Eliana Willis

Amy Sherald shot to superstardom when her portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama debuted in 2018, and now the artist will have a homecoming of sorts at a major museum show at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Opening in September 2025, “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” constitutes the most expansive exhibition of the artist to date. Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art, the show will debut in California this November before moving to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and later to the Portrait Gallery. It is sure to be a blockbuster, when the dual portraits of Michelle and Barack Obama were unveiled at the Portrait Gallery in 2018, the showing nearly doubled the museum’s attendance.
Amy Sherald in the studio with For love,andfor country (2022). Photo: Kelvin Bulluck. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The New York-based artist explores the African American experience in the United States through her intimate portraits of Black Americans—primarily women—set against strikingly colorful, minimalist backgrounds. Over the course of her 15-year-long career, Sherald’s paintings have often commemorated the highs and lows of America’s recent history. In addition to the Obama portrait, the exhibition includes her powerful 2020 portrait of Breonna Taylor, created to honor Taylor’s life after she was tragically killed in her Louisville, Kentucky, home. The portrait became a significant symbol in protests across the country and the world, and achieved even greater notice when it was used as the cover for Vanity Fair. Another highlight of the show is the debut of For Love, and for Country (2022), recently acquired for SFMoMA’s permanent collection.
The cover of Vanity Fair‘s September 2020 issue, featuring a portrait of Breonna Taylor by Amy Sherald. Courtesy of Vanity Fair.
Sherald’s work captures Black Americans’ everyday lives, transcending time and place by removing details that could situate her subjects in a specific context. Her process often begins with photographing individuals she meets by chance or in passing, allowing her to transform each subject into a painted canvas that invites viewers to contemplate their complex interiority and stories beyond the visible.
A distinctive aspect of Sherald’s work is her use of a grayscale palette for skin tones, through a process called grisaille—a Renaissance-era technique where paintings are nearly monochromatic. By depicting her subjects in shades of grey, Sherald emphasizes race as a social construct rather than an absolute identity, challenging viewers to engage with the individuals she portrays without assumptions based on skin color. This technique has become a hallmark of her style, positioning her work as an exploration of identity, representation, and selfhood within contemporary America.
Amy Sherald, Welfare Queen (2012). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, ©Amy Sherald.
Curated by Rhea L. Combs, director of curatorial affairs at the National Portrait Gallery, American Sublime is a celebration of Sherald’s precise technical skill and her ability to convey emotional depth through her art. “The Portrait Gallery’s presentation of American Sublime celebrates a full circle of sorts,” Combs states, reflecting on Sherald’s journey as the first woman and the first African-American the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the museum in 2016 to becoming a globally recognized artist represented by Hauser & Wirth, with her work in public collections from Baltimore Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, The Columbus Museum, Long Museum, Shanghai and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, amongst many more. Combs emphasizes Sherald’s capability to draw viewers in through both her technical acumen and the empathy that radiates from her portraits, prompting audiences to consider her subjects’ identities and experiences in an entirely new way.
Accompanying the exhibition is a new publication by SFMOMA, in association with Yale University Press, which chronicles Sherald’s career, artistic influences, and significant impact on the contemporary art landscape.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime is a landmark exhibition that represents Sherald’s most ambitious exploration of American identity, history, and portraiture to date. Her work places Black experiences firmly within the canon of American art, challenging conventional portrayals and offering an intimate view of contemporary life. This mid-career survey underscores Sherald’s influence, blending empathy, historical awareness, and a visionary approach to portraiture that continues to captivate audiences.
“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” will be on view at SFMoMA from November 16, 2024 to March 9, 2025; at the Whitney Museum from April 9 to August 3, 2025; and at the Portrait Gallery from September 19, 2025 to February 22, 2026. More

Henri Matisse’s The Swimming Pool (1952) is a skeletal vision of summer. It features only ripples of blue against a tan background, so it’s the viewer who conjures the leaping bodies, the shapes of water, the dance of sunshine.
If future generations are to enjoy this vibrancy, said its steward, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the work needs to be taken down and kept somewhere dark for a few years. Ever since MoMA’s exhibition that explored Matisse’s cut-outs a decade ago, The Swimming Pool has seemed a permanent fixture at the museum, guaranteed to be on the wall along with masterpieces like Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) or Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948).
Installation view of Henri Matisse’s “The Swimming Pool” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: courtesy MoMA.
The museum, after all, has long kept it on view after leading a five-year conservation of the gouache-on-paper piece that aimed to restore its original colors. It has hung in a room that matches the dimensions of Matisse’s dining room in Nice, for which it was designed. Ahead of the coming deinstallation, MoMA is hosting a mini reprisal of the 2014 exhibition with “Matisse’s Cut-Outs: A Celebration,” which brings together 10 works famously created by cutting painted paper with scissors.
