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    in Exhibitions

    Latvia’s RIBOCA Biennial Shut Down Its Third Edition When War Broke Out in Ukraine. Now It’s Back—Without Russian Funding

    The Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Riga, Latvia, is returning this summer for its third edition, RIBOCA3. The event, originally scheduled to take place last summer, was cancelled shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
    The initial program, “Exercises in Respect,” had been more or less prepared by German curator René Block, when war broke out on February 24. RIBOCA’s team swiftly redirected their organizational efforts towards the launch of Common Ground, a center for Ukrainian refugees to gather, socialize, and work. It offers a range of creative activities and children’s playrooms. Two months later, in April, they announced their decision to postpone that year’s event.
    “We felt like the [original] concept was not relevant for the world that had changed,” the biennial’s Russian-born founder Agniya Mirgorodskaya told Artnet News about Block’s decision to produce an entirely new program. “He was very strong in his decision that there was no way we could proceed with it.”
    Agniya Mirgorodskaya, founder of the Riga Biennial Foundation and commissioner of RIBOCA. Photo courtesy Riga International Biennial of Contemporary.
    The organizers may have also been concerned about the optics of the biennial’s financial backing coming from a Russian: Mirgorodskaya’s father, the fishing entrepreneur Gennady Mirgorodsky. Latvia shares a border with Russia and is also vulnerable to the whims of its aggressive foreign policy. Despite having a large Russian-speaking population, it has recently passed several new laws attempting to reduce its neighbor’s cultural influence.
    “It was very clear from day one that we had to completely change our funding structure,” said Mirgorodskaya, adding that RIBOCA has not accepted any money from Russia since the war began. “Practically speaking, that is why we needed that extra year as well.” The founder turned to her husband, an American financier working in real estate, who agreed to donate a fixed percentage of his earnings towards a new endowment fund for the biennial. “It was his amazingly generous suggestion and a brilliant solution for us,” she said.
    Block has devised a program in two parts. The first is in part an effort to exorcize last year’s discarded “Exercises in Respect” concept so that the biennial can begin with a clean slate. A magazine launched on May 11 will showcase all the artworks that had originally been prepared for RIBOCA3 in 2022.
    This will be followed in June by the exhibition “Intermezzo” at the Kunsthal 44Møen in Denmark, where Block is a co-founder and artistic director. Of the 12 artists featured, a few had initially been slated to appear in last year’s event, including Riga native Evita Vasiljeva whose original installation of upside down concrete benches will reappear in a new site-specific form, which instead overturns pre-existing benches on the Danish island of Møn.
    The second part, which shifts the focus back to Riga, comprises two concurrent exhibitions opening on August 10 with an undetermined end date. Block’s “Fragment” at the former Riga Technical University is dedicated to artists working with moving image and sound, including work by the seminal video artist Nam Jun Paik and French filmmaker Clement Cogitore.
    Members of the Danish collective Superflex [left to right] Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjornstjerne Christiansen pose in One Two Three Swing!, their Turbine Hall Installation at the Tate Modern on October 2, 2017 in London, England. Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images.This year, Block will share his curatorial responsibilities with the socially minded collective SUPERFLEX, which was founded in 1993 and is known for large-scale participatory works. They have produced the biennial’s central ongoing project “There is an Elephant in the Room,” staged across multiple venues, which invites 25 women artists to address a topic that they believe to be urgent, taboo, or controversial such as the ongoing war on Ukraine.
    Since it was founded in 2016, RIBOCA has become the premier showcase and destination for art from the Baltic region. It is broadening its ambition by inviting artists to remain in the city and collaborate for extended periods and by offering a rotating array of public works.
    “This year, the biennial won’t just happen for a few months,” said executive director Inese Dabola, noting the city’s lack of a permanent contemporary art offering. “We are thinking about art as infrastructure, we want to be more rooted and contribute to the local arts scene as much as we can.”
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    in Exhibitions

    An Exhibition of Historic Menus Starts With Levity But Serves Up Cultural Commentary as the Main Course

