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    in Exhibitions

    The Republic of Benin Is Getting Its First-Ever National Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale

    At the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale, the Republic of Benin will present a national pavilion for the very first time.
    Azu Nwagbogu, a curator and founder of the Nigeria-based non-profit African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), will organize the country’s inaugural pavilion. He was tapped by a joint selection committee that included Benin’s president Patrice Talon, the nation’s tourism minister Jean Michel Abimbola, and museum administrators from the National Gallery of Benin.
    In a statement, Talon said that Nwagbogu’s “unique background, vision, and expertise in the field of art curation makes him the perfect candidate to showcase Bénin’s cultural heritage and contemporary art to the world.”
    The West African country’s announcement situated its upcoming turn at Venice within Talon’s broader cultural policy agenda, which centers around efforts to restitute the many relics stolen from Kingdom of Benin by British soldiers in an infamous 1897 raid.
    Last year, the president’s office organized “Art of Benin, yesterday and today, from restitution to revelation,” a traveling show that showed of recently-returned historical artifacts with work from contemporary Beninise artists. The exhibition first opened at the presidential palace in Cotonou, and has since moved to the Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, Morocco, where it will remain on view through May of this year. 
    Nwagbogu, too, has been a vocal restitution proponent, speaking about the topic at international panels and forums in recent years. In 2020, he guest-edited an issue of Art Africa that cited AAF’s own efforts to turn “its gaze to the burning political, civic and aesthetic ramifications of restitution,” the Art Newspaper pointed out. 
    The curator also helped found the LagosPhoto photography festival in 2010 and served as the interim director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in South Africa from April 2018 to August 2019.
    What Nwagbogu has planned for the Biennale has yet to be announced, but Benin’s news release said his “vision for the project is to contribute to the construction of the intellectual architecture that will allow Benin to sustain and deploy the great artistic potential that springs from its land and has traversed its various diasporas.”
    The curator, for his part, said he felt “exceedingly honored” to be the committee’s choice. “I look forward to working on this exciting project,” he added.
    With this week’s news, Benin joins the growing list of African countries to participate in the prestigious event. Cameroon and Namibia made their respective debuts at the 59th Venice Biennale last year, while Ghana and Madagascar first participated in 2019.
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    in Street Art

