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    Will the Public Embrace Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Collaborative Works 30 Years After Their Lukewarm Debut? A Paris Museum Thinks So

    It was a buzzy opening. Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes was there, along with Interview magazine’s Paige Powell and renowned Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger who milled around excitedly beneath an amazing series of blown-up portraits of the show’s stars: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose paradoxical collaborative paintings were the draw of the evening.
    These paintings were the subject of another buzzy opening at Tony Shafrazi’s New York gallery in 1985. But the 2023 version, a slick affair sprawling across four floors of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Frank Gehry-designed mega-museum was a far cry from Shafrazi’s intentionally dingy Soho gallery. And it was the Parisian art-going public who turned up in droves for the opening of “Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands” to sip Moët and feast on a sense of proximity to Manhattan’s downtown art scene in the 1980s.
    Michael Halsband’s electric black-and-white photographs capture the protagonists of that scene. His poster images of the pair wearing boxing gloves and faux–sparring, taken to promote the original show, are still genius. Warhol’s weedy figure and Basquiat’s soft good looks make them unlikely sparring partners. On the other hand, the exhibition itself—like all shows at the titanic museum associated with LVMH founder Bernard Arnault—was a true exercise in flexing one’s muscles.
    Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, Untitled, 1984. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat Licensed by Artestar, New York, © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © Clint Jenkins.
    Given their stature within 20th-century art history, and their own playful manipulation of their public images, Basquiat and Warhol’s relationship has been fictionalized on multiple occasions. Their collaboration is the subject of a dramatization currently on Broadway, which stages the partnership as a cynical pairing devised by their gallerist as a bid to revive Warhol’s floundering career by hitching him to Basquiat’s rising star; and it frames both parties as reluctant to play ball.
    The reality was quite opposite. “Warhol’s reputation was still high at that time, but it had its highs and lows as it always had,” Bischofberger told Artnet News, speaking through an assistant. The dealer encouraged the collaboration in 1982, which originally included the Italian artist Francesco Clemente. “It was based on an interest in art history and deep knowledge of it, pure interest in the artists and their work, and in experiencing what new comes out of a collaboration between three artists of completely different characters, natures, and approaches, living in the same city and society and being friends.”
    Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Andy Warhol, Handball (1984). © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat Licensed by Artestar, New York; © Francesco Clemente; © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by ADAGP, Paris. © AKG Images.In fact, Basquiat admired Warhol, and had orchestrated several casual encounters in an effort to enter his orbit. He first approached him in 1979 at a restaurant to cold sell him a postcard collage, then later angled for an invite to Warhol’s studio, The Factory. By the time Bischofberger formally introduced them, Basquiat was a star in his own right, dusting everything he touched.
    They did make a series of works with Clemente, but it was Warhol and Basquiat who felt a lasting connection. United by trauma—friends dying of AIDS and being beaten to death by police—and their own recent brushes with death—Basquiat had been hit by a car, Warhol had been shot—the artists decided to continue working together in secret at Warhol’s vacant studio building, and only revealed their four-handed work to their dealer a year later.
    In all, they worked together on around 160 paintings between 1983 and 1985. Around 70 of these jointly signed canvases are included in the Paris show, which is the largest number ever to be exhibited together. It also features 220 other works and archival documents, by the artists as individuals, and by others in their circle.
    A general view of the exhibition during the “Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands” press opening at Fondation Louis Vuitton on April 4, 2023 in Paris. Photo by Luc Castel/Getty Images
    The enormous scale of some of the works—speaking to Warhol’s love of cinema-screen and billboard format and Basquiat’s experience painting on walls—goes some way towards explaining why there has not yet been an exhibition of this size despite their obvious pulling power with museum audiences. “Here, they can breathe, they can explode in their intensity,” said art historian Dieter Buchhart, who co-curated the exhibition with Anna Karina Hofbauer in partnership with the foundation’s in-house curator Olivier Michelon.
    The show opens with a group of portraits of the artists. Among them, a Polaroid selfie of the two, and Basquiat’s now-iconic double portrait, Dos Cabezas, which the artist dashed off to paint after one of their first meetings at The Factory.
    Some of the earliest collaborative works made with Clemente—looking somewhat like a cacophonous surrealist game of exquisite corpse—are included. But the duo works by Warhol and Basquiat are the substance of the exhibition—and not all are created equal. Some early ones just look like Basquiat had defaced Warhol’s paintings. The best examples are the more cohesive ones in which, as Warhol once said “you can’t tell who did which parts.” In Taxi, 45th/Broadway, Warhol’s banal yellow car bonnet is transformed by Basquiat into social commentary: a taxicab driver curses a Black figure attempting to flag it down. Also interesting are the ones in which you can see a real back-and-forth dialogue developing between the artists. This can be seen in the 33-foot-long African Masks or in the humorous exchanges made in a series of images prominently featuring a dog motif.
    Installation view. “Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands” at Fondation Louis Vuitton. Photo by Naomi Rea.
