Eliana Willis

Magic is afoot at the New-York Historical Society, where a new exhibition revisits a dark chapter in U.S. history: the Salem Witch Trials. Between early 1692 and mid-1693, more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft, and 20 people were executed.
“The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming,” which originated last fall at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is the latest offering of the historical society’s Center for Women’s History. It examines the legal proceedings in light of the role that race and gender played in the deadly affair, as well as the impact it made on descendants of the accused.
“Women were overwhelmingly the ones accused of witchcraft both in America and in Europe in the time period,” Anna Danziger Halperin, the center’s associate director, told Artnet News.
The Salem Witch Trials were an outburst of witch-phobia that followed a vogue for witch trials across Europe in the early modern period. The hysteria overtook the town and village of Salem (the latter is called Danvers today), implicating the poor and vulnerable as well as some of society’s most respected citizens.
Artist in London Sundial (1644), owned by John Proctor, one of the victims of the Salem Witch Trials. Photo by Jeffrey R. Dykes. Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, gift of Abel H. Proctor, 1907.
“The first three people who were accused were women who were ostracized and easily scapegoated in the community, but from there, it spirals out,” Danziger Halperin said. “In some ways, the fact that men were also accused is part of what makes the Salem story exceptional.”
“It’s really a defining example of American intolerance and injustice—a terrible chapter in our history,” she added.
The trials created an intense climate of fear and uncertainty for the people of Salem, who never knew who the next target would be. (The accused included a four-year-old child.)
Setting an appropriately spooky tone for the show is an atmospheric soundtrack of crackling flames, howling winds, and eerie bird calls. The ambient noise plays as you approach a recreation of the Salem hearth where the tragedy all began. The daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris accused Tituba, an enslaved woman from Barbados, of being a witch and causing the mysterious fits they claimed were afflicting them.
Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library.
Though Tituba managed to avoid execution, the historical record offers no trace of her fate. In lieu of surviving artifacts, Danziger Halperin represented her with a colonial map of Barbados, where Tituba was enslaved before joining the Parris household.
The original Peabody Essex show drew from the museum’s collection of primary documents. In lieu of trial transcripts and other papers, the NYHS has brought in other historical manuscripts, such as a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, a handbook on how to identify and kill witches, originally published in Germany in 1486.
Also on view are some of the personal belongings of Salem residents, such as a window from the home of the Towne family, whose three sisters were all among the accused. (Two were executed.)
Heinrich Institoris, Malleus Maleficarum (1669). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library.
“It has its own kind of eerie power,” Danziger Halperin said. “The window is this place where people could eavesdrop and see evidence and hear rumors.”
Other artifacts include a large chest that belonged to the Osborn family and a tape loom from the Putnams. Sarah Osborne was one of the first three people accused of witchcraft, likely targeted because of an inheritance dispute following the death of her first husband, a relative of the influential Putnam family. (Osborne died in jail before her trial.)
“The Putnams were really one of the most vehement proponents of accusing their neighbors,” Danziger Halperin said. “Which makes this small decorative tape loom that was used by Rebecca Putnam a really amazing artifact—it has these incredible symbols carved into the handle that are symbols of folk magic. It’s a protective amulet, which would have went against puritanical belief!”
Artist in Salem, Massachusetts, Tape loom owned by Rebecca Putnam (1690–1710). Photo by Kathy Tarantola. Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, museum purchase made possible by an anonymous donor, 2001.
Existing conflicts between neighbors and families were among the tensions that bubbled to the surface as the trials picked up steam, fueled by political uncertainty and upheaval, a military conflict that brought in refugees from other parts of New England, and crop failures and disease amid a harsh winter.
“Historians use the phrase a powder keg,” Danziger Halperin said. “There’s so many different conflicts and tensions coexisting in the community, once there’s this spark that ignites it, it just explodes.”
The trials end almost as suddenly, with reason seemingly prevailing in January 1693, when a new court ruled that spectral evidence was no longer legally admissible.
Alexander McQueen, dress from the “In Memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem, 1692” collection (2007). Photo by Bob Packert. Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, gift of anonymous donors in London who are friends of the Peabody Essex Museum, 2011.
A powerful addition from the museum’s own collection closes the show: Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s massive painting Witch Hill (The Salem Martyr) (1869). The model for the woman being executed was a descendant of a woman who was hung as a witch in Salem.