Matisse turned to crafting these works after undergoing surgery in 1941. Painting had become a painful ordeal, and he often worked from bed or in a wheelchair, carefully shaping sheets of paper before having them arranged with the aid of assistants. Matisse may have been old, infirm, and oftentimes irascible, but he found a new mode of expression in his final decade, one of bold color and deceptive simplicity that has only furthered the brilliance of his legacy.
Henri Matisse, Christmas Eve (1952). Photo: MoMA.
He would produce more than 250 paper cut-outs, some, like The Swimming Pool, spanning whole walls, others designed for a single sheet of paper. These experiments began with Jazz (1947), a series of 20 that he created for Verve, a French art magazine. The original title was Circus, and the theme flows through the works in the form of prancing horses and contorted bodies. They were, Matisse said, “lively and violent” images that crystallized “memories of circuses, folktales, and voyages.”
Henri Matisse beside a stained glass at the Chapel of Vence, France, based on a cut-out. Photo: Universal History Archive via Getty Images.
A highlight arrives with Christmas Eve (1952), a seasonal stained-glass window created by French glass master Paul Bony. It’s based on a Matisse cutout (which appears nearby) that was commissioned by Life magazine for its New York headquarters. Scattered with bright, long-limbed stars and blocks of yellow and green, it’s a standard nativity image that gestures towards the increasingly abstract direction Matisse was headed.
“Matisse’s Cut-Outs: A Celebration” runs at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, from November 9, 2024–January 20, 2025. More

A year into the current Israel-Gaza War, Palestine Museum U.S. in Woodbridge, Connecticut, is staging an exhibition in London featuring work from 25 Palestinian artists, including several currently trapped in Gaza.
“Art of Palestine: From the River to the Sea” is the second exhibition this year that the museum has held at P21 Gallery, which is dedicated to contemporary Arab art and culture. The show underscores how conflict has reshaped Palestinian culture over the course of decades.
For Palestinian artists who have lived in constant fear over the last year while facing continual displacement since Israel began its offensive after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, showing their art “is extremely important,” Faisal Saleh, the museum’s founder and exhibition’s curator, told me. “Psychologically, it’s just evidence that they’re still alive, basically.”
One body of work in the show is titled just that, “I’m Still Alive” by Mohammed Alhaj. His daily sketches, done in ink on paper, are a continuing record of daily life in Gaza during the war.
Mohammed Alhaj, Displacement, Gaza (2024). Courtesy of the Palestine Museum U.S.
The show also features a selection of children’s drawings, but ones that were made in the wake of Operation Cast Lead, a deadly Israeli offensive in 2009. The drawings, made in art therapy class, depict airplanes dropping bombs and other acts of war. They are a reminder of the long-running nature of the war between Israel and Palestine and of the innocent children who are growing up witnessing unspeakable violence, facing death every day.
Because it is currently impossible to transport artwork out of Gaza, all of the pieces in the show from artists who have been unable to evacuate are represented by prints based on digital images, not originals.
Bayan Abu, Nahleh (2014).
From the start of the war, Saleh was originally in touch with eight artists in Gaza, two of whom were able to escape before the closing of the Rafah crossing. Internet outages make communications unreliable, and the quality of calls can vary widely, but Salah tries to stay in regular contact with as many of them as he can.
The situation on the ground is dire, both from a humanitarian perspective, and a cultural one. Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 killed 1,200 people and saw 240 taken hostage. Since then, Israel’s counter-offensive has killed more than 41,870 people in Gaza, among them 16,765 children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas.
“Most artists in Gaza lost all their artwork. It got destroyed with the bombings,” Saleh said. “The Palestinian art institutions, a cultural institutions in Gaza, they’re all destroyed. Art museums, libraries, bookstores that sell old books, anything that has to do with culture and art in Gaza, Israel deliberately destroyed.”
Nabil Anani, In Pursuit of Utopia #7 (2020). Photo courtesy Nabil Anani.
Saleh was born in the West Bank in 1951, just a few years after Israeli forces took over his family’s village in 1948, forcing them to leave their home. He founded the museum in 2018 as a way to tell the story of the Palestinian people, retiring from his HR company in 2023 to focus full time on the institution.
He has found it a challenge to get media coverage for the museum’s programming—and its only gotten more difficult over the last year. In 2022, the Venice Biennale selected a show from the Palestine Museum U.S. as one of its official collateral events. This year, its submission did not make the cut. (It still went ahead as planned, and is on view through November 24.)
“There is the physical destruction of artwork and architecture.… The more subtle danger is the attempt by Israel to erase the Palestinian culture. And this eraser is taking place through censorship,” Saleh said, citing the cancellation of a planned exhibition by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby and the decision of the Noguchi Museum in Queens to ban its employees from wearing keffiyehs.
Samia Halaby, Venetian Red (2021). Photo courtesy of Samia Halab.
As we spoke, I was shocked to see that Microsoft Teams, which was live transcribing our phone call, censored the very word “keffiyeh,” as if it were an expletive and not just a traditional Middle Eastern garment.
