary practitioners like Rina Banerjee, Mickalene Thomas, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith among other indigenous, immigrant, and under-represented creators. On public view for the first time will be more than 120 works from the Middletons’ collection, including examples by Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, and John Singer Sargent. —B.B.

“State Fairs: Growing American Craft” at the Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.August 22, 2025–September 7, 2026  
Liz Schreiber, State Fairs: Growing American Craft (2024–2025). Courtesy of Liz Schreiber.
The Smithsonian Institution bills this show as the first ever to deal with artists’ contributions to the great American tradition of the state fair. Spanning more than 240 works from the mid-19th century to the present by artists and 4-H clubs from 43 states and tribal nations, the show takes in features like heritage villages, parades, dairy barns, and rodeos. There’s no shortage of novelties. Viewers will see the size-96 boots of Big Tex, from Texas’s state fair; a life-size cow made of butter by Iowa’s official butter sculptor, Sarah Pratt; and a pyramid of 700 glass jars holding preserved fruits and vegetables, by star canner Rod Zeitler, also from the Hawkeye State. What’s more, artist Justin Favela offers the site-specific installation Capilla de Maíz (Maize Chapel), exploring the significance of corn with shimmering gold-fringed walls that combine two Mexican art practices, cartonería and the lavish Churrigueresque ornamentation of 18th-century Mexican Catholic churches. —B.B.

“Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence” at DAR Museum, Washington, D.C.Through December 31, 2025
Unidentified photographer, Pennsylvania, Craftsperson with a Hammer (ca. 1863).
How can crafts give voice to a righteous cry for freedom? That’s the question posed by this show, co-curated by the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive and spanning more than 50 objects, including furniture, metals, ceramics, textiles, art, tools, and personal accessories. It features items created by free and enslaved craftspeople and artisans, men and women, some named, some not, from the 18th through the 21st centuries, starting in the Revolutionary War years, when Black people were already calling for liberation. Among them is a table made for Thomas Jefferson’s use by John Hemmings (half-brother to Sally) and a gorgeous silver coffeepot from Charleston, South Carolina, likely created by a Black silversmith named Abraham. Following its DAR outing, the show will travel to the Gibbes Museum of Art, Historic New Orleans Collection, the Tennessee State Museum, and the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. —B.B.

A Fresh Historical View
“The Declaration’s Journey“ at the American Revolution Museum, PhiladelphiaOctober 18, 2025–January 3, 2027
A Pennsylvania Evening Post printing of the Declaration of Independence on July 6, 1776 from the Museum’s collection, and a commemorative printing of the Indian declaration, on loan from the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Courtesy of Museum of the American Revolution.
In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was ratified, Philadelphia printer John Dunlap set to work producing the first poster-sized editions of the proclamation to be dispatched to the states. Today, only 25 of Dunlap’s printings survive—one of which anchors the American Revolution Museum’s forthcoming show that traces the Declaration’s impact. At the exhibition, the Dunlap broadside joins other rare iterations of the historical text—a German-language copy, the first newspaper printing—as well as documents of the independence movements in some 100 other nations. Similar charters from India, Ireland, Haiti, and Mexico, among others, are going on view to explore how the principles—and contradictions—of the American Declaration of Independence resonated across the globe. —M.C.

“Transformed by Revolution” at Concord Museum, ConcordOctober 3, 2025–February 22, 2026
Joseph Siffred Duplessis, Benjamin Franklin (1778). Courtesy of Concord Museum.
What did the American Revolution mean for communities across a young nation? Concord Museum, in one of its three exhibitions commemorating America’s 250th year of independence, will unpack how the idea of belonging took shape around and after the 1775 war. Furniture and domestic objects will shed light on the efforts of postwar mutual aid organizations, while textiles capture intimate narratives of childhood and family. Harvard College’s temporary relocation to Concord in 1775 (its so-called year of exile) is also explored here through 18th-century scientific equipment loaned from Harvard University, as well as a rarely seen portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Siffred Duplessis. The spotlight, however, belongs to the show’s gathering of maps, land records, and other archival materials that chart the networks of care established by Black and indigenous groups in the face of postwar precarity. —M.C.

“Facing Freedom in America” at Chicago History Museum, ChicagoSpring 2026
A copy of the Declaration of Independence in the collection of the Chicago History Museum. Courtesy of Chicago History Museum.
Festivities at the Chicago History Museum kick off with a refresh of its long-running exhibition “Facing Freedom in America,” which explores the many ways Americans have sought to define freedom—whether through the struggle for citizenship or public protest. Throughout 2026, the institution will also unveil new works created by four artists in response to the nation’s founding documents. Local artist Vida Sačić has created a type-based piece that engages with the Declaration of Independence; Barrett Keithley, founder of arts organization Paint the City, will reflect on the U.S. Constitution; painter Dorian Sylvain will contemplate the Thirteenth Amendment; and multidisciplinary artist Carlos Flores’s portable monument will tackle the Northwest Ordinance. —M.C.