The exhibition also brings the story of the trials into the 21st century, with bodies of work by two Salem descendants who have embraced witchcraft in ways that their ancestors could never have imagined.
The late fashion designer Alexander McQueen dedicated his 2007 fall/winter collection to his ancestor Elizabeth How, who was put to death as a witch, creating garments that incorporated symbolism of witchcraft, the occult, and tarot cards.
Frances F. Denny, Keavy, Brooklyn, New York (2016) from “Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America.” Courtesy of the artist and Clamp Art, New York.
And then there are portraits of modern-day witches—women who have embraced elements of witchcraft and magic—shot by New York photographer Frances F. Denny, a descendant of Samuel Sewall, one of the judges who oversaw the trials.
“There’s a huge difference between being accused of being a witch and claiming it on your own as a religious or political identity,” Danziger Halperin said. “These women do call themselves witches, and some lay claim to long historical roots in witchcraft practices and different kinds of traditions. It shows that witch doesn’t have to be this dirty word—magic doesn’t have to be this evil incarnate kind of power.”
“The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming” is on view at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street), New York, New York, October 7, 2022–January 22, 2023. 
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

At MSCHF’s upcoming exhibition at Perrotin—the art collective’s first show at a commercial art gallery—you can literally trade a gun for an artwork. 
The exchange is part of a project called Guns 2 Swords, an expansion of a previous initiative for which MSCHF bought guns from people and forged them into the shape of the ancient weapon.
Perrotin is on board: the gallery has agreed to accept firearms as a form of payment for this particular body of work. (Arrangements need to be made in advance; visitors are not allowed to bring guns into the gallery.)
Guns 2 Swords is just one of many cooky projects that MSCHF, whose members are masters of wringing profundity from provocation, have cooked up for their exhibition, “No More Tears, I’m Lovin’ It.” 
The group plans to convert the gallery into a kind of derelict strip mall, with each “store” dedicated to a discrete body of work. Alongside the sword shop, there is a “GameStop,” which will house crude video games the group has designed, and a “Footlocker,” offering paintings of feet and distorted reproductions of classic shoes. (The collective’s most infamous project, a series of modified Nike Air Max 97s sneakers with drops of human blood mainlined into their soles, will not be available.) 
Rounding out the show, which opens November 3, is a life-sized marble sculpture of Jennifer Lopez, based entirely on paparazzi photos. It’s a clever concept that checks a lot of 2022 boxes, fusing ideas about celebrity, the threat of the surveillance state, and the power of A.I. into a piece of art that looks like it was carved by Michelangelo. Meanwhile, in a three-day performance piece, the rapper 24KGoldn will sit behind a gallery wall with only his hand available to be seen or touched. 
MSCHF’s Chair Simulator (2022) video game. Courtesy of MSCHF.
The show marks MSCHF’s entrée into the capital-A Art World, which may say more about the industry’s temperament than the group’s work. Though the collective (pronounced “mischief”) has taken contemporary art as a subject before—they once bought a $30,000 Damien Hirst spot print, cut it into 88 pieces, then sold them for $480 a pop—the world of galleries and museums has never reciprocated the interest. (A reimagined version of the Hirst work, called Severed Spots, will be on view at Perrotin.)
Beyond the white cube, however, MSCHF has become a cult-favorite brand since its founding in 2019.
Their “drops,” which are released exactly every two weeks, once felt like internet stunts conceived in a dorm room: a rubber chicken-shaped bong, an app that lets you watch Netflix at work. Some still hew toward childish gaggery—they recently released a series of ketchup packets that alternately contained either the condiment or makeup—though the more the group continues to churn out their idiosyncratic products, the more it feels like what they’re after is one big, and often very clever, art project. 
It was Emmanuel Perrotin, the founder of the eponymous gallery, who approached MSCHF about working together. “I was immediately intrigued by their mission of critiquing institutional systems from within,” Perrotin told Artnet News. “It has been part of the gallery’s vision from the beginning to work with artists who break the boundaries of what is considered to be fine art.”
Indeed, perhaps more than any other major dealer, Perrotin has shown the ability to transform pop-inclined art-world outsiders into bona fide industry stars, JR and Takashi Murakami among them. The artist to whom MSCHF is most often compared, Maurizio Cattelan, is also a Perrotin artist; it was at the gallery’s Art Basel Miami Beach booth that he taped a banana to the wall, spawning countless headlines and outraged social media posts. One would imagine that the dealer sees potential for a similar response with MSCHF. (The collective is planning a special project for Perrotin’s ABMB booth this year, though details are still being worked out.)