Halaby, who is perhaps Palestine’s most famous living artist at 87, is one of the artists included in the exhibition, with one of her abstract canvases. But the show also features artists who are much lesser known, and who are addressing the war in Gaza in a much more direct way.
Tala Abu Nuwar, Three Women with Oranges (2024).
Two works are by Khalil Khalidy, a doctor and artist who had the chance to escape Gaza, but chose to remain, treating the sick and wounded.
One looks at first like a delicate Renaissance red chalk drawing of a youthful angel. Khalidy mixed the blood of an anonymous Palestinian boy who died on the hospital floor after a bombing, paying tribute to one of the war’s many unknown victims. The second shows a young girl crying as she eats a popsicle—a reference to the ice cream trucks pressed into service as mobile morgues because of the ever-growing death toll in Gaza.
Both include a QR code that links to the doctor’s Instagram posts in which he explains the dark inspiration for the beautiful paintings.
Khalil Khalidy did this painting of a boy angel of using paint mixed with the blood of a Palestinian boy who died in a bombing. Photo courtesy of the Palestine Museum U.S. Photo courtesy of the Palestine Museum U.S.
“We’re not showing gory things,” Saleh said. “It’s very subtle and the way art is supposed to be. It’s respectful and thought provoking and it’s getting some ideas across about what’s going on here.”
The exhibition is also showcasing nine selections from Palestinian History Tapestry, a project of 100 pieces of embroidery by Palestinian women telling the story of the nation’s cultural history.
“Each one of them is in beautiful colors, reflecting work of hundreds and hundreds of hours that was done by Palestinian women in refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, the West Bank,
Gaza, and other places,” Saleh said of the project, which recently joined the museum collection.
Palestine History Tapestry, Henna Party, Embroidery. Photo courtesy of the Palestine Museum U.S.
The exhibition draws its title from the controversial slogan calling for freedom for Palestinians in the geographic area between Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—historically the state of Palestine, but now all part of Israel. But for Saleh, the title is meant just to be factual.
“There are Palestinians who live from the river to the sea. They live in Haifa, in Jaffa and Anata, and all these places in Israel proper—and some, you know, in the West Bank under occupation,” he said. “We’re showing the art of these people.
And they happen to live from the river to the sea.
We’re not even saying that they should be free.
We’re just saying this is their art.”
“Art of Palestine: From the River to the Sea” is on view at P21 Gallery, 21-27 Chalton Street, Somers Town, London, September 27–December 21, 2024.
“Foreigners in Their Homeland” is on view at Palazzo Mora, Cannaregio, 2978, 30123, Venice on April 20–November 24, 2024. More

Despite the appearance of progress, the art world’s inclination to frame women artists as “rediscovered” falls into a well-worn trope that continues to center masculinist ideals. There’s definitely an increasing appetite for women’s artwork—especially on the secondary market, where the value of work by women is rising considerably faster than that of work by men. However, while the “forgotten” artist narrative seems to signify a victory for women, it doesn’t challenge the structures that marginalized them in the first place. Instead, these artists find themselves shoehorned into exhibitions and retrospectives; in place to preserve the myth of meritocracy.
In 1988, the feminist art collective The Guerrilla Girls created their sardonic list, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist. Perks included: “Knowing your career might pick up after you’re 80,” and, “being included in revised editions of art history.” This much is true for Monica Sjöö, a pioneering artist whose first-ever retrospective at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet came some 18 years after her death. Also a writer and zealous activist, Sjöö’s exclusion from art institutions was telling of the academy’s male-dominated agenda at the time. There was little space for women artists, let alone women whose paintings of giant, elephantine phalluses and gods giving birth were deemed too blasphemous for public display. Artists like Sjöö—and others like Leonora Carrington and Pauline Boty, also recently “rediscovered”—are still constrained by this narrative, their work seemingly celebrated but largely reduced to their gender.
Installation view, “Lucy Otter, Studio Jumps,” Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 2024. Courtesy of Gabriel Sierra and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. ©Gabriel Sierra 2024. Photo: Mark Blower.
This brings us to Lucy Otter. Pippy Houldsworth is showing a series of paintings by the abstract artist so unknown because she—quite literally—doesn’t exist. A character from the as of yet unpublished novel by Colombian artist Gabriel Sierra, Otter’s biography is  impressive. Alaskan-born but now Cornwall-based, the character is a former landscape gardener and was once a guest professor at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The paintings on show at Pippy Houldsworth’s “Studio Jumps,” supposedly made between 1978 and 1979, were created for her “childhood friend” Paul Hickey’s band, Duchamp Widows. The band is also a fictional construct, although their EP—and merch—are very much available for purchase at the gallery.
