Eliana Willis

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    Artists Grapple With Orientalism’s Thorny Legacy in Doha Museum Show

    What to do with problematic historical artists.
    It is a quandary that regularly dogs art historians, curators, critics, and the public at large regarding numerous high-profile artists of times past. In the list of controversial historic artists that give viewers pause, Jean-Léon Gérôme certainly ranks rather high. Credited with popularizing Orientalist painting to a fever pitch in the 19th century, the influence of Gérôme and his particular brand of Orientalism has seeped into Western depictions of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (MENASA) region today, more than a century later.
    Unpacking Gérôme’s work and legacy is the subject of a three-part exhibition “Seeing is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme,” jointly produced by the in-development, future Lusail Museum and Mataf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, both of Doha. While the first section curated by Emily Weeks, “A Wider Lens, A New Gérôme,” presents a comprehensive look at Gérôme’s practice and oeuvre, the latter two sections trace the evolution of Orientalism within visual culture through the present and offer insight into how contemporary artists engage with the theme.
    In the comparatively concise second section of the exhibition dedicated to photography and titled “Truth is Stranger than Fiction,” which operates as a sort of steppingstone taking visitors from the 19th century and into the 20th, curator Giles Hudson showcases how Gérôme’s techniques, most powerfully his use of color, have influenced subsequent generations of Western artists. Featuring a selection of 19th-century photographs illustrating the milieu of Gérôme’s time, more contemporary examples illustrate the enduring, and in some regards nefarious, ways his legacy lives on.
    Installation view of work by Steve McCurry in “Seeing is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme” (2024). Courtesy of MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art and Lusail Museum, Qatar Museums, Doha.
    In a suite of photographs by American photojournalist Steve McCurry, including the iconic Afghan Girl that appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic, the images are vibrant and hyper-saturated, echoing the color schemes of Gérôme that signaled the subject matter as being “exotic.” Inclusions of more contemporary photographs by artists from the MENASA region show emerging artists co-opting these means as well as incorporating symbols and motifs (but with actual knowledge of them) to craft new visions for the future. Underscoring the reciprocal influence between Gérôme and photography, where Gérôme tapped the compositional structures of the lens-based medium in his painting to convey a sense of reality, photography in turn found painterly opportunities to sidestep reality and incorporate elements of fantasy.
    Outside of the context of the present show, Western audiences, specifically Americans, might recognize this type of color signaling from the way television shows and movies frequently use colored filters to convey a sense of place; for instance, paralleling the motivations of Orientalism, countries part of the Global South are often shot with a yellow filter.
    The first two sections were brought together by curators tapped by the Lusail Museum, an institution which will boast the world’s largest collection of Orientalist paintings. The third section “I Swear I Saw That” curated by Sara Raza, however, speaks to Mathaf’s specialization in Modern and contemporary art. It stands as a cogent exhibition on its own terms.
    Moving away from the direct impact of Gérôme espoused in “Truth is Stranger Than Fiction,” here Raza approaches the idea of Orientalism not from a Western perspective but from a multiplicity of Eastern ones.
    Babi Badalov, Text Still (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
    Questioning the East/West Dichotomy
    Describing her approach to curating “I Swear I Saw That” in a guided walkthrough of the show, Raza said, “It was a way to think through how artists’ hands become a poetic weapon, and to rethink Orientalism, but not in a didactic way. There’s a time to be like a blunt hammer, and there’s a time to be a little bit more poetic.”
    The exhibition section features 25 artists, with the work of each showcased on its own merits rather than lumped together into thematic groupings (i.e., like a “blunt hammer”), together forming a new contemporary vision of the MENASA region through artistic means and considering the ways it has historically been illustrated. “Collectively, they come together to re-think Orientalisms in the plural,” said Raza. “Orientalism in this section becomes a conversation between East and East. Interrogating where the endpoints of Europe meet, if you flip that, that’s the East. We start to think about the arbitrary nature of borders, space, human geography, and so on.”
    The start of this interrogation begins before visitors enter the exhibition, and even the museum building itself. One of two specially commissioned works for the show, installation work Text Still (2024) by Azerbaijani artist Babi Badalov envelops the exterior of Mathaf, comprised of collaged and stitched together fabric panels emblazoned with texts employing a range of alphabets such as Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin. Playing with the elements of language itself, like grammar and syntax, as well as experimenting with various forms of stylized rendering of text like those found in graffiti or street art, Badalov’s work questions assumed hierarchies of language and culture as perpetuated by Orientalist lines of thinking. Even when figuration or illustration is absent, text is a common indicator of place, but within Text Still, the boundaries between alphabets and languages are metaphorically broken down and presented on a level plane.
    Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Quintet without Borders (2007). Courtesy of the artist and MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
    Within the exhibition space itself, a video work by Ergin Çavuşoğlu, originally from Bulgaria and now based in London, more directly addresses, or rather abstracts, ideas around borders whether East and East or East and West. Quintet without Borders (2007) shows five Roma musicians playing music in five different places. The video recordings are synced so the result is a cohesive performance of a piece of music that contains elements from a range of musical traditions, reflecting the composers’ nomadic origins. The Roma people originated from the region of Rajasthan on the Indian subcontinent, but a series of westward migrations largely between the 5th and 11th centuries codified a tradition of nomadism, which extends through the present day. The itinerant lifestyle lends itself to a decidedly different conception of borders and movement through various lands, one at stark odds with contemporary notions of geography. Quintet without Borders interprets through poetic, and musical means an old to Roma but perhaps new to Westerners’ perspective on time, place, and culture.