    If you had dined at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago in 1880 for the Annual Game Dinner, you might have had a hard time choosing among the 50 species offered. If Ham of Black Bear didn’t tempt you, maybe Ragout of Squirrel à la Française was your jam. One would expect to be charmed by some anachronistic dishes (and rock bottom prices) at an exhibition of vintage menus. But there is much more than kitsch value to “A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841–1941” and plenty of subtext between the appetizer and dessert sections.
    The show, which opened in April at The Groiler Club in Manhattan and runs until July 29, lives up to its name. Free of charge and open to non-members, it idiosyncratically and chronologically tells the story of American gastronomy, and the country itself—in menus. These include menus from restaurants, banquets, soup kitchens, private yachts, and even houses of ill repute.
    An installation view of “A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841-1941” in the ground floor gallery. Courtesy of The Groiler Club.
    “It’s like a 15-degree slice of history,” said collector Henry Voigt, who adroitly curated the show and wrote the accompanying catalogue. “You’re looking from a different perspective. It’s not just what people were eating, but what they were doing, with whom they were doing it, and what they valued. It’s a mirror of society. Yes, it runs along class lines, but it represents all classes in various ways. They’re minor historic documents that reflect everyday life.”
    On the Great Western Railway (ca. 1881), left, the fixed price for breakfast was 75 cents. The beverage list offered over three dozen Champagnes, clarets, and ales. The gilt-edge menu at right came from a social event catered by Louis Sherry (1855–1926) in New York City in 1884, a few months after he opened his confectionery and catering business, serving New York society’s highest echelons. Courtesy of the Henry Voigt Collection of American Menus.
    He continued, “I reflect on not only just the upper classes, but women’s history, African American history, and what’s dubbed economic precarity, meaning people who have been pushed from a livable life by war and financial crisis. These menus are very rare. Who saved a menu from a soup kitchen, saying, ‘I wanna remember this evening for the rest of my life?’”
    Major swaths of the American story are touched upon. The show is divided into sections such as “The Great War and Onset of Prohibition,” “King Cotton and the Telegraph,” “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” and “The Great Depression and Recovery.”
    Mark Twain’s 70th birthday party was national news. Delmonico’s (New York City, 1905) bill of fare is illustrated with comic sketches by cartoonist Leon Barritt (1852–1938) depicting the guest of honor in successive stages of his career. The dinner was hosted by George Harvey, the owner and editor of Harper’s Weekly, which published a special supplement with photographs of the 170 guests. Courtesy of the Henry Voigt Collection of American Menus.
    Shortly after completing the show’s installation, Voigt—in a tie, blazer, and loafers—gave me a run-through of some of the 224 menus he’d selected for the exhibition. “Oh, this one makes me tear up,” he said. “A couple of them here make me lose it.” He pointed out an Emancipation Banquet menu from an African-American social club honoring Sojourner Truth. Nearby was the menu for Lincoln’s second inaugural ball; guests could munch on delicacies such as terrapin and tongue en gelée.
    Voigt noted two other menus, saying, “These are the only two menus I know of from southern states under Confederate control, one from Lanier House in Macon, Georgia, in 1862 and the American Hotel in Richmond in 1864, which perished in a fire the following year during the fall of Richmond. There was a scarcity of food in the Confederacy.”
    This menu is remarkably sparse. In the accompanying exhibition notes, Voigt wrote, “The lack of shipments from outside the region also caused the cuisine to be markedly local in character. The ham-and-greens dish was made with poke sallet weed, a poisonous wild plant popular in Appalachia and the South. The leaves must be boiled in water three times to make them safe to eat, even in the early spring when its toxins are at the lowest levels.”
    The Palmer House (Chicago, 1886) opened on September 26, 1871, only 13 days before it burned to the ground in the Great Fire. The second Palmer House advertised itself as “thoroughly fire proof.” It hosted such famous guests as actress Sarah Bernhardt; writers Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde; and Presidents James Garfield, Ulysses S. Grant, and Grover Cleveland. Courtesy of the Henry Voigt Collection of American Menus.
    An Ellis Island menu, typewritten on onion skin paper, is particularly moving. It offered boiled rice and milk, and bread and butter, to newly arrived children. “When poor immigrants arrived in the 19th century, they came in steerage and they were in a state of shock,” Voigt explained. “Read about the number of children that died on the island. So, the practice began to give them milk and bread.”
    “Immigrants thought that America was welcoming them with food,” he added. “The food was paid for by the shipping lines, but they thought America was. And 50, 60, 70 years later, they had warm feelings. No, they’d never seen white bread before, but they knew they would be okay because food is symbolic. We welcomed them symbolically.”
    The Gem (New Orleans, ca. 1913), left, operated in an old mansion on Royal Street from 1847 to 1919. The menu for Maxim’s (New York City, 1917), right, was designed in a modern Louis XIV style. Future silent-screen idol Rudolph Valentino began his career as a busboy at Murray’s and later landed at Maxim’s as a “taxi dancer,” a paid dance partner for lone women. Courtesy of the Henry Voigt Collection of American Menus.
    The advent of modernism in the 1920s marked an invigorating aesthetic shift, but it would be short-lived given the simultaneous rise of Prohibition. “There was nothing cool about Prohibition,” Voigt said. “It was a disaster. People didn’t care about food anymore. The good restaurants were all closed. Speakeasies didn’t care about food. People no longer drank wine; they drank booze. Society collapsed and food did too, from an haute cuisine point of view.”
    Voigt paused and continued thoughtfully, “Prohibition was repealed in December of 1933, but it took about 50 years to get over it. When do you think we got back on our feet gastronomically? The 1980s!”
    The cuisine at finer American hotels, such as the Winthrop House (Boston, 1852), might be described as “Frenchified English cooking,” as one British visitor put it, with an emphasis on wild game. The focal point of dinner at its restaurant, Hasty Pudding Club, was provided by seven varieties of game birds. Courtesy of the Henry Voigt Collection of American Menus.
    Before embarking on menus, Voigt and his wife collected 17th- and 18th-century Dutch art. “It was a reflection of everyday life,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in everyday life. We were also interested in food and wine. Also interested in how food affects culture and societal patterns.” He sold off the paintings, keeping only prints and drawings. Menus became a focus when he retired at 60 as a senior executive at Dupont in the mid-1990s.
    “It’s not just the art element,” Voigt said of his attraction to the milieu and explained what he looks for. “What’s the language of the menu? Who’s the intended audience? Is there evidence of race, gender, or class? All menus are seen through the prism of class. What about the typography? What about the graphic design? Who owned this menu? Why did they save it? Who was the printer? Who was the lithographer? Visual appeal is wonderful, but there’s a series of questions around a menu’s significance.”
    The Cathay Tea Garden (Philadelphia, 1926), left, had a large dance floor and hosted a regular radio program. Four pages describe “American” and “Chinese” dishes. After more than 50 years, the Cathay Tea Garden closed in 1973. The Fountain Room at the Hotel Pennsylvania (New York City, 1924), right, was the largest hotel in the world when it opened on January 25, 1919, a few days before the 18th Amendment was ratified. After Prohibition, many hotel bars were turned into soda fountains. Courtesy of the Henry Voigt Collection of American Menus.
    Voigt has now amassed about 12,000 menus and stores them in his home in Delaware. His wife doesn’t partake in his collecting. “I’m very interested in history, food, and wine,” he said. “And everyday life. It wasn’t an expensive hobby like owning a sailboat. It was an ignored field. It wasn’t like collecting art, where you needed to be a multi-billionaire to go to an auction and buy one thing. This was something that I could do.”
    It’s not surprising that Voigt isn’t thrilled with today’s QR code dining culture, but he’s not trapped in the past. “I don’t pine for the old days when I look at the menus,” he said. “The old days are not as great as we think they were. Life is better now than it was then. Certainly for more people.”