    A few connecting galleries with Street art by the likes of Keith Haring and Fab Five Freddy and other works by artists of the era, such as Jenny Holzer, add context to the collaboration. Photographs by Halsband and Powell provide a role call of the scene. A mind-bending group shot taken at Mr. Chow’s features dozens of now household names, with the likes of Haring, David Hockney, Alex Katz, and John Chamberlain all crammed into one frame. In another, a radiant Mary Boone holds hands with Basquiat. The gallerist, who also represented Basquiat at the time, gets another nod in one of Basquiat’s “punching bags”—an enigmatic piece embellished with her name and one of Basquiat’s trademark crowns. The show’s meaty catalog doesn’t offer any context for the inclusion, but it is interesting to note that Boone herself was never a fan of the joint works.
    “I didn’t like the collaborative paintings. I thought it compromised both artists,” Boone told me over the phone. “I think that Bruno did it with the idea of invigorating the artists. I think that he wanted to inspire Andy. There’s a whole history of art dealers giving artists ideas and artists choosing to take them or not. But I just didn’t think the idea of encouraging artists to make paintings together, where they are just morphed into a third entity, was a good one.” Fortunately, for the collaborators, though: “Jean-Michel was a star, so there was no shortage of galleries wanting to show them.”
    Regarding the punching bag work, Basquiat was a notorious prankster, and Boone said she took it as a joke.
    Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, Untitled, 1984. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat Licensed by Artestar, New York, © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © Clint Jenkins.
    As it turned out, Boone was far from the only skeptic of the work. In an oft-cited New York Times review, critic Vivian Raynor panned the Shafrazi show, writing: “The collaboration looks like one of Warhol’s manipulations, which increasingly seem based on the Mencken theory about nobody going broke underestimating the public’s intelligence.” Shafrazi only managed to sell three paintings from the show; two of which were returned after the negative reviews.
    Curator Bucchart put the lukewarm reception down to the fact that Warhol had fallen out of favor with the press; he’d been accused of lacking in inventiveness after he turned towards celebrity portraits, and some historians suggest he lost his mojo in the decade after he was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968. “Anything Warhol was doing in the ‘80s was criticized,” Buchhart said. “So it actually wasn’t personal, it was just unlucky that the greatest project in art history would fall under bad critique because of the circumstances.”
    Queried on the sheer number of the works included in the exhibition, and whether they could all be such masterpieces, the curator doubled down on his sentiment. “It’s far away from showing everything,” he noted, citing the existence of more than 100 additional works in the world. “It’s far away from showing everything we got,” he added. “Look at the quality of the works. There are none that fail the highest standards of the Fondation Louis Vuitton.”
    I’m not sure to what extent I would agree. A more cynical observer might find something to say in the fact that Galerie Bruno Bischofberger is one of the main lenders of the collaborative works, suggesting there is still unmoved inventory in the back room.
    Andy Warhol, Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat as David (1984). ©2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Licensed by ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy Norman and Irma Braman.
    Perhaps the strongest works in the exhibition are those executed by the artists as individuals, albeit inspired by the other. These include the revelatory acrylic and silkscreen ink print collages of six Polaroids of Basquiat in his underwear posing as Michelangelo’s David (loaned by Miami heavyweights Norman and Irma Braman). Equally strong is the somber assemblage by Basquiat, titled Gravestone (1987, also a private collection), which pays homage to Warhol after his death. The work quotes the elder artist’s crosses, and is poetically, hauntingly, inscribed “perishable” as an ode to the ephemeral nature of being. Basquiat himself would die the following year of a heroin overdose, aged 27.
    What is most enjoyable about the show is the fascinating historical context of the collaboration. Here we have two titans of art history working together, undeniably a momentous event, which offers clues about the varyingly inscrutable artists, their immediate environs, and their influence on each other. The experiment brought Warhol back to painting again, and their relationship offers insights into the chess game Basquiat was playing with his own brand.
    All told, the exhibition may not demonstrate that everything they made together was amazing—but what is truly amazing is that they did it at all.
    “Basquiat x Warhol: Painting 4 Hands” is on view through August 28 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
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    Artist Sarah Sze’s New Guggenheim Show of Kaleidoscopic Sculptures Offers a Fascinating—and Frustrating—Contemplation of Time

    It’s an art nerd’s favorite fun fact: paintings that hang in the Guggenheim aren’t actually level with the museum’s canted walls and floor. In truth, they’re mounted at odd angles that merely give gallery-goers the appearance of squareness. 
    A similar irony pervades Sarah Sze’s new solo show at the museum, “Timelapse.” Everywhere in the artist’s installations are various instruments of measurement that we rely on for order in an otherwise orderless world: rulers, clocks, metronomes. But in Sze’s hands, they serve an opposite purpose, reminding us only of their own futility.
    “Measuring tools” is just one of the many classes of material in the work of Sze, who brings an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to art, erecting elaborate sculptures from the most forgettable of materials: wires and rocks and lamps and clamps. Hers is an art of stuff.
    In walking through the show, I found myself unconsciously cataloging all these little quotidian objects the artist has employed. Entire pages of my notebook are filled with passages like this: “Mirrors, salt, toothpicks, iPhone chargers, over-the-counter pills.”
    The impulse came from a desire to break down Sze’s ultra-complicated installations and identify, in their constituent parts, hidden layers of symbolic value. Why did she choose that empty bottle of water? What does that jar of mayonnaise mean?