    East and East
    While discourse around the East/West dichotomy has become well-trodden ground, confining Orientalism to a dynamic between Europe and the Near East paints only a fraction of the picture. Even the concept of “MENASA” itself is a construction.
    “That the idea of geography and space in the Muslim world isn’t just limited to terms like MENASA, WANA [West Africa North Asia], MENA. Nobody from this region ever refers to themselves as that and I’m from here,” Raza noted. “That’s really important to point out, that these are also terms that have a military connotation. They are fictional and the way in which East is constructed is also fictional. The Middle East and West Asia and North Africa, it was entirely created as a mythical space. Edward Said writes, of course, about this in Orientalism, and on the cover of Orientalism is the work of Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, except Said never, ever mentioned Gérôme by name. But an image is worth a thousand words.”
    These “military connotations” are not only the result of European interventions, but, for example, the Russian and later Soviet conquest of Central Asia, and the expansion and contraction of the Ottoman Empire. In both cases, forms of Orientalism outside Western constructs developed.
    Installation view of Farhad Ahrania, “Khatamkari” (2018–19). Courtesy of the artist and MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
    Examples of contemporary dialogues with this history of non-Western Orientalism include works from Iranian-British artist Farhad Ahrarnia’s ongoing series that employs khatamkari, an ancient Persian art of marquetry, or inlaying technique. Here, Ahrarnia leverages this traditional practice in conversation with Soviet Modern art, specifically the work of Russian artist Kazimir Malevich. Western modes of Modernism are in turn relegated to the periphery, underscoring the falsity of Western universalism—artistic or otherwise.
    Aikaterini Gegisian, Self-Portrait as an Ottoman Woman with Flowers (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Courtesy of MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
    Turning the equation in on itself are works such as Self-Portrait as an Ottoman Woman with Flowers (2024) by Aikaterini Gegisian. Building on a project undertaken by the artist between 2012 and 2016, the work features a range of postcard reproductions of women in various forms of pose and traditional dress from across the Ottoman Empire, reflecting a type of Orientalist ethnography. Coupled with dried flowers and images of Islamic architecture, Gegisian’s own organization of the work’s various parts becomes a feminist action, complicating hierarchies of identification.
    Contemporary Orientalism
    While Gérôme’s legacy is more of an abstract starting point for the “I Swear I Saw That,” it nevertheless provides a strong conceptual basis for recent artistic engagement with contemporary forms of Orientalism. The explorations are not just the body of work of one man, but an index of forms, colors, and symbols used as didactic indicators—regardless of their roots in either reality or fantasy.
    “It’s very easy to sort of just say, ‘OK, Gérôme is designated to the dustbin of art history,’” Raza observed. “But then how do we look at his work again within the revisionist lens? How do artists allow us another way to explore the work? And I think that’s really key in thinking about not only the art historical content but visual culture as a larger whole.”
    Installation view of work by Raeda Saadeh in “I Swear I Saw That” (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Courtesy of MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
    Tapping into this vernacular, Palestinian artist Raeda Saadeh presents works from her “Fairy Tale” series, including Who will make me real? (2003). In this work, the artist photographs herself in the position of the Odalisque, typically shown in Western traditions as reclining, enveloped in news clippings.
    “You start to see two elements at play: one is misinformation, and one is disinformation. To some degree we can sometimes forgive misinformation because it might just be factual inaccuracy,” said Raza. “But disinformation is very intentional, designed to displace and mobilize the masses in a very particular way. We start to see how Orientalism takes shape in other intellectual deposits as well as the news. The news has a viral capacity to generate very particular kind of meaning.”
    By wrapping her body in these numerous and overlapping news clippings and through the work’s title, Saadeh engages with the media’s frequently Orientalist representation of Palestinian peoples, as well as her own physical and psychological experience of living under occupation. Unlike the traditional, docile Odalisque pose, however, Saadeh gazes directly out at the viewer in confrontation.
    Installation view of Nadia Kaabi-Linke, One Olive Tree Garden (2024). Courtesy of the artist and MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
    In the second commissioned work for the show, One Olive Tree Garden (2024), Tunisian and Ukranian artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke presents an olive tree that has been cast in concrete and meticulously sliced, the pieces of which can be moved through and circumvented by visitors. Described by Raza as a type of “biopsy of a tree,” the work holds a multitude of references that, together, form a new perspective on Orientalism. Within the exhibition, the work alludes to Gérome’s painting La République (1848–49) which depicts the personified Republic with an olive branch. In Kaabi-Linke’s work, the tree rings (which are tapped within concrete and dissected) appear almost like a form of inscrutable cartography, evoking maps and borders, but cartography’s penchant for interpretation, paralleling the myth that is Orientalism.
    Jean-Léon Gérôme, La République (1848–49). Collection of the Musée des beaux arts de la ville de Paris.
    “Orientalism functions as a very unprogressive form of nostalgia,” said Raza. “There are nostalgic elements—there are colors, postures, scenes that evoke certain feelings. Perhaps they are beautiful in their detail. What largely projects onto external reality is what we’re trying to look at and ask: how do you exist as contemporary without cutting off the past?” More