There are a few ways to look at Sierra’s project here. One interpretation might see the ruse as a bit of fun and ingenuity. Sierra, after all, is far from the only artist to use an alter-ego—Marcel Duchamp himself adopted the alias of Rrose Sélavy when toying with femininity in Man Ray’s photographs. Colombian creatives, too, have a long history of playing with identity to challenge social constraints, from the sculptures of Doris Salcedo and performance pieces by María José Arjona to the personas adopted by musicians like J Balvin. Yet the decision to make Otter a woman seems less like a playful experiment with alter ego, and more like a pointed critique of how the art world fixates on identity over substance.
Sierra’s work as a conceptual artist, with its focus on site-specific interventions and institutional critique, is far removed from Otter’s gestural abstraction and material focus. For his piece, Untitled (The Day as a Hole in the Middle of the Night), created for the 2011 Lyon Biennial, he cut out a large section of the gallery’s wooden floor, suspending it from the ceiling to expose the structure beneath and challenge the viewer’s sense of space. By contrast, Otter’s work emphasizes gestural abstraction with heavy impasto, where materiality becomes the primary focus. 
Installation view, “Lucy Otter, Studio Jumps,” Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 2024. Courtesy of Gabriel Sierra and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London. ©Gabriel Sierra 2024. Photo: Mark Blower.
This all left me with several questions. Are artist’s biographies really so integral to the way we interpret their work that Sierra felt compelled to create Otter to be able to experiment with a new mode of creation? Or was the artist really moved to create Otter as a comment on the trend of “rediscovering” women artists? The answer might lie in unpacking why Sierra chose to present this work under a female alias, particularly one whose work supposedly dates back to the 1970s. 
On the one hand, Sierra’s project could be read as a commentary on how the art world disproportionately values the identities and credentials of artists, especially women, over the actual content of their work. On the other hand, the presence of merchandise and the promise of a future novel give the project a somewhat gimmicky feel, as if it’s less about critiquing this idea and more about capitalizing on it.
Here, the line between critique and mimicry becomes blurred. Indeed, much of the “rediscovering” of female artists done by writers, galleries, and institutions today seems entirely predicated on gender, overlooking the economic and sociopolitical conditions that shaped their lives and their ability to make art at the time. Similarly, Otter’s career—an entirely fabricated one—is unburdened by the struggles that real women artists of her supposed era faced. Yet it takes a certain kind of privilege to adopt a female persona, complete with scholarly credentials and historical context, and capitalize on it without having to bear any of the weight that comes with that identity. In doing so, Sierra risks not only trivializing the challenges faced by these women but also distracting from the real, deserving artists of that period, whom the zeitgeist is shining a light on—for now. Only time will tell whether Sierra’s project deepens this critique or merely adds to the noise. More

Oded Lifshitz clutches a microphone and addresses a conference opposing Israeli settlement of Gaza, in 1972, in the dining room of Kibbutz Nir Oz. Behind him, a map of Gaza frames his figure. The words Oded delivered that day are gone as is now 85-year-old Oded, who is one of an estimated 101 hostages who still remain in Hamas captivity in Gaza. It is only by chance that the black-and-white photograph documenting this moment, taken by his wife Yocheved, survives.
Both long-time peace activists, the Lifshitzs were taken hostage from their home in Nir Oz by Hamas on October 7, 2023, yet Yocheved has held fast to her principles since her release from captivity last October. “We must reach an agreement that allows both sides to live,” Lifshitz said in a recent interview. When she was freed, she famously shook hands with her captor and said shalom—the Hebrew word for hello, goodbye, and peace. “The period that I was held in captivity only strengthened my belief,” she said.
While Lifshitz’s convictions remain intact, her lifetime photographic archive spanning nearly 70 years was lost when Hamas incinerated her home. Only 14 of her photographs remain because they were kept elsewhere, and these form a recently opened exhibition at Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum, Surviving Moments, organized in collaboration with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum and dedicated to the memory of the victims of October 7. The exhibition joins several others across Israel marking the first anniversary of the Hamas attack that day.
Oded Lifshitz speaks at the conference against dispossession and settlement in the Gaza Strip, held in the old dining room at Kibbutz Nir Oz, 1972. Photo: Yocheved Lifshitz. Private collection, Lifshitz family.
Surviving Moments opens with images from the 1972 conference opposing Israeli settlement of Gaza and closes with a snapshot of Nir Oz residents protesting in favor of Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in the 1980s. “I make a very clear political statement here, connected to the situation today. It’s like we’ve gone back to the past,” said Raz Samira, the exhibition’s curator deputy director of the museum. “History shouldn’t repeat itself.”
Across town, a solo exhibition by Umm al-Fahm–based artist Said Abu Shakra also grapples with the regressions and horrors of the past year at the nonprofit Maya Gallery. Exhibiting expressive mixed-media works all created since October 7, Abu Shakra’s drawings show wild animals fighting each other to the death. There are no sides clearly pegged against each other in his world of hyenas, tigers, and bulls—just violence and a will to survive.