“While these artists might seem like no-brainers now, each artist was a risk early on in their career,” Perrotin said. “I believed in each one’s vision, as I do with MSCHF.”
“We don’t think there’s anything illegal in the show,” noted Kevin Wiesner, one of MSCHF’s original members. “I think Emmanuel is slightly disappointed that that’s the case.”
MSCHF, This Foot Does Not Exist (2020). Courtesy of MSCHF.
Most articles written about the collective, especially early on in its history, arrived with different versions of the same question in their title: What is MSCHF? Is it a business? A brand? An artwork? A hoax?
That remains a tricky question to answer. MSCHF is registered as a Delaware corporation under the name MSCHF Product Studio, Inc. It’s backed by venture capital firms and the group’s five founding members all have startup-friendly titles. Gabe Whaley is CEO, Dan Greenberg is CRO, Stephen Tetreault is CTO. 
The remaining core members, Lukas Bentel and Wiesner, are co-Chief Creative Officers, though when asked about those titles, they both laughed. “I don’t know what any of these [acronyms] mean!” Bentel said from a graffiti-covered room off MSCHF’s office in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint.
The two men, both in their early 30s, met while enrolled in a dual degree program at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Bendel studied furniture design and electronic music; Wiesner, industrial design and materials engineering. They’re candid and chatty, a vibe that doesn’t quite square with the sense of mystery and aloofness that surrounds their collective.
MSCHF now has around 30 employees whose backgrounds range from design and art to marketing and tech. “It’s a good meshing of people who have a desire to create things with real artistic intent and other people who are trying to push it into a more real-world space,” explained Bentel. “A lot of the work that we make comes from that tension.”
MSCHF’s Satan Shoes (2021). Courtesy of MSCHF.
Being a business on paper has no doubt helped ease some aspects of MSCHF’s modus operandi. The group, for one, has been sued on numerous occasions. Last year, Nike accused MSCHF of trademark infringement after the release of “Satan Shoes.” Bentel, Wiesner, and co. ultimately agreed to recall the sneakers.
But their business savvy shows elsewhere, too. The group’s cannily marketed drops are now almost as anticipated as those from Balenciaga and Supreme. Their products usually sell out immediately, and it’s not uncommon to see them on eBay hours after they’ve been released.
At Perrotin, more than 350 individual artworks will be up for sale, each priced from $25 to $125,000. Some quick math shows that both the group and the gallery stand to make a good amount of money. (MSCHF said they have a “standard” agreement with Perrotin, typically a 50-50 split.)
The group’s blatant embrace of the commercial could make them easy to dismiss. But it also drives the central tension in their work. MSCHF not only participates in, but also exploits and profits from, the very systems they critique: vapid hype cycles and publicity stunts, the general machinery of commerce.
Call it hypocrisy. It is. But in repeating that cycle of hypocrisy, they instantiate a kind of joke to which many of us in these the desultory days of late capitalism can relate: money is evil, but if someone’s going to make some, it might as well be me. 
“It is in MSCHF’s nature to participate, even when we are critiquing or satirizing,” said Wiesner. “We’re looking at the places where commerce gets funky and wanting to abuse or intervene. We want our intervention to hit the exact same people who are living there in the first place.” 
MSCHF, Axe Number Censored (2021). Courtesy of MSCHF.
“I love that they are taking an obvious risk in making something,” said curator Michael Darling, who wrote an introductory text for “No More Tears, I’m Lovin’ It.” (Darling, like Perrotin, has a soft spot for art in touch with popular taste. In his previous role as chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, he oversaw blockbuster exhibitions by Murakami, David Bowie, and Virgil Abloh.​​) “When they put their money on the table to buy a Damien Hirst print and then chop it up and hope that they can sell it to pay themselves back, they’re putting something on the line. That feels risky.”
Darling is a fan of MSCHF’s, though he’s not sure the rest of his industry will board the bandwagon. 
“Sometimes the art world just has a real knee-jerk reaction to people who push these kinds of buttons,” the curator said. “I’m sure there will be a lot of tsk tsk-ing.” 
MSCHF’s members, for their part, have no preconceptions about how the show will be received. “The times that we thought, ‘Oh, this is how people will react,’ people have reacted in a completely different way,” said Bentel.