    In what ways is this pile of junk art? 
    Sarah Sze, Slice (2023), installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Founda1on, New York.
    Sze, 54, is among the most successful artists of her generation. A graduate of Yale University, then New York’s School of Visual Arts, she entered the art world a young star. Her work was included in the 1999 Carnegie International and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Three years later, she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. In 2013 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. (Sze declined to be interviewed for this article.) 
    Because of these bona fides, and because of her penchant for transforming odd spaces into kaleidoscopic spectacles, the artist’s solo show at the Guggenheim arrived with much anticipation. It also arrived late. The exhibition was supposed to open in October of 2020, but was postponed because of the pandemic. Sze made good use of the extra time, though, periodically visiting the museum for research while it was closed.  
    Sarah Sze, Things Caused to Happen (Oculus) (2023), installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Founda1on, New York.
    I expected Sze’s artwork to overtake the Guggenheim the way artists like Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, and James Turrell have in the past. But “Timelapse” is a more modest presentation. It’s largely contained to the museum’s top floor, and even there only some of the bays are really filled. Instead, most of the artist’s accretions appear to grow out from the Guggenheim’s walls, like barnacles clinging to a boat. The relationship feels parasitic. (A retrospective dedicated to the Venezuelan artist Gego takes up the rest of the museum.) 
    Some of Sze’s sculptures, such as the towering scaffold of sticks and photos called Slice (2023), take up a great deal of space, though it’s often a presence that’s illusory. In works like these, everything is hollow and tenuous, literally held together by glue and string. Part of you wants to blow on them just to see if they’ll topple. 
    Sze didn’t arrive at the museum with these artworks preassembled. Rather, she put them together onsite ahead of the opening—an iterative process that took weeks.
    “Many of the decisions were made during the installation,” said the Guggenheim’s Kyung An, who curated the show. It was during that stage, she added, that a “lot of the elements came alive.” 
    Sarah Sze, Times Zero (2023), installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
    Sze’s sculptures are broken up by several large-scale paintings, all of which include collaged elements. In Times Zero (2023), for instance, a sunset scene is all but obscured by a whorl of photographs affixed to its surface, while even more printed scraps spill out onto the floor. At the center of the swirling composition is a low-res image of a fire pit, alternately inviting and threatening—a source of warmth, perhaps, or a portal to hell.  
    Another painting, called Last Impression (2023), does something similar, but its own attendant photos are suspended before it on string. Sze has cut holes in some of these pictures, creating little apertures through which the painting is constantly being cropped and reframed as one walks by. “As the exhibition came together, during installation, we realized that each bay functions almost as an image-making system of its own,” An explained. 
    Tying these systems—and indeed the whole show—together is River of Images (2023), a series of roving digital pictures and videos that are projected onto artworks, walls, gallery-goers, and even the Guggenheim’s façade. Some, like photos of hands and birds, you’ll recognize from elsewhere in the show; others move by too quickly to register. 
    This, An said, is “our current reality. We’re just trying to put these things together, all these different, disparate fragmented forms. Sarah talks a lot about how, in our digital world, there’s always a sense of longing that is left behind.” 
    Sarah Sze, Timekeeper (2016). © Sarah Sze. Courtesy of the artist.
    The show concludes in a darkened gallery at the end of the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp, where Sze’s work finally takes over to satisfaction. Presented there is Timekeeper (2016), a sprawling, multisensory installation of flashing lights, stuttering gadgets, and other sundries—the aforementioned mayonnaise among them. “Apple, carabiner, Pellegrino, tin foil, egg,” reads my notebook page from this stage of the walkthrough. 
    Pictures hang, in printed-out form, from just about every surface, while projectors throw others around the room. Most have to do with the very act of image-making and its history. There’s Harold Edgerton’s Milk-Drop Coronet Splash (1936), an early example of photography’s ability to capture imperceptible movement, and a shot of a cheetah mid-stride, which evokes Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse in Motion (1878). (Muybridge’s famed footage, a precursor to motion picture technology, appears throughout the show as well.) 
    Of all Sze’s works in the show, Timekeeper is the most thrilling. Not coincidentally, it is also the “junkiest” of the bunch. It’s the moment when the artist’s motley objects transcend their own miscellany and coalesce to overwhelm the viewer with their own excess.  
    Like Sze’s best works, Timekeeper captures something profound, or profoundly sad, about it what it feels like to be alive in these the head-spinning days of late capitalism, inundated by images, ads, and commercial solutions that leave us feeling full, but not fulfilled. Standing before it is like that moment—we’ve all had it—when you come-to on the sixth page of a dissociative Amazon search, a full shopping cart the only evidence of how you got there, and suddenly become hyperaware of how little time you have left on Earth. 
    Sarah Sze, Timekeeper (2016), detail. © Sarah Sze. Courtesy of the artist.
    “Sarah Sze: Timelapse” is on view now through September 10, 2023 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. 
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    Treasures From the Vatican, Including a 16th-Century Tapestry of Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper,’ Get a Rare Showing in Italy

    Every Easter for four centuries, 13 priests would gather in the Vatican Apostolic Palace to have their feet washed by the pope. The ceremony became one of the most important symbolic rituals of Holy Week and took place under the gaze of Jesus, as portrayed in a 16th-century tapestry depicting Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495–98).