“I’m trying to say, this is our life today,” Abu Shakra said, who noted that he suffered a period of creative paralysis after the attack. “Our life today through the existential war of animals.”
Also included in the show is a separate series of drawings of women, including the artist’s mother. Another room in the gallery displays a paper scroll measuring tens of meters that Abu Shakra drew, a little at a time, as a sort of wartime journal. The unfurled segment on view pans from blindfolded captives loaded onto a pickup truck to crowds surrendering as an airstrike attacks overhead, and women mourning dead children.
Said Abu Shakra, Hyenas (2023). Photo: Yigal Pardo
The artist believes that the work he’s created over the past year differs from everything he created before. Before, said the artist, his existential fear wasn’t as acute. Now he focuses even more on the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery that he founded in 1996—which received official recognition as a museum this July from the Israeli Ministry of Culture—as a meeting place promoting dialogue and mutual respect.
“How can I be a proud Palestinian in the State of Israel, and also the Israeli who feels respect for the fact that he’s both here and there?” Abu Shakra asked himself. “How can I become a cultural bridge?”
Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 killed 1,200 people and saw 240 taken hostage. Since then, Israel’s counter-offensive has killed more than 41,870 people in Gaza, among them 16,765 children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas.
Last week, Israel launched a ground operation across its northern border into Lebanon targeting the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Hezbollah first attacked Israel on October 8, 2023, and has said it will not stop striking Israel until a ceasefire in Gaza is reached.
The violence of the region and its imprint on the landscape is at the heart of Israeli photographer Gaston Zvi Ickowicz’s latest body of work. His exhibition, Field, at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum, features images of one of the sites of the October 7 attack: A field that Nova Festival attendees escaped to as they ran from Hamas. Photographed repeatedly by the artist in the year since, the images in are devoid of people but charged with memory.
Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Re’im Parking Lot (2024). Courtesy of the artist.
Ickowicz has photographed various landscapes in the region since the early 2000s, including Gaza, the West Bank, and towns along the Gaza-Israel border. Never directly showing violent geopolitical tensions, his photographs expose the impact of these struggles on the landscape. In addition to one large field, in this series he photographed ditches and bushes where Nova Festival survivors told him they had hid for hours, as well as unidentifiable objects left at the festival site, later identified as molten car parts by archaeologists and criminal identification researchers working at the site.
Ickowicz also produced a video work, exhibited in a large-scale triptych screen to create immersive experience. It includes footage taken in 2018 by photojournalist Roee Idan, who had collaborated with Ickowicz on a work called Sunset above Gaza. After Idan was murdered at his home in Kfar Aza on October 7, in front of his three-year-old daughter Avigail who was then taken hostage, Ickowicz received permission from Idan’s family to incorporate his raw materials into Field.
The feeling that comes across when watching the video is of “disorientation, an inability to place yourself in relation to the space,” said exhibition curator and the museum’s curator of photography, Gilad Reich. “Like the survivors who ran in the field without knowing which direction they were running in and what awaited them at the other end of the field.”
Elsewhere in the country, exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (which borders what has now become Hostages Square) highlight paintings by Kfar Aza-based Tal Mazliach who survived the attack, and a group exhibition of artworks by Israeli artists created since October 7. A site-specific installation by Arab-Israeli artist Muhammad Abo Salme, Cascade, transforms 500 kilometers of metal dog-tag chains into a weighted and weightless image of mourning.
“Surviving Moments” is on view through December 14 at the Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel.
“Said Abu Shakra” is on view through October 28 at Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel.
“Field” in on view through June 14, 2025 at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.  More

From Biz Markie’s brushed gold nameplate to T-Pain’s “Big Ass Chain” beset with hundreds of diamonds and  Erykah Badu’s 22-karat gold Ma’at grills, inspired by the eponymous Egyptian goddess, 50 years of hip-hop jewelry history is now on display in all its blinged-out glory at New York’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). As a playlist by DJ Woof sets the mood, these gilded and diamond-encrusted necklaces, rings, and grills chart how hip-hop’s custom-crafted, oversized accessories became, like their wearers’ music, forms of radical, unabashed self-expression.
“Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry” may feel like a long way from the Bronx streets where hip-hop was born, and that’s part of the point. The exhibition demonstrates how hip-hop has spread so far beyond the margins that we may be only beginning to understand its influence on the culture at large.
Slick Rick. Photo: Janette Beckman, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery.
“Bringing the ‘Ice Cold’ exhibit to the American Museum of Natural History is a testament to the cultural significance of this art form and culture [and its] enduring impact on style and society,” said guest curator Vikki Tobak, whose 2022 book, Ice Cold. A Hip-Hop Jewelry History (Taschen), served as inspiration for the show.
Indeed, the show’s curatorial team points out that the exhibition is about a lot more than just bling.