“In Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness” at the National Museum of American History, Washington D.C.Spring 2026
Thomas Jefferson’s portable desk. Courtesy of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
The Smithsonian institution is going all out for America’s 250th with a major show spanning its three floors, bringing together 250 objects that represent key chapters in the nation’s history. The star-spangled banner that U.S. soldiers raised at Fort Henry after a decisive victory over British forces in 1812? Check. The desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence? Check. And the U.S. Navy gunboat that was part of the fleet that held off British forces in 1776? It’ll be here, too, undergoing an ongoing, onsite conservation. Other rarely exhibited artifacts will be on view as well. —M.C. More

The first U.K. public institutional solo exhibition of Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara has become one of the major cultural attractions in London since its opening in June. To industry professionals such as art advisors and those in the trade, this retrospective at Hayward Gallery is a must-see, as Nara is one of the world’s top-selling living artists from Asia. Art world celebs such as fellow Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and collector RM of BTS were also spotted at the gallery.
But more importantly, Nara’s iconic wide-eyed, child-like characters with an attitude resonate with a much wider audience well beyond the usual art crowd. Over the years, the artist has amassed a huge following around the world who adore the aesthetics and appreciate the immediacy of the messages embedded in his work, whether they are inspired by his childhood memories or responses to natural disasters and political injustice. “I think a lot about the nature, people, and the world around us,” the artist told the media during the preview. And these topics are what many people care about.
The blockbuster show features more than 150 works, ranging from paintings and drawings to sculptures and installations spanning four decades of the artist’s oeuvre, an expansion of its previous iteration at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden.
Hayward Gallery declined to reveal information about the sales of tickets and merchandise. “We are pleased with the response to the exhibition and its popularity speaks to the universal appeal of Nara’s work. People connect with his works emotionally—whether they are Gen Zs that may have first encountered his work through social media, or older members of the public who may have watched his rise over the past four decades,” Yung Ma, Hayward Gallery’s senior curator, noted in an email.
Below are five key works to understanding this highly anticipated London exhibition, which runs through August 31.

I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (2017)
Yoshitomo Nara, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (2017). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Featured in the spacious gallery on the upper level, which Nara described as “the chapel,” a space that invites visitors to quietly contemplate the works before them, this large-scale painting is among a handful of works that cannot be photographed. On loan from a private collection, this painting graced the cover of the artist’s 2020 eponymous monograph and was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Last year, the work made its auction debut and became one of the top lots at a Sotheby’s Hong Kong sale after it sold for $12.3 million, including fees.
Art market headlines aside, this is truly a mesmerizing painting, and no photo can ever do it justice. Looking at it up close, I felt I could see an entire universe in this character’s starry eyes. Rather than seeing these paintings of his iconic characters as self-portraits, “I see them as self-reflections,” said the 65-year-old. “There are many reflections of my inner self. They can be good, they can be bad. I hope viewers can see themselves in these works too.”

My Drawing Room 2008, Bedroom Included (2008)
Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara. Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Upon entering the exhibition, one is immediately drawn to this cute little hut that looks as if it came straight out of an anime. This installation is a reimagined studio space of Nara. In this playhouse-like safe space, one can find his drawings, vintage toys, and other items collected by the artist, who enjoyed his freedom during his childhood despite being alone. Even though the artist is not there, the lights are still on and one can still hear the music being played. Visitors aren’t allowed to enter this little house, but they can catch a glimpse of Nara’s inner world through the windows. One should allow themselves enough time to take a good look at this meticulous creation, the first of more house installations to come.
“While [my life] may have objectively looked like loneliness, I was very happy with all of my surroundings—I will always really appreciate this environment because it’s original to me,” Nara said in an earlier interview with Artnet News.

Nara’s Record Sleeves
A staff member looks at a selection of record sleeves from Yoshitomo Nara’s personal collection that he finds particularly inspiring. Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images.
When Nara was nine years old, he accidentally picked up the transmissions coming from the Far East Network of Armed Forces Radio from a U.S. Air Force base in Misawa in Japan’s Aomori prefecture, where Nara grew up. He initially did not understand the language spoken on these broadcasts, but it did not stop him from appreciating the music. Since then, music has played an irreplaceable role in Nara’s life and his artistic creations. He also served as a radio show host at Shibuya Radio in 2016 for three years. When Nara held his first international retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2021, he created a walled installation with the vinyl record sleeves from his personal collection. Luckily, Nara brings this installation to the London show, offering fans a glimpse of some of the deepest cultural influences on the artist.
Drawings
Yoshitomo Nara, Untitled (1997). Courtesy of the artist and Hayward Gallery.
The large-scale polished paintings are certainly the main attraction of the show, but it is Nara’s drawings that take the audience on a journey through his inner world, the evolution of his artistic practice, and his take on the world around him. The beauty of this exhibition is that it features a large number of Nara’s drawings executed over the past decades, some even dating back to the early 1990s. Some of his drawings on envelopes or found materials appear to be conceived in an ad hoc manner. Some, such as the one featured above, reflect a moment of angst that many of us have experienced growing up. These drawings are scattered across the exhibition, but do pay attention to a series of small, amusing drawings hung on the wall of the corridor of the upper gallery. You can certainly see yourself in one of them.

Miss Forest, A Pedestal (2023)
A staff member looks at Miss Forest, A Pedestal (2023) by Yoshitomo Nara. Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images.
Sculptures play an increasingly important role in Nara’s oeuvre. Art historian Yeewan Koon, who curated the artist’s sculpture-themed exhibition “My Imperfect Self” that opened at Blum Los Angeles at the beginning of the year, noted that the artist took up sculpture in response to the trauma of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that hit his home turf on March 11, 2011—the worst earthquake recorded in Japan’s history. “What he really wanted to do was to leave his physical presence onto the clay itself, a way to make permanence feel more solid,” Koon said earlier, ahead of the opening of the exhibition. She also observed that Nara’s approach to sculpture has evolved over time, from “wrestling” with the clay to “nurturing” the earthy material from 2016 onwards.
Conceived in 2023, the large-scale Miss Forest, A Pedestal depicts a “forest child” with her eyes closed, looking calm and serene despite being surrounded by the crowd and chaos. A herd of small dogs congregates on the flat surface of Miss Forest’s head, forming a crown for this character that appears to be at one with nature. She might be alone, but she is definitely not lonely.
The exhibition of Yoshitomo Nara is on view until August 31, 2025 at Southbank Center. More