    That tapestry is now one of the key highlights of In Leonardo’s Shadow,” a new exhibition at the Palace of Venaria that explores the Holy Thursday ritual at the papal court. It is is joined by the woven papal throne canopy of Pope Clement VII, created by renowned Flemish tapestry weaver Pieter Van Aelst and, like the Leonardo-esque tapestry, on loan from the Vatican Museums. More

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    See Inside Artist Filip Custic’s First Solo Show in Tokyo, Where His ‘Super-Bionic’ Sculptures Meld the Body and Technology

    Will humanity know when singularity has arrived? This is a central question propelling the ascent of young Spanish-Croatian artist Filip Custic.
    His works in response have focused on the human body as a canvas, lavishing it with color, layering it with 20th-century motifs of art and psychoanalysis, and fragmenting it with mirrors and screens. Often, the results appear like fantastical scenes composed for high-end fashion magazines and not by accident: the 30-year-old began in marketing working with the likes of Vogue, Esquire, and GQ, and remains, perhaps surprisingly, un-jaded by the creative potential of the commercial world.
    Filip Custic, virtualhypermetasuperultramegaconnected. Photo: Filip Custic, courtesy Onkaos.
    Fitting, then, that one of Custic’s first solo shows has opened inside a luxury shopping mall, Tokyo’s Parco Museum. The exhibition, “Human Product,” stages many of the Madrid-based artist’s founding works that present the body, most often his own, as a site for tweaking and upgrading, just like an operating system, as the artist puts it. Three new sculptural works place Custic within the context of collectible doll culture. Again, Custic believes presenting such works in Japan, the main developer of collectible dolls, makes Parco an ideal location.
    “In the show, I basically want people to experience new paradigms, new situations, so we can think out ‘human programming,’” Custic told Artnet News. “I would like to open a conversation focused on how consumerist culture attempts to turn us into ‘commodities.’”
    In zzz (2023) and human product (2023), new works in which Custic recasts himself as miniaturized dolls, he calls attention to the somnolent qualities of technologies, but not as you might expect. “I want to express the possibility of being able to sleep in the system and then wake up,” Custic said. “It is a big pressure to be a human being and we must look for moments of relaxation of our consciousness.”
    This line of thinking applies to the overall exhibition. In his “Bolso de Pantalla” series (2021), a collection of handbags with incorporated screens that play his own branded messaging, he highlights the idea that carrying a handbag turns a human into a walking advertisement, but not to revolutionary ends.
    “Consumerist culture turns us into commodities,” Custic said. “Our existence is more valid if it can be monetized.” A far-cry from calls to reclaim our digital identities.
    Installation view of “Human Product” at Parco Museum, Tokyo. Photo courtesy Onkaos and Filip Custic.
    Custic’s arrival in Japan marks the latest in a series of commercial breakthroughs for the artist. In 2018, he provided the visual thematics for Catalan pop star Rosalía’s sophomore album El mal querer. In a series of moving digital sculptures, Custic portrayed Rosalía as a divine figure immersed in worlds of modern spiritualism—think golden crucifixes, moon cycles, and energy circles all cast in scenes of flashing radiance. He later created work to accompany music projects for Julia Stone and Lil Nas X.
    These projects stayed true to Custic’s glossy aesthetic, repeating much-used symbols such as cracked mirrors and the fragmented body, but left behind technological considerations. There’s little evidence of Custic making such a turn in his own work.
    “It’s difficult to separate the role of technology in my artistic practice and in my life,” he said. “Technology is the only innovative element of our era. I think we will look super-bionic in the future and we will ask, ‘at what point did all this happen?’” Some would argue that moment has already arrived.
    See more images of the exhibition below.
    Installation view of “Human Product” at Parco Museum, Tokyo. Photo courtesy Onkaos and Filip Custic.
    Filip Custic, “Bolso de pantalla” (2021). Photo: Filip Custic, courtesy of Onkaos.
    Installation view of “Human Product” at Parco Museum, Tokyo. Photo courtesy Onkaos and Filip Custic.
    “Human Product” is on view at Parco Museum, 15-1 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, through April 24.
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    See Highlights From the Smithsonian’s Epic ‘Afrofuturism’ Show—From Octavia Butler’s Typewriter to Parliament-Funkadelic Costumes

    Now that the highly-anticipated “Afrofuturism” show is open at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., we caught up with curator Kevin Strait to talk about the years-long planning, the final result, and some of his favorite objects in the show.
    For starters, Strait described Afrofuturism as an evolving concept. The term itself was coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993, and was initially conceived though his discussions with authors Samuel Delany and Greg Tate, and sociologist Tricia Rose, said Strait. A few years later, researcher Alondra Nelson and others created a listserv (functionally, an email list) to gather voices and ideas about this relatively new scholarly term. 
    “In the early days of the internet, this listserv functioned as the virtual community for scholars, musicians, artists, and other like-minded individuals to discuss and develop the language of this conceptual model that looked at the ways that race, technology, and fantasy blend together in the creative works and radical expression of African Americans and Black people across the diaspora,” said Strait.