“Both as a cultural symbol and as an aesthetic, hip-hop jewelry reflects deeper issues about wealth, identity, and the American Dream,” said Tobak via e-mail. “It has always been about more than just conspicuous consumption and more a visible statement of overcoming obstacles and transforming one’s circumstances.”
FERG. Photo: C.T. Robert.
Take the iconic label chains in the show. There’s the diamond-studded Roc-A-Fella medallion, in honor of the record label co-founded by Jay Z; there’s Nipsey Hussle’s All Money In A$I necklace, referring to the record label of the same name,  founded by the late rapper; and there’s Coach K’s diamond and 14-karat white gold QC necklace, signifying Quality Control Music. These, Tobak points out, are veritable symbols of entrepreneurship, the “hustle” of trying to make it, in “a grind outside of conventional opportunities that weren’t always made accessible to these artists.”
On the curatorial team, Tobak is joined by hip-hop legend Slick Rick, Kevin “Coach K” Lee, founder and COO of the Quality Control Music record label, Karam Gill, who made the 2021 documentary series Ice Cold, and other contributors.
The ever-larger dazzle of these jewels also challenges what success in America is supposed to look like and who gets to show it, argues Gill. The project, including his film on the topic, “has shed light on larger conversations around societal perception and the American Dream,” he said in press materials. “This exhibition pushes that further in a powerful way.”
“Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry.” Photo: Alvaro Keding/© American Museum of Natural History.
In addition, hip-hop jewelry is shown here as a personal expression of one’s culture and life, made popular by Black and Latinx communities. “People get so stuck on how much these pieces cost, but truly, even the early simpler gold pieces speak to [their] deeper cultural and personal significance,” added Tobak.
Slick Rick’s iconic eye patch, for instance, is an intrinsic part of his theatrical, narrative style and persona, while also a rejection of conventional ideas of displaying wealth.
Drake, The Crown Jewel of Toronto Pendant. This pendant—designed by Alex Moss in 2023 to celebrate Drake’s hometown of Toronto—boasts multicolored diamonds and rubies on 18-karat gold and features the mascots for the Toronto Raptors and the Toronto Blue Jays wrapped around Toronto’s CN Tower. Alvaro Keding/© AMNH
Additionally, the show spotlights the jewelry makers who worked closely with these artists to create accessories not seen anywhere before, like K & I jewelers in Brooklyn’s Albee Square Mall, and a later generation of now well-known jewelers like Tito Caciedo of Manny’s New York and Jacob Arabo of Jacob & Co.
Ghostface Killah. Photograph by Atsuko Tanaka
Legendary pieces in the show include Notorious B.I.G.’s giant “Jesus” necklace; Slick Rick’s crown, eye patch, and five-foot-long chain; and Ghostface Killah’s five-pound Eagle arm band-cum-wearable monument. Another favorite example of hip-hop’s newer phase of bold expression is the Nicki Minaj “Barbie” pendant in gold, diamonds, and Barbie-pink enamel.
Nicki Minaj, Barbie Pendant. Nicki Minaj’s iconic Barbie pendant—which boasts 54.47 carats of diamonds on 18-karat gold and bright Barbie-pink enamel—was made by Ashna Mehta in 2022 and is the most recent commissioned by Minaj, whose first Barbie pendant dates to 2009. Alvaro Keding/© AMNH
“For many pioneers, these jewelry pieces also carried symbolic weight… literally, as in the case of nameplate pieces from artists April Walker and Scorpio, wearing your name on your body for the world to see,” said Tobak. “To really see and be seen.”
These artists, along with their bejeweled aesthetic, are certainly being seen now. In addition to AMNH, other cultural institutions have been celebrating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary since it began last year. (Why stop?)
But the AMNH show marks a new level of acknowledgment. What’s more, while setting up the show, several of the artists whose jewelry is on display, including Roxanne Shante, Joey Bada$$, FERG, and Nas, all said they had come to the museum as children on school trips. Returning now, as makers of cultural history, to see their own artifacts in the global and historical context of the museum’s hallowed halls of gems and minerals, is its own kind of priceless jewel.
“Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry” is on view at the American Museum of Natural History, 200 Central Park West, New York, until January 5, 2025. More

London is brimming with brand-new gallery shows, all freshly mounted, as Frieze Week gets underway. Here are six that we think are unmissable, from Alison Wilding’s “sexy” abstract sculptures to the occultist paintings of Leonora Carrington and Linder.
“Jordan Wolfson: Mirror and Bear” at Sadie Coles HQ
Jordan Wolfson, detail of Mirror and Bear (2024). © Jordan Wolfson. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
Since his first inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 2006, few artists are able to polarize audiences quite as acidically as Jordan Wolfson. While the “shock” aspect of shock value is generally fleeting, the 44-year-old artist has been able to alchemize that feeling into something that has lasted nearly two decades. At Sadie Coles HQ, a new sculptural animation by the artist behind the infamously animated Female Figure will occupy the gallery in his show called “Mirror and Bear,” on view through November 7.