    New Work by Saype in Ibri, Oman

    Switzerland and Oman is celebrating its 50th anniversary of bilateral relations, Switzerland is committed to closer bilateral cooperation in the field of sustainability. As part of the celebration, the Swiss Embassy in Oman invited the Swiss-French graffiti artist Saype to create a giant fresco in Oman. The work of over 10,000 m2 of eco-friendly paint was created in the country’s largest solar power plant in Ibri and symbolises cooperation on a sustainable world for future generations.The artwork in Oman was made on March 11th at the Ibri solar farm, Oman. Energy management is certainly one of the major challenges of our ever-accelerating world. Our contemporary civilization was built on fossil fuels, but today we must look to the future and seek sustainable solutions to keep the earth habitable. It is with the major environmental issues of our time in mind that I chose to paint in one of the largest solar farms in the Middle East (11,3 km²). Being aware that the solution centres around a complex energy mix and in a form of sobriety, I chose to paint this child playing with the magic of solar energy. Looking towards the horizon, he symbolizes the renewal of a civilization that must now reinvent itself to continue to grow without destroying the planet.This year, the Sultanate of Oman and the Swiss Confederation are celebrating 50 years of diplomatic relations. The two countries share many commonalities. Not only are both countries committed to promoting peaceful coexistence and tolerance or act as facilitators in conflicts. Switzerland and Oman also share a common commitment to sustainability. Both countries have taken steps to reduce their carbon footprint and set themselves the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. To reach this goal, it is important to develop innovative solutions that will transform our economy and society. Oman has a huge potential in developing solar and wind power – and Switzerland is leading in developing new technological approaches in the energy and sustainability sector. Hence, marrying the potentials of the two countries will certainly help both to reach their ambitious goals within the Agenda 2050. It, therefore, seemed natural for the Swiss Embassy in Oman to invite the world-renowned artist SAYPE, whose work focuses on these very topics, to come to the Sultanate as part of Switzerland’s contribution to the Oman Sustainability Week and express this special relationship between the two countries through one of SAYPE’s ephemeral artwork.Self-taught artist, Saype is known today for his paintings on grass, made with eco-responsible paint. Certainly one of the most publicized artists in 2019, he was notably named by the famous magazine Forbes as one of the thirty most influential personalities under the age of thirty in the world, in the field of art and Culture. In 2012, just a nurse, challenged by the revolt of the Arab Spring, Saype questions the meaning of our existence and our place in society. He begins to paint scenes in the subway in black and white, where people crowd daily, in an underground greyness well known to our megalopolises. While Saype explores a rather introspective workshop work, he has been developing a new artistic approach since 2012. Based on the premise that graffiti is diluted in the pollution of our current societies, and that, by extension, no one has any regard for them, Saype seeks to find a new way to appeal to people.Influenced by his readings, his questions as well as the democratization of drones in Europe which gives him easy access to aerial views, he began to paint on the grass. He then invented a 100% biodegradable paint and perfected a process which enabled him to create gigantic frescoes on the ground. He is now considered a pioneer of a new land art movement. Since then, these frescoes travel around the world, with a concern to appeal to people and society, minimizing their impact on nature. Its main objective is to put its art at the service of the human being, always with a concern for optimism and in a poetic way. In 2018, his self-funded project, in support of the SOS Mediterranean association, carried out in the heart of Geneva, had a considerable media impact since it was seen all over the world and by 120 million people. Following this popular impulse, the Swiss confederation proposed a pavilion for the association’s boat, then blocked on the ground and caught in the European political turmoil around migration.With this experience and this ability to mobilize thanks to his art, in 2019, Saype embarked on a project of global scope. His Ambition: To symbolically create the largest human chain in the world. This pharaonic project called “Beyond Walls”, over several years aims to pass in more than 30 cities of the world, to invite people to mutual aid, and kindness and to live together. Begun in June 2019 at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, on the Champ de Mars closed to the public for the first time in its history, for two weeks for the event, this fresco has once again left its mark. Supported by the famous British daily newspaper The Guardian which devoted 3 magazine covers to it throughout June, relayed by several hundred media and inaugurated by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, this work has been seen by 500 million people around the world.Take a look at more images below and check back with us for more updates. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Desert X Arrives in Coachella Valley, Bringing Art That Reflects on Ecology. See Images of the Show Here

    The newest iteration of Desert X is all about water—which might come as a surprise, seeing as how there’s not much liquid of any kind to be found along the dusty stretch of land in south-central California where the biennial exhibition is installed through May 7.
    But, for Neville Wakefield and Diana Campbell, the show’s two curators, “a desert is not defined by the absence of water.” To them, “the desert landscape is formed by the memory of water.”
    As suggested by that quote, this year’s Desert X—the fourth mounted in the Coachella Valley since the program was founded in 2017—zooms out for a holistic, ecological perspective on the land and art’s place in it. This edition spreads out across the land and features the work of 10 artists and collectives, including Tschabalala Self, Torkwase Dyson, and Tyre Nichols, among others. 
    “How do we connect the specificities of the Coachella Valley to the wider biosphere, where resources and energy… flow across borders and impact parts of the world we may never see?” Campbell asked in a recent interview. 
    That’s a lofty prompt, as much of the curators’ ideas are. But navigate from one individual site-specific commission to the next, and it becomes clearer what the duo means.
    Rana Begum, No.1225 Chainlink (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
    A sculpture by the Bangladesh-born, London-based artist Rana Begum, for instance, is made almost entirely from chainlink fencing—a ubiquitous industrial material used to demarcate natural land as human property. The maze-like quality of Begum’s piece also suggests that it’s not just acreage these fences tend to divide.
    In a funny way, Matt Johnson’s contribution to the show—a tenuous arrangement of stacked shipping containers—shares similar themes. On one hand, the L.A. artist’s gigantic installation situates the region in a globalist context and suggests connection across cultures, countries, and oceans; on the other, it points out that that sense of connection is mediated through commerce and comes with a devastating environmental toll.
    Elsewhere in the valley is a larger-than-life game board, conceived by Gerald Clarke; an assemblage of reflective squares mounted atop the same electric motors used for mechanical bulls, made by Mario García Torres; and a readymade car sculpture from which a pair of giant animal arms emerges from its trunk, courtesy of Paloma Contreras Lomas. 
    Together, these makers’ contributions “make visible, as instruments of self-awareness and devices of wonder, the forces that we exert on the world,” according to a catalog text from Wakefield. 
    See more images from Desert X 2023 below. 
    Lauren Bon, The Smallest Sea with the Largest Heart (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
    Torkwase Dyson, Liquid A Place (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
    Gerald Clarke, Immersion (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
    Mario García Torres, Searching for the Sky (While Maintaining Equilibrium) (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
    Tyre Nichols, Originals (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
    Hylozoic/Desires, Namak Nazar (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
    Paloma Contreras Lomas, Amar a Dios en Tierra de Indios, Es Oficio Maternal (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
    Tschabalala Self, Pioneer (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
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    in Exhibitions