    The Smithsonian exhibition traces this history by beginning with the cultural roots of Afrofuturism and its African legacies, before moving to the narrative works of the enslaved and into the 20th century with the words and visual data produced by African American sociologist and theorist W.E.B. Du Bois.
    “After historically grounding the concept, the exhibit explores Afrofuturism’s reach into the 20th and 21st centuries, exposing the evolving worlds of science fiction writing, fashion, visual culture, film, and activism,” Strait explained. “We also explore music’s central role as a primary mouthpiece of Afrofuturist expression in art and take a close look at its evolution beginning with Sun Ra, and carrying forward with artists as diverse as Lee Scratch Perry, Outkast, Janelle Monae, Herbie Hancock, and so many more.”
    Installation view of “Afrofuturism” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
    Asked how and when he first conceived of the show, Strait told Artnet News he began writing the script for the exhibition in 2018 and working with the museum on the project in 2019.
    “But I started thinking about Afrofuturism in relation to material culture after our museum collected the Parliament-Funkadelic Mothership in 2011,” he added. “That object carries so much history, and alongside its legacy as an iconic stage prop, it also embodies deep symbolic meaning as a figurative vessel, designed to liberate the minds of audiences. From these objects, we can see how themes of freedom and agency are inherently woven into their history. After our doors opened in 2016, we’ve been developing multiple exhibitions that take a deeper dive into various subjects that examine the cultural history of the African American experience.”
    Asked about the challenges of organizing the show and why the concept is particularly resonant at the moment, Strait pointed to “the inherent complexity that comes with any exhibition that focuses on identity, representation, and contextualizing the African American experience through a cultural lens.”
    While there is a wide-ranging scope to Afrofuturism that covers generations and of course, looks to the future, he said that that challenge also presented an opportunity for the museum to examine a large variety of objects in its collection, connecting stories across multiple genres and disciplines from the past and present.
    “As the term and concept become more noticeable and part of our daily lives, we see more examples of its impact and influence in our culture. That’s the power of social media and our connected lives, where previously siloed academic terms like Afrofuturism have now entered our national discourse,” Strait said. “I think the success of films like Black Panther have helped to cement the ideas of Afrofuturism in our culture. That film’s success is due, in part, to more audiences knowing about Afrofuturism and a more public demand for stories with Black characters, Black settings, and Black worlds that are developed by Black creators.”
    Asked what he considers among the crowning achievements of the show, Strait told Artnet News: “I’m happy that we’ve developed a narrative that explores Afrofuturism’s broad history of expression and one that connects its story to real people.” For instance, the exhibition explores how Nichelle Nichols’s portrayal of Uhura on Star Trek impacted Black recruitment in NASA, as well as how Trayvon Martin’s dreams of working in aviation connect the themes of Afrofuturism to real people.
    “We also want the exhibition to connect with and add another layer of understanding to our museum’s central narrative of ‘making a way out of no way,’ by exploring these new concepts and spaces of identity for African Americans that emerge over time.”
    Here are some of the highlights of the show, some picked by Strait.
    Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil by W.E.B. Du Bois (1920). Strait called Du Bois’s The Comet “a wonderful example of speculative fiction that provides an allegory about race in America.” Photo courtesy Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
    Octavia Butler typewriter, once owned and used by the writer in the mid to late 1970s. On loan from Anacostia Community Museum.
    Costume worn by Bernie Worell of Parliament-Funkadelic, “who crafted their space-age sound with his innovative use of synthesizers in popular music” (c. 1966). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Gift of Judie Worrell and Bassl Worrell.
    ESP custom electric guitar owned by Vernon Reid, “used in the recording and video for [Living Color’s] breakthrough song, ‘Cult of Personality’” (1985-86). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Donated by Vernon Reid.
    Costume worn by Nona Hendryx of Labelle (1975). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Gift of Nona Hendryx of Labelle.
    Cape and jumpsuit worn by André De Shields as the Wizard in The Wiz—the “super soul musical”—on Broadway (1975). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Cape: gift of the Black Museum founded by Lois K. Alexander-Lane. Jumpsuit and accessories: Gift of André De Shields.
    [The Georgia Negro] Occupations of Negroes and whites in Georgia ca. 1890. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.“Afrofuturism” is on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, 1400 Constitution Ave NW, Washington, D.C. through March 24, 2024.
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    See Inside a New Exhibition That Ties Bollywood Musicals to the Long Tradition of Depicting Dance in Southeast Asian Art

    Bollywood cinema is known for its elaborately choreographed song-and-dance numbers—a phenomenon that reflects the importance of dance in the art of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Himalayas for millennia.
    That’s the thesis of a new exhibition at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum celebrating 2,000 years of the visual language of dance—and its historical, spiritual, and political impact across a broad geographic region that includes India, Pakistan, Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia.
    “What we’re trying to pull out is how really important dance is in the religion and mythology and court culture and everyday life of all of those places,” exhibition co-curator Forrest McGill, the museum’s senior curator of South and Southeast Asian art, told Artnet News.