    Voigt will conduct an in-person tour of the exhibition on May 18 at 1 p.m. The Groiler Club is located at 47 East 60th Street, New York, NY 10022, (212) 838-6690.

    Steinberg’s Dairy Restaurant (New York City, 1938) opened in 1931, one of several dairy restaurants on the Upper West Side. Its streamlined Art Déco interior was reproduced on the cover of this menu that offered Eastern European Kosher foods including salmon, borscht, vegetarian (mock) chopped liver, chopped herring, cabbage soup, and potato latkes. Courtesy of the Henry Voigt Collection of American Menus.

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    in Street Art

    “Janus” by Diego Dedablio in São Paulo, Brazil

    Brazilian street artist Diego Dedablio recently finished a new mural in the interior of São Paulo, at the Conservatory of Music in Tatuí.Diego Dedablio started painting at the age of 15 in the streets of his hometown, Tatuí, São Paulo state. The artist’s work is strongly influenced by Afro-Brazilian folk culture, a flurry of colors, ethnic motifs similar to cave painting.In his works and materials, Diego combines tradition with everyday globalization, subordinating colors and lines to musical metrics, composing with visual notes. His murals adorn the walls of Amsterdam, São Paulo and Buenos Aires.Take a look below for more photos of the mural. More

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    in Exhibitions

    See Artist Pamela Rosenkranz’s New High Line Plinth Commission: a Hot Pink Tree Planted Amid New York’s Skyscrapers