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    Richard Avedon’s Luminous Photos of Creative Icons Star in Phoenix Museum Show

    “Dick had put up this huge bubble-jet poster of a sequence of pictures he’d taken of Marilyn in a tight sequined dress,” photographer Tim Walker once wrote of a photoshoot that friend and colleague, Richard Avedon, did with actress and fashion icon Marilyn Monroe.  
    “One morning the first thing, when I was making the coffee, I observed him standing in front of the poster mimicking all her poses, reliving the shoot in a way—almost asking, with his own body, ‘Did I get all I could?’ And of course he had!”
    This anecdote, taken from Walker’s 2018 book Avedon: Something Personal, perfectly encapsulates Avedon’s approach to photographing celebrities and artists—the practice for which he is most often remembered today. Now, 20 years after his passing, Avedon is getting a long-overdue retrospective at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona.
    Richard Avedon, Paul McCartney, The Beatles Portfolio, London, England, August 11, 1967. Photo: Center for CreativePhotography, University of Arizona: Richard Avedon Archive. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
    The museum’s new exhibition, “Richard Avedon: Among Creatives,” opened on December 6, 2024, running until May 25, 2025. Curated by Emilia Mickevicius, an art historian who specializes in 20th century photography, “Among Creatives” brings together work from various stages of Avedon’s decades-spanning career, from the early fashion photography he did for Harper’s Bazaar, to the photographic portraits of celebrities like Monroe, which he produced later in life.
    Born in New York City in 1923 to Russian-Jewish immigrants who fled the Bolshevik Revolution, Avedon’s artistic career began when he started photographing his sister Louise as she began suffering from schizophrenia. His keen eye for lighting and composition helped land him jobs as a fashion photographer for numerous prestigious magazines, including Vogue, Elle, and—as mentioned—Harper’s Bazaar, leading him to befriend many a rising star.
    Richard Avedon, Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957. Photo: Center for Creative Photography, University ofArizona: Richard Avedon Archive. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
    Like pop artist Andy Warhol, Avedon was interested in celebrity culture. But where the former depicted his subjects as cultural, consumerist commodities, the latter wanted to capture their humanity. While agents, managers, and publicity firms work to present a consistent, positive image of their client, Avedon captured their inevitable multitudes through his deceptively simplistic portraiture, straying closer to the likes of the Old Masters than to Warhol.
    His commitment to authenticity and transparency even carried over into his fashion photography. As Amanda Hopkinson wrote for The Guardian after Avedon passed away in 2004:
    Richard Avedon, Marian Anderson, contralto, New York, June 30, 1955. Photo: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
    “Avedon’s own interest was always in the people, never in the fashions. In fact, the models tended to add a layer of complication to what he fundamentally believed was the relationship between photographer and sitter. As he said: ‘A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he (sic) is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks.’”
    Richard Avedon, Dovima with elephants, evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955. Photo: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Richard Avedon Archive. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
    In addition to scrutinizing his approach to portraiture, “Among Creatives” promises to explore how Avedon’s photographs of troubled celebrities like Monroe reflect his own lifelong struggles with fame, mortality, and the demands of his craft.
    Aside from Monroe, visitors will get face-to-face with photographs of John Ford, Allen Ginsberg, Marlene Dietrich, Paul McCartney, and Warhol, as well as those of renowned fashion models like Veruschka, Dovima, and Penelope Tree. More

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    Want to See Inside the First Impressionist Exhibition? There’s a V.R. Experience for That

