Eliana Willis

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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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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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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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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Faith Ringgold’s black feminist art has been an oversight in the mainstream art world for decades until last year when the New Museum in New York staged a major retrospective surveying her practice. Spanning nearly six decades of her work, it was the largest solo show of the Harlem-born artist since 1998.
This year, in France, the 92-year-old artist is finally getting recognition from the other side of the Atlantic. “Black is beautiful” at the Picasso Museum in Paris is the first presentation of the artist’s rich body of work in France. The exhibition is part of a major overhaul of the museum that marks the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death; the rehang also hopes to refresh the collection and appeal to younger audiences, many of whom are critical of Picasso’s treatment of women and appropriation of African art in his work.
The presentation of Ringgold’s significant body of work, including a range of story quilts and tapestry, considers her reinterpretation of modern art history, as well as her struggles for civil rights while witnessing the racial conflicts in the United States. The exhibition presents major highlights from Ringgold’s career, including the important series “The French Collection,” which includes 12 quilts the artist made after a 1961 trip to France.  Through this work Ringgold “wanted to show there were Black people when Picasso, Monet, and Matisse were making art,” the artist was quoted saying in the exhibition text. “I wanted to show that African art and Black people had a place in that history.”
Cécile Debray, curator of the exhibition and president of the museum, credited Ringgold for reviving the figurative lineage from the Harlem Renaissance and contributing a great deal to the Black feminist art scene.
“Faith’s work, by its plurality, its inventiveness, and its power, is emblematic of a form of utopia, of a certain challenge, that of an art that is both committed, avant-garde and popular, which undoubtedly gives it a wide and very current resonance,” the curator wrote in the exhibition catalog.
Below are the highlights from the exhibition, which is on view until July 2.
Faith Ringgold, American People Series #18: The Flag Is Bleeding (1967). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund and Gift of Glenstone Foundation (2021.28.1). © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022
Faith Ringgold, Black Light Series #1: Big Black (1967). Pérez Art Museum Miami, Museum purchase with funds provided by Jorge M. Pérez and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022
Faith Ringgold, Picasso’s Studio: The French Collection Part I, #7 (1991). Worcester Art Museum; Charlotte E. W. Buffington Fund. © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022
Faith Ringgold, Slave Rape #2: Run You Might Get Away (1972). Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging; courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.
Faith Ringgold, Slave Rape #3: Fight to Save Your Life (1972). Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging; courtesy Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.
Faith Ringgold, The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro (1975-89). Courtesy the artist and ACA Galleries, New York. © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022. Photo: Ron Amstutz; courtesy Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland.
Faith Ringgold, United States of Attica (1972). Courtesy de l’artiste et ACA Galleries, New York. © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022.
Faith Ringgold, Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach (1988). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Gift Mr. and Mrs. Gus and Judith Leiber, 88.3620. © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022.

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