    In recent weeks, a hot pink beacon has arisen on the High Line at West 30th Street. Standing 25 feet tall atop the High Line Plinth, Old Tree is the work of Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz, its 145 branches recalling at once both the limbs of a tree and human blood vessels.
    “This piece immediately stood out because of the ambition of scale, and the color is something incredible that brought it to a whole other level,” Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art told Artnet News during the installation of the work. “It’s like the central square in a village with a tree and benches around it.”
    Fabricated outside San Diego and shipped cross country in two trucks, the work had arrived in pieces, a steel armature covered with spray foam and carefully sculpted into delicate branches sealed with epoxy.
    Each of the 16 limbs and six roots were carefully assembled on site, the tree growing bit by bit, almost as if it had been planted there by Rosenkranz. (The artist even covered the plinth with an earthy surface so it resembles soil.)
    Pamela Rosenkranz, Old Tree (2023). A High Line Plinth commission. Photo by Timothy Schenck courtesy of the High Line, New York.
    “It’s a synthetic artificial tree in the middle of a park,” Alemani said. That contrast between the natural and the manmade—on a park that is itself an abandoned train track once reclaimed by nature—was part of what drew her to the work, which was first proposed in 2020 in response to an open call. It became a finalist for the site that November.
    Old Tree is the third commission for the plinth, which launched in 2019 with Brick House by Simone Leigh. (That piece later won a Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, curated by Alemani.) It follows Untitled (drone) by Sam Durant.
    Pamela Rosenkranz, Old Tree (2023). A High Line Plinth commission. Photo by Timothy Schenck courtesy of the High Line, New York.
    The new artwork’s bold color is a dramatic departure from its two predecessors, which were black and white, as well as the Hudson Yards skyscrapers that tower above it.
    “This new part of the city is kind of cold, with incredible glass and mirrored surfaces. It’s so corporate and masculine in a way,” Alemani said. “The contrast with the surroundings is really quite stunning.”
    Pamela Rosenkranz, Old Tree (2023). A High Line Plinth commission. Photo by Timothy Schenck courtesy of the High Line, New York.
    Rosenkranz applied the bright reddish pink paint as she would to one of her canvases, with seven layers topped with with a clear UV coating.
    You can see subtle drips and variations in texture of the painted surface, which adds to the fleshy, bodily feel of the work. The trunk could be a torso, muscular and strong, while the roots and branches recall a delicate network of veins and capillaries.
    Compared to the initial renderings, Alemani said, “it looks much less of a tree.”
    Pamela Rosenkranz, Old Tree (2023). A High Line Plinth commission. Photo by Timothy Schenck courtesy of the High Line, New York.
    The works unveiling comes ahead of the opening of a new extension of the High Line Spur, which was once slated for demolition. Just beyond the plinth and nearing completion is the High Line’s new Moynihan Connection, first announced by then-Governor Andrew Cuomo in January 2021.
    The Woodland Bridge, extending along 30th Street, was built last year, with 63 trees, 90 shrubs, and over 5,000 grasses and flowers. This weekend, it was connected to to the public plaza in Brookfield Properties’ Manhattan West building on 9th Avenue with the installation of a 300-foot Timber Bridge made from Alaskan yellow cedar. From there, pedestrians will be able to access the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station.
    The installation of the new Timber Bridge, connecting the High Line Spur’s Woodland Bridge to Manhattan West and Moynihan Station. Photo by Andrew Frasz, courtesy of the High Line, New York.
    “You can walk all the way down to the West Village without crossing the street,” Alemani said.
    The $50 million project is expected to open to the public this summer.
    “Pamela Rosenkranz: Old Tree” is on view at the High Line at the Spur, at West 30th Street and 10th Avenue, New York, May 2023–September 2024.

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    in Exhibitions

    Peek Inside Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II’s Trove of Statues and Treasures, Now on View in an Epic Exhibition in Paris

    From whichever angle you approach Ramses II, the 13th century B.C.E pharaoh earns his epithet: the Great.
    His 67-year reign stands as the second longest in Egyptian history. Bold in both war and peace, Ramses expanded Egyptian territory and signed the earliest-known peace treaty with the Hittites in 1271 B.C.E. This consolidation led to an unparalleled building of cities and monuments—often to himself. Ramses’s progeny was also vast, he’s estimated to have fathered more than 100 children.
    There may have been 11 other pharaohs named Ramses, but “Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs,” a recently opened show in Paris demonstrates the pharaoh who acquired semi-godlike status in his own lifetime needs no identifiers.
    The exhibition is on the third leg of a five-year, 10-city global tour with previous stops at Houston Museum of Natural Science and San Francisco’s de Young Museum. It was devised through a collaboration between the Supreme Council of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt and World Heritage Exhibitions.
    Installation view of Sennedjem’s outer coffin, and its lid. Photo: la Grande Halle de la Villette à Paris, © Yvan Lebert.
    Across more than 180 objects, many of which have never before left Egypt, the show creates a vivid picture of the country’s ancient Golden Age. Though Ramses’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings was raided and plundered of its gold adornments, the show presents ample treasures directly connected to him including a colossal red granite statue of the pharaoh’s head, one of his many gold rings, and painted reliefs celebrating his military victories.
    More broadly, the exhibition presents a view of the world Ramses inhabited, sculpted, and inspired. There is space dedicated to the grave of royal tomb builder Sennedjem, a collection of mummified animals found at the Saqqara necropolis, and treasures discovered in the royal tombs in Dahshur and Tanis.
    Installation of the multimedia display of the Battle of Kadesh. Photo: la Grande Halle de la Villette à Paris, © Yvan Lebert.
    The exhibition also leans on contemporary technology to bring both artifacts and historical events to life. Drone footage and computer animations have been used to recreate the ancient splendor of Ramses’s memorial temple, photo-murals are projected on walls, and there’s a multimedia recreation of the Battle of Kadesh, a 1274 B.C.E. chariot battle widely considered the pharaoh’s greatest military achievement. There is also a V.R. experience available to visitors.
    “Ramses II is considered to be the greatest king ever to rule Egypt,” said Mostafa Waziri, Egypt’s Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in a press statement. “This exhibition will illuminate the pivotal moments that earned the great pharaoh his place in history, while bringing visitors face-to-face with absolutely stunning Egyptian artifacts”
    See more images of the exhibition below.
    Head of a colossal statue of Ramses II. Photo: Sandro Vannini/Laboratoriorosso World Heritage Exhibitions.
    Statue of Ramses kneeling. Photo: Sandro Vannini/Laboratoriorosso World Heritage Exhibitions.
    Granite bust of Merenptah. Photo: 2020 World Heritage Exhibitions.
    Necklace with falcon heads and counterweights of Princess Neferou-Ptah Photo: Sandro Vannini/Laboratoriorosso World Heritage Exhibitions.
    Coffin of Ramses II made in cedar at the end of the 18th dynasty. Photo: Sandro Vannini, Laboratoriorosso/World Heritage Exhibitions.
    Bracelet of Chechonq II. Photo: Sandro Vannini/Laboratoriorosso World Heritage Exhibitions.
    Installation view of the upper part of an obelisk with the name of Ramses II. Photo: Sandro Vannini/Laboratoriorosso World Heritage Exhibitions.
    Mirror of Sithathoriounet. Photo: Sandro Vannini/LaboratoriorossoWorld Heritage Exhibitions.
    “Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs” is on view at the Grande Halle de la Villette, 211 Av. Jean Jaurès, Paris, France, through September 6.
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    in Exhibitions