    Few exhibitions have been more mythologized than the one that opened in a Parisian photography studio on April 15, 1874. There, over the course of a month, the trajectory of art was altered, launching a movement, Impressionism, that’s still being dissected 150 years later.
    Not that its protagonists anticipated as much. The 31 artists who convened at the studio of Felix Nadar at 35 Boulevard des Capucines were disgruntled, underpaid, and largely unknown. The exhibition was indeed a revolution, though not simply in artistic terms: these were the rejects of the Académie des Beaux-Arts Salon, the state-sponsored arbiter of artistic value, and by hosting an alternative show, the artists controlled how their work was to be exhibited, priced, and sold.
    This note of pragmatism was touched upon at “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism,” the landmark Musée d’Orsay exhibition that recently traveled to Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. Throw in the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and the chaos of the Commune insurrection, and those dreamy works by Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir seem less like reflections on modern society and more like willful escapes.
    Monet paints the scene at Le Havre, from the VR experience “Tonight With the Impressionists.” Courtesy Gedeon/Excurio.
    One component of the Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition that stuck rather more closely to the romance was “Tonight With the Impressionists,” a 45-minute virtual reality experience. It casts back to the fateful night of April 15 and plunges visitors into the rapidly modernizing world of the late 19th century, one the Impressionists so vividly captured. There are the grand new boulevards designed by Baron Haussmann, electric lamps, and, of course, a steam engine pulling into the Gare Saint-Lazare.
    After showings across France and in Atlanta, Georgia, “Tonight with the Impressionists” is set to open on December 13 at Eclipso in Midtown Manhattan, an 11,000-square-foot space purpose-built to stage V.R. experiences. It’s the latest in a trend that’s using immersive technology to make some of the art world’s most popular figures, such as Frida Kahlo and Vincent van Gogh, more engaging and approachable.
    Interior of the first exhibition of the Impressionists, from the VR experience “Tonight With the Impressionists.” Courtesy Gedeon/Excurio.
    Gedeon Media Group, which co-produced the V.R. experience alongside the Musée d’Orsay, has worked to maintain historical accuracy alongside the entertainment. The experience’s narrative may be invented, but the details remain accurate—to the degree possible. Nadar’s studio, for instance, was knocked down in the 1990s, and there are no photographs of the 1874 exhibition itself. To compensate, Gedeon used architectural plans, exterior photographs, and upholstery and wallpaper information to recreate the space.
    Beyond the studio and the febrile streets of Paris, “Tonight with the Impressionists” rides into the countryside and looks on as painters now considered masters got to work. Renoir paints the scene at La Grenouillere, a boating and bathing resort on the Seine, and Monet steps onto the balcony of his Le Havre hotel room and paints the work that granted the movement its name, Impression, Sunrise (1872).
    “This experience offers a journey through time and invites visitors from all over the world to experience the emotions that inspired the painters, particularly in two well-known regions of France, Normandy, and the Paris region,” said Stéphane Millière, CEO of Gedeon Experiences. More

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    Marina Abramović Opens Her Archive for an Intimate Miami Exhibition

    Marina Abramović, performance artist extraordinaire, is not sitting out the festivities at Miami Art Week. In collaboration with Spanish clothing brand Massimo Dutti, the artist is presenting “A Tribute to the Nomadic Spirit,” an exhibition at the city’s Faena Art Project Room, to coincide with the release of her coffee table book, Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places.
    As hinted at by the exhibition and book titles, the show is offering a rare glimpse into Abramović’s artistic process, exploring the creative journeys she’s undertaken through four decades’ worth of drawings, poetry, photographs, and reflections.
    Installation view of “Marina Abramović & Massimo Dutti: A Tribute to the Nomadic Spirit” at Faena Art Project Room. Photo courtesy of Massimo Dutti.
    Born in the Serbian province of Belgrade in 1946, Abramović first became interested in performance art while she was studying at Belgrade’s Academy of Fine Arts, recognizing the largely unexplored medium as a means to communicate her political views. One of Abramović’s most well-known pieces of performance art, 1997’s Balkan Baroque, saw her try and fail to clean some 1,500 cow bones—an obvious metaphor for how the violence of historical events can never be washed off.
    Marina Abramović’s sketches on hotel stationery. Photo courtesy of Massimo Dutti.
    Her other performance work is just as provocative. Relation in Time (1977) saw her and her professional and romantic partner, German visual artist Ulay, spend 17 hours with their hair tied together, symbolizing their connection. Most famously, for The Artist Is Present (2010), Abramović spent a total of 750 hours seated in silence, inviting visitors to engage her in uncomfortably intimate staring contests.
    Marina Abramović’s sketches on hotel stationery. Photo courtesy of Massimo Dutti.
    In “Nomadic Journey” are prints of the artist’s original drawings and doodles—some of them casual and spontaneous, others unveiling a creative mind at work. Some are scribbled on hotel stationery, capturing the roads she’s taken over the decades: a piece of Venice’s Bauer Hotel note paper is traced with outlines of her hand and foot, while another doodle under the letterhead of Brazil’s Fasano Hotel offers the cryptic phrase: “…if you could see.”
    Marina Abramović’s sketches on hotel stationery. Photo courtesy of Massimo Dutti.
    Even when residing in temporary residences, Abramović apparently found space for reflection and inspiration.
    “I believe we humans need to keep moving forward, and my own life was purely nomadic,” Abramović noted of these travel journals. “My home was everywhere I went because my home was my own body.”
    Cover of Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places. Photo courtesy of Massimo Dutti.
    The accompanying book, Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places, similarly chronicles her nomadic lifestyle, which has taken her from Serbia to the United States. It also explores her evolution as an artist through a self-curated selection of her work, combining poetry, notebooks, and personal observations. It will be available for purchase in select Massimo Dutti stores.
    “A Tribute to the Nomadic Spirit: An Artistic Intervention by Marina Abramović” is on view at Faena Art Project Room, 3420 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida, December 3–8, 2024. More

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    After 40 Years as the Conscience of the Art World, the Guerrilla Girls Finally Get Their First L.A. Show