    ‘My Practice Is Play’: Trenton Doyle Hancock Has Gamed Out a Fully Functioning Basketball Court in a Houston Museum

    The basketball court as canvas? It’s not such a stretch—the likes of Robert Indiana, Yinka Illori, and KAWS have all put their artistic spins on hardtops and hardwoods over the years. Houston-based Trenton Doyle Hancock is the latest artist to leave his mark on one such court, though, notably, his entry isn’t bound for the gymnasium, but the museum.
    On March 18, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston will unveil Hancock’s latest commission, titled CAMH Court, within its Brown Foundation Gallery. The first artist-designed basketball court installed at a museum, the work won’t just be on view, but entirely playable too.
    Visitors are invited to play on the court on a first-come-first-served basis, with a youth court available for those aged 12 and younger (basketballs will be provided). On either court, players will get to dribble across surfaces and dunk off a backboard painted with Hancock’s signature Bringback characters, cartoon figures the artist invented and has scattered throughout his poppy body of work.
    CAMH Court, Hancock told Artnet News, sees “basketball and my art come together to make space for pure play.”
    An overview of CAMH Court by Trenton Doyle Hancock. Photo courtesy of the artist and CAMH.
    According to museum’s executive director Hesse McGraw, CAMH had envisioned installing a basketball court within its building as early as the 1990s. But, institutional rigidity aside, the gallery didn’t lend itself naturally to a site where basketball could be played. 
    In Hancock’s view, the space represented “a unique architectural environment,” particularly for its dimensions that take the form of “a famous parallelogram that has vexed artists for generations.”
    To fit the work into the space meant canting a regulation-sized court into that famed parallelogram, with help from project partners Adidas Basketball and Creative Court Concepts—in turn putting an oblique angle on the game.
    “This space creates a distorted and torqued basketball court that’s highly dynamic and generates a new kind of game,” Hancock added. “I’m interested in new types of basketball play emerging here.”
    Trenton Doyle Hancock. Photo courtesy of the artist and CAMH.
    In fact, “play” has long been an operative word for the artist, who, across paintings, sculptures, and murals, has unfurled a lore of his own making, threaded throughout with elements of pop culture, comic books, and art history. His self-made universe is home to a regular cast of characters with names like Vegans, Mounds, and Torpedo Boy, who engage in ongoing good versus evil battles—a flight of fancy that Hancock has sustained for nearly two decades.
    “My artistic practice is play. My paintings are like large toys, and my studio is a playground. I’m trying to create new worlds where things might be skewed, but your imagination is on fire,” Hancock said.
    For his first basketball court, Hancock deployed his Bringbacks as a way for players to engage and above all, play with his fictional characters. “I wanted to create a place where people could lose themselves in my artwork,” he explained. “I love the idea that people will try to play basketball despite the best efforts of the Bringbacks.”
    This latest project with CAMH also builds on Hancock’s long-standing relationship with the institution that staged his first solo museum exhibition in 2001 and his most recent retrospective, “Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing,” in 2014.
    McGraw, for his part, sees CAMH Court as offering an unexpected encounter with contemporary art as much as a “unique expression of basketball as art.” More so, echoing Hancock, he views the exhibition as a way for the artist “to meet audiences where they are.”
    “What comes next,” he added, “will be up to all the players.”
    CAMH Court is on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, Texas, March 18–April 27, 2023.
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    in Exhibitions