    What I’m Looking At: Cavorting Human-Duck Hybrids, a Tribute to a Legendary Alt-Art Magazine, and Other Things at the Edge of Art

    “What I’m Looking At” is a monthly column where I digest art worth seeing, writings worth consuming, and other tidbits I come across in my quest to absorb the contemporary cultural moment. Below, assorted thoughts from April 2023.

    More Pombo, Please!
    The most unexpected find this month was at Barro NYC, an art gallery from Buenos Aires with a space in the weird faux New England fishing village-themed mall that is the South Street Seaport. The current show, “Artisanal Conceptualism: Starting Point” (through May 21) features a small selection of deliriously interesting works by Argentine artist Marcelo Pombo (b. 1959).
    The centerpiece of the show is the “Dibujos de San Pablo” series he made during a formative trip to Brazil in 1982, a suite of black-and-white drawings featuring duck-billed lovers intertwined and other fantasies of queer beach life strained through a kind of “dirty Disney” look. There’s other good stuff, too, including a trio of delightfully eccentric contemporary abstractions and some dense graphics he made for Sodoma, a magazine put out by an 1980s gay rights collective of which Pombo was a part.
    My only complaint: Not enough Pombo! “Artisanal Conceptualism” is too small to render anything like a complete portrait of this artist—but it is just enough to suggest that I would like a complete portrait of this artist.
    Drawing from Marcelo Pombo’s “Dibujos de San Pablo” (1982). Photo: Ben Davis.
    Marcelo Pombo, Sin título [Untitled] (2023). Photo: Ben Davis.
    Display of graphics and flyers by Marcelo Pombo. Photo: Ben Davis.

    Catch “Lost” If You Can
    I caught Ficre Ghebreyesus’s second show at Galerie Lelong just in time (it’s open through May 6), and am glad I did. The Eritrea-born artist ran a café in New Haven and died in 2012 without having shown a lot of his works. Posthumously, his fame has expanded and he won a plum spot in the Venice Biennale last year. Even when the works might be seen as flirting with folk-art cliches (skeletons, dancers), they have a distinct atmosphere, simultaneously direct and dreamy, sophisticated and rather dashing.
    I Believe We Are Lost (2002) gives the show its name, a large work that looks like a banner of some kind, done on unstretched canvas, featuring an uneasy trio of jagged monsters framed in a sea of deep blue. But I really like the allover scrap-quilt style of something like Five Figures with Horse Head (1999), with the richness of its colors and the specificity of its details.
    Ficre Ghebreyesus, I Believe We Are Lost (2002). Photo: Ben Davis.
    Ficre Ghebreyesus, Five Figures with Horse Head (1999). Photo: Ben Davis.

    Rite-On
    The back of the Printed Matter bookstore in Chelsea is worth visiting right now for the packed vitrines dedicated to “From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite” (on view through June 21). Founded in in 1973 by the late Edit DeAk (the stuff here comes from her collection), Walter Robinson, and Joshua Cohn, Art-Rite was a free-spirited alternative art publication with a programmatically scrappy style (the title was a play on the budget store Shop-Rite).
    Art-Rite was a vehicle for plenty of intense, inventive thinking about the big issues of its day. Here, though, the behind-the-scenes photos of the editors, shown with their stitched-together print layouts and Art-Rite posters and cover art, really do radiate the excitement of an art mag that was a creative project itself. The show makes you remember that covering the art scene should be fun first and a professional obligation second.
    “From the Margins: The Making of Art-Rite” at Printed Matter. Photo: Ben Davis.
    Display of material relating to Art-Rite. Photo: Ben Davis.
    Layout for an article in Art-Rite. Photo: Ben Davis.
    Clearing Comes Back
    Clearing gallery has left Bushwick and is now a stone’s throw from the New Museum in Manhattan. The new space doesn’t have quite the same yawning industrial charm as the Bushwick one. But “Maiden Voyage,” its opening group show (through May 21), makes a pretty convincing case for the gallery with a selection of artists to be proud of. It’s all killer, no filler, down to some delightful seating-options-as-art.
    Hugh Hayden, Shadow (2023) and Calvin Marcus, Dead Soldier (2018) in “Maiden Voyage” at CLEARING. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Javier Barrios, Contraataque (2022). Photo; Ben Davis.
    Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel, Oak bench with cinnabar moths, opium poppy flowers and snails (2021) at Clearing. Photo: Ben Davis.