    A giant ape has overtaken Los Angeles exhibition venue Beyond the Streets—not King Kong, but Queen Kong. The official mascot of the Guerrilla Girls, in fact. This looming inflatable crowns “Laugh, Cry, Fight,” the first-ever L.A. exhibition for the famed anonymous art collective of rebellious women.
    Each member of the Guerrilla Girls assumes the name of a historic female artist. They make public appearances only wearing their iconic gorilla masks. Regarding the exhibition’s title, founding member Käthe Kollwitz told me over Zoom, “We knew the show was going to start after the election, but we didn’t know how the election was going to turn out. It just seemed like a great motto for what we do.”
    Exterior view of the new Guerrilla Girls exhibition “Laugh, Cry, Fight” on view in Los Angeles. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
    The Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985 in response to the show “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—which widely omitted women. They made posters highlighting the lack of female representation in art museum collections and posted them on the streets of New York art strongholds. This was a decade before Cost and Revs popularized wheat-pasted posters as street art—but six years after Jenny Holzer papered subway stations with her Inflammatory Essays. Reactions to the stunt were swift, widespread, and spirited.
    “Laugh, Cry, Fight” encompasses the many methods and messages that the Guerrilla Girls have played with over the past 39 years. “It’s not organized in any usual way,” Kollwitz said of the show. “We have this giant wall, the biggest wall in the space, which has a crazy montage of some of our old work and a lot of our very, very recent work.” That includes English and Spanish editions of their infamous 1989 poster “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?” which exposes the disparity between female artists and nudes in museums. A 1988 poster cites the “advantages” of being a woman artist, “which, of course, are all disadvantages,” Kollwitz noted.
    Installation view, featuring posters from the Guerrilla Girls’s history. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
    Since then, museums have started “casting a wider net,” as Kollwitz put it, by diversifying the artworks they exhibit. The Guerrilla Girls have played a real part in this shift. Ten years ago, they inspired the Uffizi Gallery to make material advancements, and in 2008, the collective confronted the Tate Modern’s chief curator, Frances Morris. “You have completely changed my mind, and I am changing this institution,” Morris reportedly responded. “And she did,” Kollwitz said. “It’s quite incredible.”
    Such real shifts have empowered the Guerrilla Girls to tackle wider social issues, like homelessness and inequality in the film industry. The collective has also turned its gaze towards art world machinations that materially impact the rest of the world, like the way rich museum donors use their art collections to enhance their wealth. Last year, for example, the collective stationed a nine-foot-tall monument bearing updates to its 1990 museum code of ethics outside New York’s premier museums. The sculpture, which states “thou shalt honor thine employees” and “not consort with art dealers or collectors who commit tax evasion,” appears in “Laugh, Cry, Fight”—alongside new works like Meet The Creeps Who Stripped Our Abortion Rights (2022).
    Interior, featuring a vitrine of ephemera. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
    Despite their outsized reputation, the Guerrilla Girls aren’t a large group. Too many cooks would impede their efforts in the kitchen. “Our dirty little secret is that while we’ve had over 60 members, at any one time, we’re very small,” Kollwitz said. They typically have fewer than 10 members at once, she said, adding, “That’s how you get things going.”
    But, while they don’t recruit new Guerrilla Girls, they would like fans to copy them. Although the group began in the streets, most of their projects—ironically, or perhaps fittingly—take place in museums. Beyond The Streets, meanwhile, is a different kind of institution—one that attracts the fine art crowd as well as those beyond it, from sneakerheads to Instagram girlies.
    Installation view, featuring their Complaint Department. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
    Two installations at “Laugh, Cry, Fight” invite participation—a photo booth and an iteration of the Guerrilla Girls’ Complaint Department, where guests write what they’d like to change about society. “I would say it took about one hour for the entire thing to be totally filled up,” Kollwitz said. “We are used to that. People want to have their say, and they should.”
    “Laugh, Cry, Fight” is on view through January 18, 2025 at Beyond the Streets, 434 N La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. More

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    Trans Voices From Argentina Are Amplified in a New York Show