    Five years in the making, “Beyond Bollywood: 2,000 Years of Dance in Art” brings together 120 artworks from 25 museums and private collections. Originally conceived of by Laura Weinstein, the curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it became a collaboration between the Asian Art Museum and the Cincinnati Art Museum when the Boston museum had to pull out for scheduling reasons.
    Classical Khmer dancer Prumsodun Ok. Photo by Nobuyuki Arai.
    Bollywood movies, of course, draw inspiration from Hollywood musicals. But some of the early Bollywood films recounted traditional stories from Indian mythology, and the exhibition pairs a number of objects with short movie clips related to the subjects of the artworks.
    “The big idea for this exhibition is dance is power,” McGill said. “I think people are going to be surprised to see how often deities are dancing, and in different contexts they’re dancing… dancing seems to symbolize the energy and the power of the deities.”
    The show opens with a bold expression of that power: a statue of a dancing Shiva from 800 or 900 years ago.
    Installation view of “Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art” at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, with a statue of Shiva displayed against a backdrop of NASA footage of solar flares. Photo courtesy of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
    “It’s surrounded by projected video of NASA footage of solar flares,” McGill said. “This is meant to suggest how Shiva’s dance is really happening out in the cosmos. It has implications of cosmic destruction and cosmic recreation.”
    “In the Indian and Hindu and Buddhist worldview, time is cyclical,” he added. “The cycle of destruction and recreation is happening endlessly, over and over and over for billions of years. There’s no first beginning or final end.”
    Other memorable depictions of deities in the show include a mischievous statue of the Hindu god Krishna as a child dancing for joy—”full of the sense of an impish little boy,” McGill said—and an adult Krishna dancing in victory on the head of a vanquished serpent.
    Krishna overcoming the serpent Kaliya (ca. 975–1025). India; Tamil Nadu state. Copper alloy. Collection of the Asia Society, New York: Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection.
    Dance also appears as a form of seduction—a distraction tactic that usually failed when employed against the gods.
    The earliest work in the show, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a 2,000-year-old plaque from northern India, of a woman dancing to an accompanying harpist.
    “The harp didn’t survive as a musical instrument in India, interestingly,” McGill said. “But the position of the dancer, the way she holds her arms and legs, could absolutely come out of a dance performance today!”
    The final work in the show is a three-channel 2016 video by Sarah Choo Jing titled Art of the Rehearsal.
    Installation view of “Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art” at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, with Sarah Choo Jing, Art of the Rehearsal (2016). Photo courtesy of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
    “The piece fills a whole room, projected on three walls. It’s the back streets of Singapore with people practicing their dance,” McGill said. “It’s very striking.”
    “The exhibition makes the point that these traditions—the importance of dance, the significance of dance, the variety of powerful things that dance can do,” he added, “That continues right up to today.”
    See more works from the show below.
    Comb with depiction of dancing woman (ca. 1600–1700). Sri Lanka; former kingdom of Kandy. Ivory with traces of pigment. Collection of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Avery Brundage Collection. Photo ©Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
    The Buddhist deity Vajravarahi (ca. 1300–1400). Tibet. Bronze with gilding and inlaid turquoise. Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund.
    Attributed to Pandit Seu, Dancing villagers (ca. 1730). Indian. Opaque watercolors on paper. Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase.
    Dancing Ganesha (ca. 1500–1700), India, Karnataka state. Copper alloy. Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Harry and Yvonne Lenart.
    Maharaja Sher Singh and companions watching a dance performance (ca. 1850). Pakistan; Lahore. Opaque watercolors and gold on paper. Collection of the San Diego Museum of Art, Edwin Binney 3rd Collection.
    Dancing Hevajra surrounded by dancing yoginis (ca. 1050–1100). Northeastern Thailand; former kingdom of Angkor. Bronze. Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of Maxeen and John Flower in honor of Stanislaw Czuma.
    Mythical bird-man and bird-woman dancing (ca. 1857–1885), Myanmar (Burma). Wood with lacquer, gold leaf, and inlaid glass. Burma Art Collection at Northern Illinois University, gift of Konrad and Sarah Bekker.
    Mythical bird-man and bird-woman dancing (ca. 1857–1885), Myanmar (Burma). Wood with lacquer, gold leaf, and inlaid glass. Burma Art Collection at Northern Illinois University, gift of Konrad and Sarah Bekker.
    Armlet with Krishna overcoming the serpent Kaliya (ca. 1850–1900). India; Chennai, Tamil Nadu state. Gold, opalescent glass, and topaz. Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase.
    Pushpamala N., Still image from Indrajaala/Seduction (2012) (Indian, b. 1956). Courtesy of the artist.
    The Lords of the Cremation Ground dancing (ca. 1400–1500), Tibet. Gift of Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation.
    “Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art” is on view at the Asian Art Museum, Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture, 200 Larkin Street, San Francisco, California, March 31–July 10, 2023. 
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    The Next Big Names? Here Are 5 Rising Artists to Watch From the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea

    The opening of the 14th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea on April 6 might have met with a rainstorm and communication breakdown that led to chaotic arrangements, but it was nonetheless a success.