    Fun With Dots
    Of things I read this month, the one that stands out in my mind is actually John Elderfield’s two-part opus on the history of dots in Euro-American art in—that’s right—Gagosian magazine. It’s a fun kind of article: an expansive, informed ramble across art history, from how dots were long frowned on in textiles because they reminded people of skin disease to a theorization of the “film mode” versus “surface mode” of dotting.
    Georges-Pierre Seurat, Seascape (Gravelines) (1890). Photo: Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images.

    Buy It Now!
    There’s a Jenny Holzer–themed condom for sale on Ebay. It’s $119.99. The condition says “Used,” but don’t worry, I think they just mean it has been used as art.
    Screenshot of Jenny Holzer condom, for sale on Ebay.

    A Few Words on NFT.NYC…
    Finally, at the beginning of the month I did go back to NFT.NYC, the big crypto-art/crypto-business/crypto-whatever conference that is now held in the Javits Center.
    The first time I went to NFT.NYC, in the heady days of 2021, it felt as if everyone was high. It was just at the moment when the drugs were hitting hardest and people are screaming at each other, “We should buy a boat together!!!” Now it feels like everyone has come down and people are kind of looking around at each other and saying, “So…are we still serious about that boat?”
    I should say I only went on Friday, the last day of the conference. I can’t speak for the whole thing. Maybe people were tuckered out from the great stuff they saw the previous days. But most of the art talks I went to were attended by the merest smatterings of people.
    Don’t get me wrong: I saw plenty of people still trying to make an earnest go of it. Most memorably, I sat in on curator Stacy Engman’s talk, the actual title of which, as printed in the program, was: “Most Expensive NFT Stacy Engman Art History NFT Project—$450 Million NFT Value Pegged to Fine Art Market.” The tone of the Engman’s presentation was much less haywire than that manic word salad. Still—it was hard to figure out what she was selling, and that’s kinda where things are at as a whole.
    Sign for NFT.NYC 2023 at the Javits Center. Photo: Ben Davis.
    Curator Stacy Engman presents at NFT.NYC. Photo: Ben Davis.
    A panel at NFT.NYC 2023. Photo: Ben Davis.
    A vendor booth at NFT.NYC 2023. Photo: Ben Davis.
    Bored Ape Takes the Stage, Cannot Hold Mic Straight
    Some people will tell you that the parties are where the real action is at NFT.NYC. I will have to take their word for it. The one I was invited to this time around, put on by Nolcha Shows at the new immersive art venue known as the ArtDistrict in Williamsburg, billed as “a state-of-the-art, next-level 360-degree visual experience.” In practice this meant that, as at many parties and concerts, it had big light projections all over the walls, except these were from a coterie of NFT artists.
    The air of rented decadence was set by the presence of a team of go-go dancers in metal bikinis and capes with lights on them. Partygoers stood around talking about liquidity and fractional lending protocols. There were VIP booths composed of what appeared to be park benches. Someone pitched me on an NFT that would allow me access to a whiskey subscription service.
    The big draw here was the debut performance by Shilly, an act from the Bored Ape enthusiast/content creator Shwaz that is built around a Bored Ape avatar. Shilly has so far released two songs, I’m Boring and Elizabeth Holmes, both of which almost rise to level of creative vision and soulful authenticity of Fall Out Boy’s Ghostbusters cover.
    I found the atmosphere at this event draining and I did not have the stamina to stick around to watch Shilly strap on his motion-capture helmet to perform in-character as Bored Ape #6722.
    I’ve seen the tape though, and I have no regrets. It’s linked below.
    A dancer performing. Photo: Ben Davis.
    A glamorous VIP table. Photo: Ben Davis.

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    Mexican Photographer Kati Horna Collaborated With the Biggest Surrealist Stars of Her Day. Why Don’t We Know Her Name?