    The piano at the gallery entrance, with an array of framed photographs lovingly displayed on the lid, could be found in many family living rooms. But these portraits, along with more on the wall, depict members of the trans community in Argentina, collected by the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina (Trans Memory Archive Argentina).
    The 15,000-object archive, founded in 2012 to safeguard the history and memory of a community that has historically faced violence and the threat of erasure, contains newspaper clippings, police files, and personal letters as well as photos and films spanning the 20th century.
    Selections from the archive are on view in an installation titled Constelaciones: Entre estrellas y cenizas (Constellations: Between Stars and Ashes) at New York’s Ford Foundation in the show “Cantando Bajito: Chorus.” It’s the finale of a three-part exhibition series celebrating artworks that fight for bodily autonomy and oppose gender-based violence, collectively curated by Isis Awad, Roxana Fabius, Kobe Ko, Beya Othmani, Mindy Seu, and Susana Vargas Cervantes.
    The Archivo was conceived of by María Belén Correa and the late Claudia Pía Baudracco, who died in 2012, mere months before Argentina passed the Gender Identity Law allowing transgender people to legally change their name and gender. It was a major step forward for trans rights in the nation.
    Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina’s photo installation Constelaciones: Entre estrellas y cenizas (Constellations: Between stars and ashes), 2024, at “Cantando Bajito: Chorus” at the Ford Foundation. Photo courtesy of the Ford Foundation.
    “Trans women were tortured [and] brutalized during the Argentinian dictatorship and even after,” Fabius told me during a tour of the exhibition. “So there’s the celebratory aspect of the gathering and the collecting, but also the aspect of gathering information for a case against the state.”
    But the Archivo, like the exhibition as a whole, is less about the suffering experienced by vulnerable communities than it is about their ability to thrive despite their struggles.
    A photo of women toasting at a party from the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina. Photo courtesy of the Ford Foundation.
    The show’s title, which translates to “singing softly,” is inspired by Nicaraguan political activist Dora María Téllez Argüello. She remained unbowed in the face of two years of solitary confinement as a political prisoner, defiantly singing throughout, refusing to be silenced. (She has since been freed.)
    The installation of photographs from the Archivo, showing women who were unabashedly themselves throughout decades of discrimination, reflects the same spirit. But where Argüello struggled alone, “Cantando Bajito” emphasizes the importance of banding together to combat gender-based violence.
    Selections from Los Angeles Contemporary Archive’s “Private Practices: AAPI Artist and Sex Worker Collection” on view in the “Collective Desk” in “Cantando Bajito: Chorus” at the Ford Foundation. Photo: Sebastian Bach, courtesy of the Ford Foundation.
    The show also features a “Collective Desk” that brings together even more archival materials from trans and feminist communities from around the world, including the Cyberfeminism Index in the U.S.; FAQ?, a queer feminist collective from Tokyo; and the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive’s project “Private Practices,” which features Asian American and Pacific Islander sex workers.
    It’s an exhibition where art meets activism, past meets present, and tragedy meets triumph, the artists and their subjects rising above difficult circumstances against the odds.
    “It’s the idea of not showing the violence, not showing the victim,” Fabius said, “but rather holding a place of resilience, resistance, and flourishing.”
    “Cantando Bajito: Chorus” is on view at the Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 East 43rd Street, New York, New York, October 8–December 7, 2024. More

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    Don’t Miss These 6 Miami Gallery Shows

    Tis the season! Art lovers have alighted in Miami Beach kicking the city’s annual art week into full swing. While the main circuit of art fairs, events, and buzzy museum exhibitions offer an overabundance of world-class art, Miami galleries are also worth a gander—but where to start?
    We’ve handpicked our must-see gallery exhibitions to see during Miami Art Week, from rising artist debuts to a historic reappraisal.

    “Estefania Puerta: The Ghost in the Hallway” at Nina JohnsonThrough January 4, 2025

    Installation view of Estefania Puerta’s show “The Ghost in the Hallway” at Nina Johnson. Photo: courtesy Nina Johnson.
    Scroll through Estefania Puerta’s Instagram and you’ll encounter a photograph of the artist bathing in a Roman fountain. Taken during Puerta’s time at the American Academy in Rome, the fountain is a playful reflection of a subject at the center of her new show at Nina Johnson—namely, the ability of something to simultaneously function as “place, object, and a literary document of sorts” (a slab of marble above the fountain is inscribed with its benefactors).
    Though Puerta openly draws from the reliquaries and sarcophagi she encountered in Rome, “The Ghost in the Hallway” doesn’t feel conventionally morbid. Reproduction Question presents a purple plexiglass coffee table that it itself can be read. A trio of mounted wall pieces appear like elongated flowers with shimmering silver petals, inside each one contains drawings and trinkets (Roman postcard, chewing gum, artist’s spit) though you likely won’t spot them.

    “Marlon Portales: The Last Man” at Spinello ProjectsThrough January 11, 2025
    Marlon Portales, The Voyeur (2023). Photo: courtesy Spinello Projects.
    Linger the extra moment with the color-pop paintings of Marlon Portales and it’s hard not to begin conjuring stories for its cast of characters. Partly, this is the consequence of the Cuban-born artist repurposing visual beats from the worlds of fairytales and art history.
    When presented with a straw-hatted figure astride a white horse that’s leaping across a swimming pool, one inevitably asks: where are they headed and why such haste? Similar questions arise from the sight of an elegant cherry-red shoe crushing a sunflower or a pair of female centaurs stood in deep blue moonlight.
    Thematically, the fluid nature of masculinity is the focus of Portales’ debut solo show at Spinello Projects. The title piece tackles the matter directly. Out on a lake, Saint Sebastian, an icon of male beauty and homoerotic desire, is arrow-struck and falling. Beside him lies John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, the Pre-Raphaelite vision of feminine beauty, unconscious and fallen. The two, quite literally, are in the same boat.

    “Ayiti Toma III: Spiraling, Silence, & Sirenes” at Central Fine 
    Through January 14, 2025
    Viktor El-Saieh, Se toune’l toune (2024) ©️ the artist. Courtesy of CENTRAL FINE and El-Saieh Gallery. Photo: George Echevarría
    Despite its name, the first edition of “Ayiti Toma III” never took place. This absence is one the organizer Tomm El-Saieh hopes will highlight the erased culture of the Taíno, indigenous peoples who inhabited the Caribbean islands before the arrival of Europeans. The show’s name is a nod to dueling theories on Haiti’s etymology: one from the Indigenous Taíno language meaning “land of the high mountains,” and another from the Fon language meaning “from now onward, this land is our land.”
    Alongside a show at New York’s Luhring Augustine gallery, “Ayiti Toma III” arrives at Central Fine in Miami and offers a broad sway of Haitian art, culture, and history over the past century and a quarter. There are the fantastical flat beasts of Georges Liautaud’s sculpture, some of the island’s mythologies told by Myrlande Constant’s intricate bead flags, and the ghostly white-etched paintings of Shneider L. Hilaire.