“We always wonder who is [going to show up],” Wiesner chimed in. “And it honestly always shocks us.”
“MSCHF: No More Tears, I’m Lovin’ It” is set to run November 3 through December 23 at Perrotin in New York.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Botticelli’s Minerva and the Centaur (ca. 1482), which typically hangs beside his iconic Birth of Venus at the Uffizi, is among the 45 works shipped from Florence to the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) for a major new show. In Minnesota, its new neighbor is an ancient Roman sculpture of a centaur, also from the Uffizi. This is one of several stunning juxtapositions in “Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from the Uffizi” (until January 8, 2023)—an exhibition made possible by the close relationship between the Italian and American museums.
According to several individuals involved in its planning, the show is a reflection of the powerful ties between the two art institutions. The Uffizi’s director, Eike Schmidt, was curator of decorative arts and sculpture at the MIA for nearly seven years before taking up his post in Florence in 2015.
Two years ago, in the midst of the global pandemic, the Minneapolis museum decided it needed to plan something big for when life returned to normal. “We thought, we know this guy at the Uffizi, why don’t we give him a call?” Matthew Welch, the MIA’s deputy director and chief curator, told Artnet News at the show’s preview. “Of course, he was happy to talk to us.”
Welch added that the show is timely considering how we have spent the past two years practicing social distancing: “The Renaissance is all about the human touch. This is the perfect invitation back into the world.”
The exhibition, said Katie Luber, the Minneapolis museum’s president and director, “is an amazing example of the power MIA has to work with international partners—in this case the Uffizi—to bring works of art to our community that many of our visitors would never otherwise have the opportunity to see.”
She sees similarities between Florence and Minneapolis, which also has a vibrant art scene and a lot of cultural philanthropy. “There’s a spirit of inquiry here that I think is very similar to what you would see in Florence,” she said. Luber, who called Schmidt a “genius,” noted that his ability to successfully fulfill roles in both Minneapolis and Florence also speaks to the similarities between the cities. 
When Luber and Rachel McGarry, the MIA’s chair of European art—who co-curated the show with Cecilia Frosinini, the director of painting and drawing conservation at Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure—visited the Uffizi, she asked McGarry to see if Schmidt would loan the centaur sculpture. Although his initial response was no, he soon agreed. “It was because we were there together, looking together, thinking about these things together,” Luber said. 
Schmidt said knowing the team in Minneapolis put him at ease about the exhibition. “I knew with whom we would be working,” he said. “If it would have been another museum, I would have also been open-minded, but I would have needed to figure out how many people do we have, what’s their background.”
Many new discoveries were made ahead of the exhibition. For example, a technical analysis of the MIA’s portrait of a young woman (ca. 1495) confirmed it is by Benedetto Ghirlandaio, brother of the more famous Domenico Ghirlandaio. And visitors to the MIA will be able to view delicate, rarely-seen Botticelli drawings—which can only be displayed 12 weeks every five years. One was requested for a show in San Francisco, so the Uffizi is sending it for six weeks each to Minneapolis and California.
“We took inspiration from King Solomon,” Schmidt joked of cutting the time in half. Among the drawings on display in Minneapolis is Two Male Nude Figures (ca. 1475–82), which hangs beside Spinario (late first century B.C.E. to early first century C.E.), the sculpture he copied.
Here is what Schmidt told us about three other highlights from the show:

Madonna of the Roses, (1490–1500)
Botticelli’s Adoration of the Child with Angels, also known as Madonna of the Roses (1490—1500). Photo courtesy of Minneapolis Institute of Art
The frame of the Adoration of the Child with Angels, also known as Madonna of the Roses (1490–1500), still reads “Scuola di Sandro Botticelli,” but conservation and scholarly analysis has reversed the attribution. “Before, it was thought to be a workshop [piece], with perhaps [details by] Botticelli,” Schmidt said. “It’s a Botticelli with workshop [details].” Student work can be seen, particularly in an awkwardly drawn figure on the right, and Schmidt doubts that the older, in-demand Botticelli painted each leaf and flower. The Madonna figure, however, is characteristic of his hand.

Adoration of the Magi, (1470–75)
Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi (1470–75), Le Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Uffizi Galleries
Adoration of the Magi (1470–75) famously features a self-portrait of Botticelli in the foreground on the right. In the New Testament scene, the artist included the painting’s commissioner alongside several prominent Medici family members—both living and dead.