    They were known as the “three witches.”  
    In the feverish cultural milieu of 1930s Mexico City, artists Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Kati Horna were the closest of friends and frequent artistic collaborators. Each a European expatriate—Carrington from England, Varo from Spain, and Horna from Hungary—these women came to Mexico fleeing war and persecution and found in each other kindred spirits with shared interests in witchcraft, alchemy, and tarot, passions which bled into their uncanny artworks and collaborative visions. 
    Still, history has remembered their legacies unevenly. While in recent years, Carrington and Varo have become familiar names amid reexaminations of women’s role in Surrealism’s development, Horna, however, has remained a surprisingly obscure figure. 
    Kati Horna, Portrait of Leonora Carrington (1960/1987). Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
    But her strange and beautiful photography may now be drawing new light. New York’s Ruiz-Healy Art is currently presenting “Kati Horna: In Motion”—the first devoted exhibition of Horna’s work in the city. This haunting exhibition brings together photographs made from the 1930s into the 1960s and offers a window into Horna’s internal world—one replete with mysticism and loss shaped by a war-torn life. 
    Horna was born Katalin Deutsch in Budapest in 1919 to an upper-class Jewish family (Horna would marry the artist Jose Horna in Paris in the late 1930s). She lived amid the city’s intelligentsia and was a childhood friend of Robert Capa, studying photography alongside him. As a teenager, she apprenticed herself to the celebrated photographer József Pesci, whose avant-garde imagery bridged advertising and Constructivist aesthetics. 
    By her twenties, Horna had moved to Berlin, befriending Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and her compatriot László Moholy-Nagy. The turbulence of the era pulled her throughout the continent. In 1933, she went to Paris, enmeshing herself in the Surrealist movement. A leftist driven by her politics and a supporter of the Spanish Republican cause, she soon relocated to Spain, working as a war photographer through the Spanish Civil War, linking for a time with Capa. These photojournalistic images were published widely, particularly in the Illustrated Press (New York’s Americas Society presented a curation of these works in 2016), and while the exhibition at Ruiz-Healy focuses primarily on Horna’s artistic pursuits made in Mexico, dealer Patricia Ruiz-Healy says her photojournalism—and experiences of war—as key to understanding her oeuvre. 
    “Kati’s photojournalism gave her economic independence and the ability to pursue her political beliefs. Her father died when she was 18 or 19 and she invested an inheritance from her father in buying a camera and for photography classes,” said Patricia Ruiz-Healy, in a conversation, “It gave her creative freedom.”
    Kati Horna, Mujer Con Máscara (1961) from the series “Mujer Y Máscara.” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
    Returning to Paris in 1938, Horna and her husband would be pushed into flight again the following year as France came under Nazi occupation. This final exodus would bring the artist to Mexico, a country she would grow to love deeply, and which would allow her the refuge for artistic experimentation. “I am allergic to the question of where I am from,” Horna wrote. “I fled Hungary, I fled Berlin, I fled Paris, and I left everything behind in Barcelona…When Barcelona fell, I couldn’t go back for my things, I lost everything again. I got to a fifth country, Mexico, with my Rolleiflex around my neck, and nothing else.”
    In these Mexican-era photographs, one notices certain recurring fascinations: dolls and masks, Surrealist and occult imagery, and the lives of her friends. Again and again, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo appear captured in time, as do other artists and actors of the time, in imagery both staged and candid. Varo leans against a window sill, smoking a cigarette, in one photograph, captured as though midstream in conversation. In another, Carrington paints at her easel, with relaxed familiarity.
    Kati Horna, Leonora from the series “Oda A La Necrofilia” (Ode To Necrophilia) (1962). Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
    “Kati captures Carrington and Varo in their more intimate settings. They appear so relaxed—painting, working, socializing. These are often images of good times, fun times, which are all the more striking when we know how much these people had all suffered in their lifetimes,” said Ruiz-Healy. “So much.” Other photographs are materially and technically experimental, and the show includes photomontages and photo-collages. In keeping with Horna’s Surrealist inclinations. In one photograph, actress Beatriz Sheridan presses her face against a mirror, appearing like a beheaded saint or Medusa, proffering, it seems, her peculiar reflection. In another, an unidentified model is photographed through a glass jug, creating a rippling effect on the photograph’s flat surface. Carrington, particularly, appears often as Horna’s model and muse, her face photo-collaged, in one image, into a Di Chirico-esque architectural space. Varo and Carrington also appear obliquely, in masks and other objects made by the artists (in one of Horna’s photographs, Carrington is pictured in a mask made by Varo, encapsulating their artistic trinity). 
    Masks are one of Horna’s most enduring symbols. In a marvelously uncanny series, “Ode to Necrophilia”—which Horna made for the avant-garde magazine S.NOB in 1962—Carrington appears nude, sitting and crouched beside a rumpled bed. In what seems a twilight light, her face turns away from the viewer, on the pillow rests a haunting white mask.
    Kati Horna, Untitled (1933/1960) from the series “Marchés Aux Puces, Paris.” Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
    “These are death masks” explained Patti Ruiz-Healy, daughter of gallery founder Patricia and director of the New York space. “Often a plaster cast would be made from the face of a loved one when they died.”
    The images are unexpectedly serene. “These photographs were made in the early 1960s, at a time when Kati’s husband Jose was very sick, and soon passed away. Remedios, who was like a sister to her, was also very sick and died in 1963. It was a way for Kati and Leonora to mourn these people in their lives,” said Patricia Ruiz-Healy. The ‘Necrophilia’ of the title here alludes to the physical love, longing, and embodied mourning for loved ones who are dying or who have passed on. 
    Death suffuses all hidden corners of her oeuvre, it seems, and Horna’s perhaps most revealing images are absent of living figures altogether, instead depicting jumbles of broken dolls in stark black-and-white images. The 1962 series “A Night at the Doll Hospital” focuses entirely on such images, and while superficially these images might call to mind the darkly Surrealist photographs of Hans Bellmer, upon closer consideration Horna’s series is a more tender contemplation of innocence and its loss. 
    Kati Horna, Untitled (1962) from the series “Una Noche en el Sanatorio De Muñecas” (A Night at the Doll Hospital). Courtesy of Ruiz-Healy Art.
    “What she saw in Spain stayed with her forever. She would go into towns and see women and children laying dead in the street with baby dolls and discarded toys next to them,” said Patricia Ruiz-Healy, “The dolls are very symbolic for her. In the series ‘The Night at the Doll Hospital’ there is some hope of fixing them.”
    Horna lived in Mexico until her death in 2000, leaving behind and rich and complex legacy. Patricia and Patti Ruiz-Healy believe some of Horna’s obscurity is due to the rarity of her work in the market. The dealers were introduced to Horna’s daughter, Norah (a sidelong tribute to Carrington), who manages her mother’s estate along with her children, but an exhibition took years to mount. “Horna made only a select reprint of her vintage prints in the 1960s, and donated much of her archive to the Spanish government and to a research institute in Mexico City,” said Patti Ruiz-Healy. Nevertheless, her reputation has been growing steadily in institutional circles. Her works were included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Beyond Surrealism” in 2021. When asked what Horna would have thought of the prospect of art fame, the dealers were circumspect, given Horna’s politics. “She considered herself an art worker, not an artist,” noted Patricia Ruiz-Healy.
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    British Painter Frank Bowling’s First Digital Artwork, an Evocative Play on Color, Lights Up London’s Piccadilly Circus