    “Camilo Godoy: Neither one nor the other, but a wound” at Dot FiftyoneThrough January 31, 2025
    Still from Camilo Godoy’s Renacemos a cada instante (We are reborn at every moment) (2024). Courtesy of Dot Fiftyone.
    Today, Miami is a playground for the rich and famous. But, from 500 B.C.E. through the mid-1700s, the tropical idyll was predominantly home to the Tequesta tribe, vanquished by the Spanish, and then the English. For New York-based Colombian artist Camilo Godoy, the echoes of this history abound across America and the wider world. These influences come to the fore in the artist’s first Miami solo show, staged at the city’s longstanding contemporary art gallery Dot Fiftyone.
    The exhibition takes its title from a poem about colonialism, and centers on an orange-lit room screening Renacemos a cada instante (We are reborn at every moment)—a video immortalizing the performance from Godoy’s New Museum residency this past year. The footage features three dancers performing choreography “inspired by mourning practices that celebrate the cycles of life and death,” a release states. Three further photos from Godoy’s series “What did they really see” depict the artist in enigmatic black on black, performing his take on Indigenous dances that Christian missionaries once recorded with disdain. In its entirety, the exhibition is a movement-driven healing rite, rendered across mediums.

    “Alba Triana: Dialogue with the Primordial Sea” at Locust ProjectsThrough January 28. 2025
    Alba Triana amongst “Dialogue with the Primordial Sea.” Image: Logan Fazio, courtesy of Locust Projects.
    It really would not be Miami Art Week without Locust Projects staging a spectacle. This year, the lauded experimental art space has managed to outdo itself. Executive Director Lorie Mertes hand-selected Miami-based Colombian artist Alba Triana to stage her first solo show in the city amidst Miami Art Week. Triana’s immersive sound and light installations typically explore unseen relationships between nature and humans. For her largest project to date, the artist makes magnetic fields material.
    Forty small hand-crafted setups pairing copper coils with spherical pendulums dot all four 16-foot-tall walls of Locust Projects’ 625-square-foot gallery. Each coil generates a magnetic field, which, independently, “is randomly activated by digital microcontrollers positioned at the base of each wall,” Locust Projects’ head of technology Andrew McLees explained over email. That activation yanks the corresponding pendulum from its gravity-induced oscillations, into a new position. Zoom out, and they all start to dance together during their demonstration of magnetism, which protects the earth from solar flares—and creates the sensation of touch (since atoms never actually interact, it’s all just charged electron clouds repelling each other.) Sound emanates from the thrum of these coils kicking on, scoring the mesmerizing dance of these miniature metal balls.

    “Cosmic Currents: Lita Albuquerque & Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.)” at GAVLAK, West Palm BeachThrough January 4, 2025
    Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), Solar Flare #5 (2024). Image: GAVLAK, West Palm Beach.
    GAVLAK is one of 32 galleries making their Art Basel Miami Beach fair debut this year. Back up in West Palm Beach, however, the gallery is placing legendary land artist Lita Albuquerque in conversation with their longtime roster artist Jose Alvarez (also known as D.O.P.A.) The show’s release notes that “both artists use light, materiality, and metaphysical themes to explore spirituality, cosmology, and the nature of existence.”
    For her first collaboration with Alvarez, Albuquerque created a new gestural painting that honors the silhouetted forms of Ana Mendieta’s land artworks. Three recent installments in her acclaimed “Auric Fields” series appear as well, using light to bridge the gap between life on Earth and the rest of the universe. For his part, Venezuelan-born and Miami–based Alvarez offers numerous works from the past four years, including four “Solar Flare” tondos to compliment Albuquerque’s “Auric Fields”—and a range of watercolors and collages executed in the artist’s signature kaleidoscope hues. The show promises a transcendent experience from two creative masters of spirituality. More