    Four Artists Have Been Shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. See How Their Works Unpack Themes of Identity and Power

    Photographs tend to flatten—in multiple senses of the word—the subjects they depict. But do they have to?
    The medium’s capacity for complex, multidimensional depiction is front of mind for Bieke Depoorter, Samuel Fosso, Arthur Jafa, and Frida Orupabo—the four artists nominated for this year’s prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2023. Their work is on view now in a show at the Photographers’ Gallery in London.
    Now in its 27th iteration, the annual £30,000 ($36,000) prize recognizes outstanding photographic artworks or exhibitions presented in the preceding year. The winner, who will be announced in a ceremony set for May 11, will join an impressive list of previous recipients, including Deana Lawson (who won in 2022), Susan Meiselas (2019), Trevor Paglen (2016), and Paul Graham (2009). This year’s runners-up will each receive £5,000 ($6,000).   

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    Depoorter, a Belgian artist whose work often probes the power dynamics between photographer and subject, was chosen for her 2022 show “A Chance Encounter” at C/O Berlin. Among the two projects she presented there was Michael (2015-present), an installation that explores the inner life of a man Depoorter met on the streets of Portland, Oregon in 2015.
    Last year’s career-spanning survey of Fosso at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris qualified him for the Deutsche Börse prize. For five decades now, the influential African photographer has turned his camera on himself, donning elaborate costumes for coded self-portraits that reflect on the performance of identity. 
    A series of piecework photo-sculptures represents the contributions of Orupabo, who was nominated for her exhibition “I have seen a million pictures of my face and still I have no idea” at Switzerland’s Fotomuseum Winterthur. Using imagery culled from both colonial archives and contemporary picture-sharing platforms, the Norwegian Nigerian artist creates collages of black female bodies that are both dense and fragmented. 
    Jafa, who rounds out the group of shortlisted creators, similarly draws from disparate sources for his own library of pictures, though how that material manifests in his work varies widely. The American artist’s 2022 exhibition “Live Evil” at LUMA in Arles, France featured photographs, sculptures, and large-scale installations, as well as signature films like The White Album (2018).
    Arthur Jafa, Bloods II (2020). © Arthur Jafa. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
    This year’s four shortlisted artists were selected by a jury of five industry experts: Anne-Marie Beckmann, director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation; Natalie Herschdorfer, director of the Photo Elysee in Switzerland; Mahtab Hussain, an artist based in Britain; Thyago Nogueria, head of contemporary photography at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Brazil; and Brett Rogers, director of the Photographers’ Gallery.
    “Our shortlist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2023 exemplifies photography’s resounding power and resonance right now,” said Rogers in a statement. “Each artist addresses subjects which drive forward debate about the nature of the medium, and the role it plays in history and society.” 
    See more pictures from the 2023 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize nominees below.
    Frida Orupabo, A lil help (2021). Photo: © Frida Orupabo, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake.
    Samuel Fosso, Autoportrait (1976). Photo: © Samuel Fosso, courtesy of the artist and JM Patras.
    Bieke Depoorter, We walked together, Portland, Oregon, USA (2015). Photo: © Bieke Depoorter/Magnum Photos, courtesy of the artist.
    Samuel Fosso, Self-Portrait (Angela Davis) (2008). Photo: © Samuel Fossoc courtesy of the artist and JM Patras.
    Arthur Jafa, Ex-Slave Gordon 1863 (2017). Photo: Andrea Rossetti, © Arthur Jafa, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
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    in Exhibitions

    Generative Art Sensation Tyler Hobbs Has Filled His Debut London Show With Old-Fashioned Paintings—Painted by a Robot, That Is