    The renowned British abstract painter Sir Frank Bowling is unveiling his first-ever digital artwork on May 4 in London’s Piccadilly Circus.
    At 8:23pm BST, his work, titled Arrival, will flash across the city’s iconic Piccadilly Lights, which usually feature advertisements or brand logos. This will happen every evening at the same time until June 30.
    Since 2020, the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts (CIRCA) has been using the Piccadilly Lights to broadcast new works of art by celebrated artists so that they can be enjoyed by passersby for free. The organization’s global network of public screens is always growing, and the work will also appear at 8:23pm local time at locations in Berlin, Milan, Seoul, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. A program and map can be found on CIRCA’s website.
    Sir Frank Bowling, 2021. Photo by Sacha Bowling.
    Arrival, is inspired by Bowling’s move from British Guiana (now Guyana) to London in May 1953 when he was just 19. One of his early defining memories is of the citywide celebrations for the late Queen’s coronation on June 2. The exhibition is therefore timed for both the 75th anniversary of Windrush, the boat that carried Caribbean migrants to the U.K. to start a new life, and King Charles III’s coronation on May 6.
    The work’s warmly evocative orange, pink, and red tones are the result of crossfading two of Bowling’s celebrated Map Paintings, Texas Louise (1971) and Australia to Africa (1969–70).
    “I am a painter first and last, but I am always experimenting,” Bowling told Artnet News. “My intention is just to use color and geometry to create something that will hold the viewer’s eye. I am convinced that light comes out of the paint, and that’s what I’m looking for.”
    “Working on Arrival was an opportunity to use color and light in a totally different way and add something new to the world.”
    Bowling had made the original paintings during a stint living in New York, when he became interested in the stenciled map shapes of Guyana, Africa, Asia, and Australia. The shape of these maps became a guiding framework within which to explore color and geometry.
    “Thinking about my life moving from South America to London and then to New York, and then years moving back and forth across the Atlantic, referencing these earlier works seemed like the obvious move,” Bowling said. 
    “I keep hearing that my work feels relevant right now, but I don’t know. It would be interesting to hear what viewers make of it,” he added. “I remember [Nigerian curator] Okwui Enwezor saying that I started my career as an artist in the ’50s in a moment of global transition, where the world had become an unfixed place. I think there’s a feeling that we are at another moment of transition, of flux, of the possibilities for something new. Perhaps that’s why?”
    CIRCA is inviting viewers with a connection to the Windrush Generation to upload photos documenting their own stories onto its website, some of which will be included in a special film screened on the Piccadilly Lights on June 22.
    Artists previously commissioned by CIRCA include Douglas Gordon, Caroline Walker, Anne Imhof, Laure Prouvost, Shirin Neshat, Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, and Vivienne Westwood.

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