    It wasn’t due to the K-pop glamor brought by Super Junior’s Siwon Choi, who was appointed the ambassador of this edition’s biennale onstage; nor did it have much to do with the strong presence of the opposing Democratic Party, including the mayor of Gwangju, Kang Gi-jung. The real star was the stunning main exhibition curated under the theme of “Soft and Weak like Water” by the Tate Modern’s senior curator Sook-Kyung Lee, the first South Korean-born curator to helm the event since 2006.
    Spanning five galleries in the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall as well as four other off-site locations, the beautifully installed exhibition proved more than just a show to impress, but a platform for important dialogues that aim to inspire.
    Featuring 79 artists from around the world, the show is divided into four main sections: Luminous Halo, Ancestral Voices, Transient Sovereignty, and Planetary Times. The biennale set in the South Korean city known for its struggle for freedom and democracy might not be overtly political at first glance, but there’s no lack of politically charged yet poetic works that question and respond to urgent issues related to resistance, decolonization, and the environment. The art here is like water—its softness and tenderness can be a powerful mediator that penetrates the hard surfaces to bring about transformation.
    Ahead of a full review of this expansive biennial event, we highlight five artists featured in the show deserving of global attention.

    Oum Jeongsoon
    Oum Jeongsoon, Elephant without trunk (2023). Courtesy the artist and Gwangju Biennale Foundation. Photo: glimworkers.
    Who: Born in 1961 in Chung-ju, South Korea, Oum graduated from Ewha Woman’s University’s College of Fine Arts in Korea before furthering her studies at Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Munich, Germany, from which she graduated in 1988. She was previously a fine art professor at KonKuk University in the 1990s and has exhibited in Korea, Japan, and Germany. She is the founder and director of art exhibition and education centre Our Eyes. She is based in Seoul.
    Work on show: Installation work Elephant without Trunk (2023), featured in the section Luminous Halo at the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall. The work earned the artist the inaugural Gwangju Biennale Park Seo-Bo Art Prize, with a cash prize of $100,000 sponsored by the famed 91-year-old Korean artist.
    Why you should pay attention: In her ongoing project “Another Way of Seeing,” Oum traces the journey of the arrival of the first elephant in Korea from Indonesia 600 years ago. Elephant without Trunk is an extension of this project, in which Oum reinterprets elephants through the experiences of the visually impaired individuals and plays them up in enlarged forms. These obscurely shaped “elephants”—some without trunks, others without a proper body—serve as reminders of how “no one can see properly, no one can see the whole. We can only see part of the world,” noted Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern and one of the five judges of the Park Seo-Bo Art Prize. Morris praised the artist for sending a strong message to the world in the post-pandemic era: “It defines life through strong connections transcending genres, and traditions which have been passed down to this day.”

    Emilija Škarnulytė
    Emilija Škarnulytė, Æqualia (2023), on view at Gwangju Biennale. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
    Who: Born in 1987 in Vilnius, Lithuania, Škarnulytė is an artist and filmmaker working between documentary and the imaginary. The award-winning artist is a graduate of Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art in Norway and her works have been collected by in institutions the Kadist Foundation and Centre Pompidou. She is a founder and co-director of Polar Film Lab and is a member of artist duo New Mineral Collective. She is based between Vilnius and Oslo.
    Work on show: Æqualia (2023), an immersive video installation featured in Planetary Times at the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall.
    Why you should pay attention: Škarnulytė made the news by turning down of the GASAG Art Prize last year in protest of Germany’s reliance on Russian energy amid its war with Ukraine. This year at the Gwangju Biennale, the artist might be back in the news for the art she’s made. Æqualia is an enigmatic and mesmerizing work that features a creature that looks like a mermaid navigating different bodies of water. The mythical creature swims across different rivers around the Amazon, and at one point cuts through the convergence point between the blackwater river of Rio Negro and whitewater of Rio Negro. At times, the mermaid is seen playing with the pink river dolphins, who are residents of the region. Echoing the theme of this subsection, the lyrical nine-minute film captures the beauty and mystery of nature. The mermaid’s navigation through different waters also inspires the way we should act around conflicts and unpredictable circumstances.

    Yuko Mohri
    Yuko Mohri, I/O (2011-23), on view at Gwangju Biennale. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
    Who: Born in Kanagawa in 1980, Mohri is a graduate of the Tokyo University of the Arts and has held solo shows around the world. Her residencies with Asian Cultural Council in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Camden Arts Centre in London have enlarged her global exposure. Her works are in the collections of Centre Pompidou in Paris, M+ in Hong Kong, and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. She is based in Tokyo.
    Work on show: Installation work I/O (2011-23), on view at the glass pavilion of Horanggasy Artpolygon, one of the off-site venues.
    Why you should pay attention: The installation artist has been a regular at biennales around the world since 2017, according to our survey last year, and it is not hard to understand why after seeing her work at Gwangju. I/O, which features a set of kinetic sculptures, is an ongoing series. But the artist has given it a new spin, adapting the site-specific work to a local context. By collecting the almost invisible dust and debris from the floor, and sampling environmental elements such as air flow and humidity, Mohri’s work transforms these odd components into a “music score” that is uniquely Gwangju. The artist also links the work to Han Kang’s novel The White Book (2016) and the multi-layered history of the city, symbolizing the creation of a “tone of history that was never written.” She’s expecting to show at the upcoming Art Basel in Switzerland with Mother’s Tankstation, with a solo show at gallery’s London space slated to open in September.