    Inside a Mayfair gallery earlier this week, a gathering of London’s cognoscenti raised colorful textured glasses along a well-appointed table stretching the length of the room. Glamorous as it was, the scene was a typical enough art world gallery dinner, except for the fact that the usual attendees, who included magazine critics and an art historian from the Courtauld gallery, were toasting an artist whose star ascended during NFT mania, and they were clinking glasses across the table with people named things like “blockbird” and “shamrock.”
    It was at Unit London, where generative artist Tyler Hobbs was inaugurating his first solo exhibition in the U.K. On view through April 6, “Mechanical Hand” includes three paintings on canvas, and 17 works on paper. Real canvas and real paper, that is. 
    Hobbs became a sensation during the NFT bubble in 2021, best known for his highly sought-after “Fidenza” NFTs—a series of 999 algorithmically produced and randomized grids of color. In 2023, he remains a breakout as his market is one of few that appears to have survived the crypto crash. One of these pieces hammered down at Christie’s evening sale in London last week at £290,000 ($348,667). 
    But the focus of the evening was definitely on IRL art. The artist, who studied computer science at university, made the works on view using algorithms, codes, and plotters—a sort of robotic arm directed by a computer—to create aesthetic compositions, which he then embellished by hand, either painting or drawing on the surface. 
    Tyler Hobbs, Delicate Futures (2022). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.
    Hobbs relates his work to the system-based practices of artists like Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin, who took similarly methodical approaches to mark-making. Speaking to the room, Hobbs said that this type of work “can only be experienced in person.” And while sales of these physical works were indeed encoded on the blockchain, and there were two NFTs also displayed in the gallery on screens, there was little to no mention of the now-poisoned word “NFT.”
    This detail didn’t deter the OG NFT collectors from feting Hobbs’s success. “I loved the work, and Tyler’s explanations for each piece made it all the richer,” Hobbs fan and NFT collector, blockbird, told me of the work. “I think this venture into the physical is a great move as it really helps explain and bridge the qualities of his algorithmic work to a new audience. For me as a digital-first collector, it still holds great appeal. I would love one of these in my home.”
    And if celebrating, even in a whisper, an NFT artist was unusual for many of the esteemed art world guests, the state of affairs was new to the artist, too, who professed that he had never sat around a dinner table “in the middle of a gallery like this.”
    Describing the exhibition, Hobbs said it aims to ask questions about the “adolescent relationship between humans and machines.”
    “Computers and machines deeply influence our aesthetics, and I want to observe how that happens,” Hobbs said in a statement. “What implicit skew does the computer have, and what tell-tale signs does the hand leave?” 
    The questions lend conceptual depth to the work, as they certainly feel very relevant as algorithm-assisted text and image generators increasingly take over many of our daily tasks, and we collectively ask how we can move forward using a combination of both physical and digital tools. 
    Tyler Hobbs, Return One [Red] (2021–2022). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.Of the works on view, the works on paper shone the most. The earthen-toned gouache of Aligned Movement recall an ancient Roman mosaic or an Aboriginal dot painting. The pastel-smeared paper grids appear as if generative art pioneer Vera Molnár had a baby with a Rothko color field. The pale pink and purple hued watercolor of Delicate Futures has something in it of Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stained paintings. The larger works on canvas, such as the primely hung at the back of the room, Return One [Red], are markedly less successful. That one, in particular, I thought looked like a D-version Kusama painting. Like much machine-generated art, it was all very good at looking like something else, and not very good at looking like nothing else. 
    But what do I know? Unit London director and cofounder Joe Kennedy told me the following day that the show had “pretty much sold out.” The show at Unit London is the beginning of a landmark season for the artist who will open another solo exhibition later this month at Pace Gallery in New York, coinciding with NFT.NYC. Prices for the works in the show start at £25,000 (around $30,000), going up to £300,000 ($360,000) for the red painting at the back of the room, which had sold to a Hong Kong-based collector by the end of the evening.
    “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” is on view through April 6 at Unit London. See more of the works below.
    Detail. Tyler Hobbs, Fulfilling System 1 (2020). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.
    Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
    Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
    Tyler Hobbs, user_space (2022). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.
    Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
    Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
    Tyler Hobbs, Aligned Movement (2020). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.
    Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
    Installation view, “Tyler Hobbs: Mechanical Hand” at Unit London. Photo: Marcus Peel, courtesy the artist and Unit London.
    Tyler Hobbs, By Proxy Yellow 1 (2021). Courtesy the artist and Unit London.
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    in Exhibitions

    Fashion Designer Paul Smith Juxtaposes Contemporary Art With Picasso Classics for a New Museum Show in Paris