According to the gallery’s text, the piece will “blend the childlike with the obscene.” This dichotomy is at the heart of many famous works by Wolfson, who often co-opts the visual aesthetic of children’s animation to give his animatronic sculptures a sense of depravity, and an implied loss-of-innocence arc. As the world’s conversation about virtual reality’s place in society continues, this new work by Wolfson challenges the definition of what we consider real or virtual. Surely, Wolfson’s perspective will either give us guidance (or perhaps confuse us even further.)
—Annie Armstrong
“Sudhir Patwardhan: Cities: Built, Broken” at Vadehra Art Gallery, No. 9 Cork Street
Sudhir Patwardhan, Built and Broken (2024), Courtesy the artist and Vadehra Art Gallery.
“Cities: Built, Broken” is Indian artist Sudhir Patwardhan’s London solo debut, presented by the New Delhi-based Vadehra Art Gallery at the Frieze-backed project space No. 9 Cork Street through October 19. Born in 1949 in Pune, Maharashtra, the self-taught artist took up painting in the 1970s, when he moved to Thane, near Mumbai, to study medicine. He worked as a radiologist for three decades until 2005, when he decided to become a full-time artist.
Patwardhan captures the human lives, social fabric, and urban landscape of the city on his canvases, in a style resonating with that of Cézanne and Picasso. This exhibition at Cork Street highlights a recent body of work, which continues to demonstrate Patwardhan’s insightful and emotive depiction of his homeland’s transformation. Concurrently, his works are also on view at the Barbican Centre’s “The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998,” a critically acclaimed landmark group show of more than 30 Indian artists whose works reflect the dramatic sociopolitical changes the country went through during these decades.
—Vivienne Chow
“Alison Wilding: Testing the Objects of Affection” at Alison Jacques
Alison Wildling, Terrestrial (2003). Photo: Michael Brzezinski, courtesy of Alison Jacques, London, © Alison Wilding.
One of Britain’s foremost contemporary sculptors, Alison Wilding has spent the past five decades producing what she calls “abstract sculptures” using inventive techniques and all manner of materials, from PVC, rubber, and copper to foam, wax, and string. Though non-representational, her work is ultimately about the body and human desire. Wilding burst onto the London scene in the 1980s alongside peers like Richard Deacon and Anish Kapoor, their work lumped together under the generalist term of “new British sculpture,” which skewed mostly male in scope. While she’s been shortlisted for the Turner Prize twice and was made an OBE in 2019, Wilding has still remained somewhat under the radar.
The impressive range of her 50-year practice is what stands out in a new retrospective, the British artist’s first show at Alison Jacques since she joined the gallery earlier this year. Some pieces dangle, while others are affixed to the wall or declare themselves in the center of the room. In any case, our experience of them shifts as we navigate the room. What is implied by certain unexpected material combinations? “Sculpture can be sexy,” Wilding once said; the rest is left up to the imagination. The exhibition runs through October 26.
—Jo Lawson-Tancred
“Anna Weyant: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?” at Gagosian
Anna Weyant, Girl in Window (2024). © Anna Weyant. Photo: Maris Hutchinson.
It has been a relatively calm year for Anna Weyant. The once red-hot market for ultra-contemporary art, including her works, has cooled off, as has her much-talked-about relationship with mega gallerist Larry Gagosian, which Artnet’s Wet Paint revealed in January. Perhaps with all these distractions now in the rear view mirror, now is the time to take another look at the art of the 1995-born Canadian painter.
Weyant remains part of Gagosian’s stable, and her latest works will be on display during Frieze week in “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?,” the artist’s first London exhibition, running through December 20 at the gallery’s Davies Street location. The show will feature six paintings, all created this year. While the artist continues to demonstrate impeccable and incisive technique through these meticulously rendered figurative paintings, these new works possess an added layer of mystery that draws viewers in, serving as portals to Weyant’s inner world rather than mirroring public perception.
—Vivienne Chow
“Enchanted Alchemies: Magic, Mysticism, and the Occult in Art” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan
Chitra Ganesh, Breathing Water and Air (2024). Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
This wide-ranging and energetic show features 50 works by more than two dozen artists exploring how magic, the occult, and mysticism have influenced artists ranging from 20th-century Surrealists like Leonora Carrington, Gertrude Abercrombie, and Ithell Colquhoun to contemporary makers like Linder, Chitra Ganesh and Claire Lehmann, who have created brand-new works for the exhibition. Organized into three thematic sections—Occultism; Dreams, Magic and Mysticism; and Enchantment and Transformations—the show explores how artists of the last century have employed ancient practices to shift cultural narratives in the present.