“Nowadays, we would think, ‘How dare they!’ But it’s the opposite,” Schmidt said, explaining that it actually shows their humility as they get down on their knees to take part in this very old tradition. He noted that the Medici would dress as the Magi as part of a sacra rappresentazione, or sacred theater, during annual events to mark the Epiphany.  
The picture reflects the wealthy’s desire to be close to Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Child, and for Florentines to appear alongside the Medici. “It’s about being close to power—taking your selfie with a famous baseball star,” Schmidt said. “It’s a diagram of power in Florence.”

Saint Augustine in His Study, (ca. 1494)
Botticelli, Saint Augustine in His Study (ca. 1494), Le Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Uffizi Galleries
Another newly understood work is Saint Augustine in His Study (ca. 1494), which features the saint along with roundels of Roman emperors and the Madonna and Child, suggesting continuity between Saint Augustine and pagan antiquity. Some scholars think the saint is translating a text, but the torn papers on the floor don’t jibe with that analysis. One would scrape and reuse costly velum, rather than discard it.  
“The new theory—which is totally convincing to me and is published for the first time here in the catalog—is that these are actually [Saint Augustine’s] retractions,” Schmidt said. “Towards the end of his life, when he looked back at all his theology, he said, ‘Well this is where I was wrong.’” 
Botticelli’s blend of ancient Roman symbolism with (then) contemporary Catholic iconography is a recipe that is at the heart of the exhibition, and it typified the Renaissance, said Schmidt. “I would argue that this is more relevant than certain things that are explicitly reacting to specific issues of the present day,” he said. 
“Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from the Uffizi” is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, until January 8, 2023.

More Trending Stories:
It Took Eight Years, an Army of Engineers, and 1,600 Pounds of Chains to Bring Artist Charles Gaines’s Profound Meditation on America to Life. Now, It’s Here
Mega-Collector Ronald Perelman Is Suing to Recover $410 Million for Art He Says Lost ‘Oomph’ After a Fire at His Hamptons Estate. His Insurance Companies Say It Looks Fine
A 28-Year-Old Who Unexpectedly Won a Dalí Etching at Auction for $4,000 Has Gone Viral With Her Rueful TikTok Video About It
Tom Hovey, the Illustrator Behind the Delectable ‘Great British Bake Off’ Drawings, on How the Show Has Catapulted His Career
The World’s Oldest Map of the Stars, Lost for Thousands of Years, Has Been Found in the Pages of a Medieval Parchment
 
Click Here to See Our Latest Artnet Auctions, Live Now
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

The first U.K. exhibition to explore the life and work of the Renaissance sculptor Donatello (ca.1386—1466) is due to open next February at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. 
Several of the most-prized exhibits will make their U.K. debut in the 130-piece show, which offers museum-goers a chance to learn more about Donatello’s impact on the early Italian Renaissance as well as his influence on later artists. 
Among the important loans is an early marble sculpture of David (ca. 1408—09) from the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence. One of the artist’s most significant early commissions, he sculpted it when he was in his early 20s for the Cathedral of Florence, but it was eventually installed in the Palazzo della Signoria. 
Two relief sculptures will be seen together for the first time when the V&A’s Ascension with Christ Giving the Keys to St Peter (ca. 1428—30) is reunited with Madonna of the Clouds (ca. 1425—35) from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 
Donatello, Reliquary bust of San Rossore. Photo courtesy of The Ministry of Culture Italy— Regional Directorate of Museums of Tuscany, Florence.
The landmark exhibition will also feature a reliquary bust of San Rossore from the Museum Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa, bronzes from the High Altar of the Basilica of St Anthony in Padua, and the bronze Attis-Amorino from the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence. 
The son of a wool merchant who trained as a goldsmith, Donatello’s story brings to life many aspects of society and culture in 15th-century Florence, including the power and patronage of the Medici family and their elite circle with whom he forged a close relationship. 
Audiences can expect to learn how the master’s inventive genius enabled him to combine a range of influences from various periods to create a bold new style. He was skilled in working in a wide variety of materials, including marble, wood, bronze, terracotta and stucco, and examples in this show promise to reveal the considerable diversity of his talent.
“Donatello was a driving force behind the Italian Renaissance and an inspiration to artists across centuries,” said the exhibition’s lead curator Peta Motture. 
“The exhibition provides a unique moment to experience, enjoy and—for those less familiar with his work—discover Donatello’s astonishing talents and his wide-ranging impact on Renaissance and later art.”