    In the 50 years since Picasso’s death in 1973, his profound influence on contemporary art and culture has shown no signs of slowing down, continuing to appear in new guises in the 21st century. This is the lens through which the many phases of his practice are reconsidered in a new show celebrating the anniversary at the Picasso Museum in Paris, which has been assembled with help from British fashion designer Paul Smith, who served as guest artistic director.
    “Picasso Celebration” waves goodbye to the white cube in which we are all too accustomed to seeing modern art, instead giving us a suite of newly designed galleries that feel gimmicky but fun. Smith has noted his particular interest in appealing to younger audiences.
    Pablo Picasso, Paulo as Harlequin (1924), hanging at the “Celebrate Picasso” exhibition in collaboration with Paul Smith at the Picasso Museum in Paris. Photo: © Vinciane Lebrun/Voyez-Vous and Succession Picasso 2023.
    Early on in the survey, for example, Picasso’s obsession with the pantomime characters Harlequin and Pierrot, featured here in two large oil paintings and a few sketches, is brought vividly to life as the colorful patterns from the subjects’ outfit jump out from the canvas and are splashed across the neighboring walls.
    Touches like these jazz up an otherwise conventional, roughly chronological retelling of Picasso’s story—starting with the Blue Period and Cubism before examining works relating to his most famous masterpieces like Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937)—so that it feels genuinely fresh and easy to engage with.
    Installation view of “Celebrate Picasso,” in collaboration with Paul Smith at the Picasso Museum in Paris. Photo: © Vinciane Lebrun/Voyez-Vous and Succession Picasso 2023.
    Among these already familiar works, however, is the inclusion of pieces by living artists who are strongly inspired by Picasso or interested in similar themes. One example can be found in a room dedicated to the ethnographic objects of African and Oceanic origin that Picasso collected from markets in Paris, a selection of which are included in the show. Picasso was seeking a radical break from Western tradition, but today his use of the objects has been problematized by a post-colonial critical lens.
    Welcoming more contemporary perspectives, the museum has staged these items alongside Landscapes of My Childhood Remembered (2015), a triptych of collages by the Nigerian artist Obi Okigbo. The artist’s use of traditional Igbo masks and sculptures relates to her exploration of a local custom known as the Mbari rite.
    Elsewhere, a powerful 1997 work by the Congolese painter Chéri Samba is a direct response to Picasso’s thorny legacy. Standing in for the archetypal Western artist, his Picasso looks greedily over at the continent of Africa and its culture, represented here by a traditional mask. The painting honors the many African artists whose work has been othered, fetishized, and consumed without proper representation in Western museums.
    Chéri Samba, Quand il n’yavait plus rien d’autre que… L’Afrique restait une pensée (1997). Photo: © Florian Kleinefenn, courtesy Galerie MAGNIN-A.
    Additions like these are part of a wider strategy on the part of the museum to continue to recontextualize Picasso’s practice for new generations. The result is that even those already familiar with the gems of this collection can expect to keep discovering something new.
    Nothing could be more of-the-moment than drawing a connection between groundbreaking modern and contemporary art movements and other art forms. In recent years, many luxury and high fashion brands have been clamoring to be associated with the world’s best-loved artists, including Louis Vuitton’s much-discussed partnership with Yayoi Kusama.
    Installation view of “Celebrate Picasso,” in collaboration with Paul Smith at the Picasso Museum in Paris. Photo: © Vinciane Lebrun/Voyez-Vous and Succession Picasso 2023.
    Smith himself is represented by a multicolored rug leading visitors from the second floor to the third floor. Otherwise, the revered designer’s perspective is communicated almost entirely via the wacky color schemes.
    “Truthfully, l have little academic knowledge of Picasso, so the project is very much about visual and spontaneous associations,” he told the museum’s director Cécile Debray and head conservator Joanne Snrech during an interview for the exhibition’s catalogue. “I’m a very visual person, so it always come back to approaching things in a visual way.”
    “In a way, I’m covering myself from potential criticism by some of the more academic connoisseurs of Picasso in the art world, who might think this exhibition is disrespectful in some way,” he added.
    Delicately handling the complicated public image, this new exhibition leaves us with little doubt that Picasso’s influence will remain strong for at least another 50 years into the future.
    “Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light!,” under the artistic direction of Paul Smith, runs until August 27, 2023. 