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    in Exhibitions

    A Herd of Life-Sized Elephant Sculptures Migrates to Miami Beach

    For so many of us, the first week of December means a pilgrimage to Florida for Art Basel Miami Beach. But this year, a herd of 100 wooden elephants are joining the party, as the conservationist-minded “The Great Elephant Migration” has made its way to the sand.
    The life-size sculptures are each modeled after an individual elephant, mostly from the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in South India. They are the handiwork of the Coexistence Collective, a group of 200 local Indigenous artisans. Designed by Shubhra Nayar, they are made from lantana camara, an invasive weed threatening to overtake the natural habitat of Indian elephants.
    After kicking off their U.S. tour this summer in Newport, Rhode Island, where the elephants roamed along the coastal cliffs near Gilded Age mansions, the herd spent much of the fall in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, strolling the cobblestone streets. But they make an even more dramatic spectacle on the South Florida beach, set against the bright blue sky and sparkling teal waters.
    “It’s so nice, people in bare feet with the herd,” Ruth Ganesh, the British animal rights activist behind the roving art project, told me. “And elephants are nature’s greatest masterpiece. They are like a Surrealist dream.”
    “The Great Elephant Migration” in Miami Beach. Photo by Lee Smith.
    So far, the reception has been enthusiastic—perhaps a little too enthusiastic. A breathless Page Six exclusive reported that a security guard caught a couple having sex on top of one of the elephants. There were no arrests made, but Miami Beach Police are now patrolling the installation, to ensure the thousands of visitors behave themselves.
    “We knew that people would love them, but we didn’t think they’d take it that literally!” Ganesh said. “My question is how? They have very bony ridges on their backs!”
    Ganesh launched the traveling art project as part of her work with the Real Elephant Collective, a nonprofit she started with elephant researcher and scientist Tarsh Thekaekara. All the elephant sculptures are for sale, with proceeds going to 22 partnering conservation non-governmental organizations, or NGOs—benefitting elephants, but also other species. The aim is to promote a mutually beneficial coexistence between humans and nature.
    “The Great Elephant Migration” in Miami Beach. Photo by Lee Smith.
    “I feel very proud of the indigenous creators for having captured Miami’s attention,” Ganesh said, noting that the collective is a well-paying job for a community that typically made low wages on nearby tea plantations. “Now there are 20 different villages with little workshops, and they’re all making elephants. And they know the elephants. These poor tribes actually know how to live with the elephants, and this rewards them for their ability to coexist.”
    To date, 250 sculptures have already sold, staying behind as the herd has made its way down the East Coast. Prices range from $8,000 for a baby elephant to $22,000 for an adult males with tusks, which tops out at 15 feet tall. (Ganesh advises bringing the works indoors for the winter, but you can also cover them with a tarp.)
    If you don’t have the space—indoor or out—for a life-size elephant, you can also support the cause by purchasing a bottle of the project’s signature scent. Coexistence, from Italian perfume house Xerjoff, costs €250 ($263) a bottle, with part of the proceeds going to the NGOs. The luxury brand is the sponsor for the Miami exhibition.
    “The Great Elephant Migration” in Miami Beach. Photo by Lee Smith.
    “The perfume has been made with flowers that you would find in an Indian elephant’s habitat, so you have notes of jasmine and damask rose,” Ganesh said.
    (When I asked Sergio Momo, Xerjoff founder and creative director, if he was concerned that people might get confused and think that the perfume smelled like elephants, rather than their habitat, Momo told me King Charles made the same joke when the artwork was on view in London in 2021.)
    In Miami, the elephants are also joined on the beach by a set of 46 3D-printed stars, laid out on the sand in a star-shaped formation. The artwork, titled Miami Reef Star, is the work of artist Carlos Betancourt and architect Alberto Latorre. It’s a prototype for an underwater sculpture that will be the first piece in the ReefLine, a seven-mile artificial reef and sculpture park planned for Miami Beach.
    Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre, Miami Reef Star (2024), rendering. Image by Mateo Rembe, courtesy of the ReefLine.
    When “The Great Elephant Migration” was planning its trip to Florida, the ReefLine, which looks to restore Miami Beach’s decimated coral reefs, was a natural partner.
    “We are about the water. They are about the land. And we’re both about preservation. So we decided to join forces,” Ximena Caminos, founder and artistic director of the ReefLine, told me. (The overarching presentation, which also included a Daniel Buren regatta at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, is called “Star Compass.”)
    The ReefLine is being funded in part with a $5 million grant courtesy of Miami Beach taxpayers, who approved new arts and culture funding in 2022.
    The first work, Concrete Coral by Leandro Erlich, is slated to be submerged 600 feet offshore, 20 feet below the waves, in spring 2025. The sculpture, of 22 cars, is a new take on the sandcastle traffic jam the artist created on the beach for Miami Art Week in 2019.
    Leandro Erlich, Concrete Coral, rendering. Image courtesy of the ReefLine.
    The individual arts of Miami Reef Star are designed to mimic the natural habitat of local fish, creating comforting nooks and crannies where they can relax, hidden from predators.
    Both works will be made from CarbonXinc, a newly developed eco-friendly concrete, and will use Coral Lok technology, where lab-grown coral can be literally plugged into the art to kickstart the growth of the reef.
    Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre, Miami Reef Star (2024), rendering. Image by Mateo Rembe, courtesy of the ReefLine.
    “We’re going to start with soft corals that are called gorgonians; these are kind of like sea fans that sway with the waves. It’s the dominant type of marine life you find in the couple of patches where there are still near-shore reefs in Miami,” marine biologist Colin Foord, founder of Coral Morphologic, the Miami multimedia aquaculture studio and science lab that will grow the coral, told me.
    After the party wraps up in Miami Beach, “The Great Elephant Migration” will be back on the road. It will head to Hermann Park in Houston, Texas, in April; Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana in May; Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in June; and wrap up its journey in July in Los Angeles.
    “The Great Elephant Migration” is on view on the beach between 36th and 37th Streets, Miami Beach, Florida, December 2–8, 2024. More