    Anne Duk Hee Jordan
    Anne Duk Hee Jordan, So long, and thank you for all the fish (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Gwangju Biennale.
    Who: Jordan was born in Korea in 1978 and grew up in Germany. A free diver since a young age, Jordan’s installation work explores the intertwined relationships between the humans and non-humans, as well as marine life, technology, food, and sexuality. Humor also often has a role to play in the artist’s inspiring and delightful work. Jordan is based in Berlin.
    Work on show: So long, and thank you for all the fish (2023), on view at the basement of Horanggasy Artpolygon, one of the off-site venues.
    Why you should pay attention: Jordan has created a mysterious yet whimsical world with her elaborate installation spanning three rooms in the basement of this community art center located on Yangmin mountain. The mirrored rooms, doused in black light and fluorescent colors, are filled with obscure objects and creatures that are inhabitants of a unique ecosystem that exists solely in these rooms. There are also robotic, non-human inhabitants that can sense the presence of humans, as they start making joyous moves to greet the visitors. As it turns out, these robotic critters are part of Jordan’s ongoing series “Artificial Stupidity” (2016–), and the work’s title is taken from Novacene, a 2019 book by James Lovelock, the late scientist, environmentalist, and futurist who has long inspired the artist’s contemplation of our futures through an environmental lens.

    Oh Suk Kuhn
    Oh Suk Kuhn, “Enemy Property” series (behind, on the wall) and “Prosperity” series (front). Photo: Vivienne Chow.
    Who: Born in 1979, Incheon in South Korea, Oh studied photography at Nottingham Trent University in the U.K. before embarking on an artist career. He works with photography, a medium he picked to document and investigate the confluence between his personal and collective memories, and the ongoing trauma of the country’s war-torn and colonial history. Oh is based in Incheon.
    Work on show: Photography series “Enemy Property” and “Prosperity,” on view at the Gwangju Exhibition Hall.
    Why you should pay attention: At first glance, Oh’s subtle photography series may not be the most eye-catching compared to the elaborate installations surrounding his work. But these seemingly uneventful pictures are telling important stories about the history of Korea that has long been forgotten or even unknown to outsiders. The series “Enemy Property” captures the “enemy houses” in Gwangju built by the Japanese during the colonial period that have been transformed over the years from their original state. His images depict enemy houses seen in Incheon and Busan (where the artist created a series and showed at last year’s Busan Biennale). The “Prosperity” series captures longevity symbols found in Korean culture that were in fact created by appropriating patterns and motifs from other cultures, such as Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and even art nouveau. These very still pictures are like time capsules, which Oh has created to process and question the history and narratives that are still affecting Korea today.
    The Gwangju Biennale runs until July 9.
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    An Exhibition of Doodles by Renaissance Masters and Modern Artists Brings Idle Scribblings From the Margins to the Center

    From childhood fridge masterpieces to those jottings one makes while on interminable hold with the utility company—there’s something instinctive and revealing about the doodles made by absentminded humans. And according to “Gribouillage / Scarabocchio,” an ongoing exhibition at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, it’s an art.
    Borne out of a research project between Columbia University’s Diane Bodart and the Villa Medici’s Francesca Alberti, the exhibition debuted in a sprawling 300 work show in Rome in Spring 2022. Its Parisian companion stages half that number, but still succeeds in tracing six centuries’ worth of jottings, scribbles, doodles, and idle-minded sketches—and their constancy in art.
    Drawing from the collection of the Beaux-Arts de Paris as well as a host of other European institutions, “Gribouillage / Scarabocchio”—French and Italian for doodling—is thematic rather than chronological in approach. It arranges work in sections such as “Drawing at Play,” “The Childhood of Art,” and “In the Shadow of the Workshop.”
    This curatorial decision brings the often-preparatory work on the backs of canvases by Renaissance masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bernini into conversation with modern and contemporary artists including Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Luigi Pericle. In doing so, the exhibition offers doodling as something inherent to and indivisible from artistic endeavors.
    “By proposing new comparisons between the works of the masters of early modernity,” reads the show’s notes, “the exhibition blurs chronological classifications and traditional categories, and places the practice of doodling at the heart of art-making.”
    See more images from the exhibition below.
    Brassaï, Matisse in front of a drawing he executed with his eyes closed (1939). Photo: © Estate Brassaï Succession – Philippe Ribeyrolles.
    Giovanni Francesco Caroto, Portrait of a Child Holding a Drawing (1515–20). Photo: © Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Civici, Verona (Gardaphoto, Salò).
    Eugène Delacroix, Class Notebook (1815). Photo: © INHA.
    Léonard de Vinci, Profile of an Old Man (1481–86). Photo: © Beaux-Arts de Paris.
    Jean Dubuffet, Henri Calet (1947). Photo: © Fondation Dubuffet / ADAGP, Paris.
    “Gribouillage / Scarabocchio” is on view at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, 14 Rue Bonaparte, Paris, France, through April 30.
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