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    Artist Josie Williams Trained A.I. Chatbots on the Literary Achievements of Black Authors. The Result? ‘Virtual Poetry’

    When artist and developer Josie Williams began looking into A.I. chatbots some two years ago, she was immediately taken with the technology, but also with the possibilities of what more she could do with it. These natural-language applications, after all, suffer from a clear set of limitations. They are told to make relational connections and stick to syntax in their outputs, and most damningly, have been trained on datasets that often lean European, leading to the technology’s notable racial bias.
    “What would happen,” Williams wondered, “if I used the words of radical Black thought leaders in an A.I. dataset, so that was the only thing that a chatbot could use to formulate responses about itself or the world?”
    Thus was born Ancestral Archives, Williams’s latest project encompassing four A.I. chatbots that will be unveiled at an installation at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on March 10. 
    Each of these chatbots has been built on a dataset exclusively containing the work of a Black author, inviting viewers, in effect, to interact with these subjects in an A.I.-mediated conversations. The four thinkers—James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Octavia E. Butler, and Zora Neale Hurston—are the “ancestors” referenced in the work’s title, who, Williams told Artnet News, “really allowed me to have a sense of identity, and feel seen and heard as a Black femme queer person.”
    Josie Williams. Photo: EY.
    To further maximize the technology’s potential, Williams lifted constraints when it came to syntax in the chatbots’ responses, allowing their output to be “more abstract and fluid,” she said. “I was really curious how an A.I. chatbot would say things, given the dataset, when having free bounds for how it can deliver that information.”
    The results, Williams admitted, were often “nonsensical,” but also, hauntingly poetic. She brings up an interaction with the James Baldwin bot that, when asked if it was dreaming, returned with: “A dream so infantile / That is practically forbidden, forbidden, forbidden.”
    “I call them virtual poets,” said Williams, “because they produce really beautiful couplets that only have actual meaning in the terms of [the user’s] contextual understanding.”
    The work’s physical installation will feature four traditional Nigerian masks to house each chatbot, all of them designed by Williams in a nod to her West African heritage. These masks, she explained, played key roles in traditional ceremonies, enabling wearers to channel their ancestors and their ancestors, in spirit, to be part of these rituals.
    Ancestral Archives is embedded with that same purpose, staging meetings between tradition and technology, forebears and heirs. “I’m by no way trying to reanimate them,” Williams said of her ancestral subjects, “but rather [highlight] that the energy and meaning behind their words will always be here to inspire and lead us.”
    The Octavia E. Butler chatbot, part of Ancestral Archives. Photo courtesy of the artist and New Inc.
    The project is supported by New Inc, the New Museum’s innovation incubator, in partnership with Ernst and Young, the multinational consultancy which recently initiated its EY Metaverse Lab aimed at building inclusivity and equity into the virtual space. In addition to Williams’s piece, New Inc and EY are backing the development of a host of other tech-assisted art with an eye on an inclusive metaverse.
    “Where Black speculative futures fit into how A.I. is measured and learned is really interesting for a practitioner who has always felt like her story has been on the outskirts of technology’s development,” Salome Asega, the director of New Inc, told Artnet News. “It’s our place as a program that nurtures cutting edge and emerging art practices to support the research and the questions artists are asking.”
    Indeed, the question posed by Ancestral Archives is less about the creative potential of A.I. than how Black experiences and identities can be centered in the build-out of A.I.—making them the core, not an afterthought. 
    Williams further intends to build this same inclusivity into the delivery of Ancestral Archives. Following its physical launch, she hopes to host the project online to ensure it an expansive reach beyond the niche corners of technology or academia, where it might be “hard for people from under-resourced demographics to have access to it.”
    “It’s this idea of building for people who are most marginalized rather than building for people who are already benefiting from the system,” she emphasized, “starting from the outside in, rather than the inside out.”
    “SXSW Art Program Installation: Ancestral Archives by Josie Williams” will be on view at the Austin Convention Center, 500 Cesar Chavez St, Austin, Texas, March 10–17, 2023.
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