It’s a timely show, not least because it coincides with the centenary of André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” as well as a major survey at the Centre Pompidou in Paris dedicated to the global reach of the movement. It also crucially presents magic not as an esoteric practice, but as part of the intrinsic fabric of reality, just in time for the veil between the material and spiritual world to thin on the most mysterious night of the year, Halloween. The show runs, fittingly, through the winter solstice on December 21.
—Margaret Carrigan
“Olu Ogunnaike: Is the Soil Right” at Rose Easton
Olu Ogunnaike’s exhibition “Is the soil right?” installed at Rose Easton gallery. Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards.
A new series of charcoal dust prints on monumental slabs of mirrored steel by Olu Ogunnaike offer snapshots of street life, whether a solitary figure lingering outside a pub entrance or crowds gathering on a side street. Sometimes upside down or partially obscured, their vantage point that may initially disorientate the viewer, but their layered complexity reveals itself fully with time. Viewers can also catch themselves in the reflective surface, their own image merging into the artist’s hazy personal memories.
Born and raised in London, Ogunnaike’s profile has been on the rise in recent years an has become known for his works that use industrial and organic materials to query how we relate to the built environment. His 2020 Cell Project Space commission saw him parquet the gallery’s floor with lumber from plane trees, which were planted around London during the industrial revolution and are increasingly removed to make way for building works in rapidly gentrifying areas. Earlier this yer, “Fix Your Face,” a site-specific work at Bristol’s Spike Island, used wood, mud, charcoal and steel from the nearby Underfall Yard, a historic boatyard, to address the city’s colonial maritime past. His show at Rose Easton, through October 26, is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
—Jo Lawson-Tancred More

When it opened in 1923, New York’s Shelton Hotel was the tallest residential skyscraper in the world, and the following year, a 37-year-old Georgia O’Keeffe became one of its residents. Several of the works in O’Keeffe’s latest retrospective, “My New Yorks,” coming soon to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, are views from the artist’s 30th-floor apartment or views of the Shelton from the New York streets. The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. (1936) was one of the artist’s personal favorites of her long career.
Georgia O’Keeffe, The Shelton with Sunspots, (1931). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
The show, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, where it first appeared this past summer, contains around 100 works, made during the 1920s and ’30s across a range of media. Although O’Keeffe first moved to New York in 1907, she experienced a period of great creative output between 1924 and 1929 after she moved into the Shelton—a period well represented in this exhibition.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Manhattan (1932). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. / Art Resource, NY.
“My New Yorks” takes its title from the affectionate nickname O’Keeffe gave her city landscapes. They weren’t met with the immediate approval O’Keeffe would have wanted. Her husband, photographer/dealer Alfred Stieglitz, initially refused to exhibit them in his gallery, worried that their subject matter was too masculine—a criticism O’Keeffe would face on multiple occasions throughout her career.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Pink Dish and Green Leaves (1928-1929). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
O’Keeffe’s cityscapes have often taken a backseat compared to the artist’s other series, particularly the botanical works for which she is best known. But, for the first time, this period of O’Keeffe’s work is being celebrated, not as a detour from her more famous themes but as a core part of her practice.
Georgia O’Keeffe, White Flower (1929). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
“‘My New Yorks’ offers a “wonderful opportunity to highlight this important, but perhaps less recognized period of O’Keeffe’s artistic life and demonstrate how her ‘New Yorks’ exemplify her innovation as a Modernist,” the High’s director, Rand Suffolk, said in press materials.
Georgia O’Keeffe, City Night (1926). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Also included in “My New Yorks” are paintings of subjects that have defined O’Keeffe’s legacy: the large close-up views of flowers and the animal skulls which dominated her practice during her years in New Mexico after leaving New York in 1929. In addition to the show’s many paintings, photographs both of O’Keeffe (taken by Stieglitz) and by O’Keeffe will be on display, including a sentimental shot she took of the Chrysler Building from the window of the Waldorf Astoria hotel.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses (1931). © The Art Institute of Chicago.
The works on display demonstrate the range of O’Keeffe’s talents across different media as well as her unique ability to create atmospheric texture. After all, she did say that “one can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.” The artworks in “My New Yorks” are O’Keeffe’s love letters to the city, and are finally receiving the attention they deserve.
Georgia O’Keeffe, East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel (1928). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
“Georgia O’Keeffe’s lasting significance as a preeminent American modernist is undeniable, yet her urban paintings, featuring soaring skyscrapers and dramatic elevated views, are less familiar,” said Sarah Kelly Oehler, the Art Institute of Chicago’s curator of arts of the Americas. “By situating her Manhattan works within the context of her innovative output of the 1920s, we can better understand the beauty and complexity of O’Keeffe’s bold, experimental vision at a key moment in her career.”
Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, Night (1928-1929). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo by Bill Ganzel.
“Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks” will be at the High Museum, 1280 Peachtree Rd. NE, Atlanta, Georgia, from October 25 to February 16 2025. 
Georgia O’Keeffe, Pattern of Leaves (1923). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Courtesy of The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. More