Works by Donatello will be joined by several pieces by his contemporaries, including those by the architect and sculptor Michelozzo, to further contextualize his practice.
“Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance” will be on view from February 11 to June 11, 2023.

More Trending Stories:
Some People Trade in Their Old iPhones. A Smarter Person Just Sold Their First-Generation Device at Auction for Nearly $40,000
Museums and Private Collectors Jousted for Treasures From the Getty Family Collection in a $79 Million White-Glove Auction at Christie’s
Meet 9 Power Players Who Are Steering the French Art Scene to New Heights—Including Its Booming Art Market
Tom Hovey, the Illustrator Behind the Delectable ‘Great British Bake Off’ Drawings, on How the Show Has Catapulted His Career
A French Auction House Fired the Employee Responsible for Pricing a $7.5 Million Qianlong Vase at Just $1,900
Click Here to See Our Latest Artnet Auctions, Live Now
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Each gallery of the Hammer Museum’s recently opened exhibition, “Joan Didion: What She Means,” explores a chapter of the revered writer’s life—from her roots in Sacramento to her last years in New York.
The final room is titled “Sentimental Journeys” after a 1990 essay that Didion, who died in late 2021 at age 87, published in the New York Review of Books. Centered on the 1989 Central Park jogger case, the essay unravels the threads of race, class, and “preferred narratives,” which, tangled together, led to the unjust conviction of the young Black men known as the Central Park Five (now the Exonerated Five since their convictions were vacated in 2002).
Didion had not always been so good at writing about race. When she wrote about Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton in 1968, she called him a “black militant,” not pausing to interrogate what such a term might convey or from where, or whom, it came. When she wrote about the 1965 Watts uprising, she treated it as a vague inevitability: “For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.”
Noah Purifoy, Watts Uprising Remains, (ca. 1965-66). Photo: Karl Puchlik
“Joan Didion: What She Means,” curated by writer Hilton Als alongside the Hammer’s Connie Butler and Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi, allows Didion to be complicated. In fact, included in the “Sentimental Journeys” gallery is a sculpture by Noah Purifoy made from the rubble of the Watts uprising, an elegant work that looks like a pile of charred pages. Placed here, the sculpture recalls Didion’s flawed 1960s writing, and seems implicitly to acknowledge how much her writing changed in the decades between the 1960s and 1990s. “Is Joan Didion a legend?” a journalist recently asked Onyewuenyi. Onyewuenyi responded, “I want to keep her as a writer. I think she’s a writer.”
Hilton Als, a New Yorker staff writer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017, conceived of this exhibition about Didion before the writer’s death. He had previously curated what he calls “exhibitions as portraits” about writers James Baldwin and Toni Morrison at David Zwirner Gallery. Als wrote to the Hammer, broaching the possibility of a show with Didion, and conversations with the museum began in fall 2019. “This project had Didion’s blessing,” wrote Als and Butler in the catalog. “Didion is as much a co-curator of this exhibition as we are.”
The exhibition begins with a section called “Holy Water,” after an essay in which Didion reflected on her drought-prone home state of California. All of the objects in this first section reference the state in one way or another, though not always literally. A 1930 woodblock print by the Japanese-American artist Chiura Obata titled Evening Glow at Mono Lake, from Mono Mills (1930) depicts blue water underneath purple mountains and a sky that glows pink through heavy clouds. A nearby wall-hanging ceramic sculpture by Los Angeles artist Liz Larner, inflexion (2013), has a strikingly similar palette, but is otherwise abstract.
Liz Larner, inflexion, (2013). © Liz Larner. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Two ethereal 1970s landscapes by the artist Suzanne Jackson imbue trees, hills, and clouds with such energy that they appear in motion. Like Didion, Jackson spent part of her childhood and her college years in Northern California, then, in the second half of the 1960s moved to Los Angeles. Unlike Didion, Jackson was directly affected by racism in the city, and the Los Angeles Police Department’s war on Black activists, especially after Jackson showed the work of Emory Douglas, the Black Panther’s Minister of Culture, in the gallery she operated. Two paintings by Ben Sakoguchi, a Japanese-American artist whose family was interned during World War II, come from his 1974–81 satirical series “Orange Crate Labels,” in which he uses the state’s signature citrus as a vehicle to criticize the exploitation of labor, racism, and war-mongering.
“The show is really like a collage,” said Onyewuenyi, who took on the task of researching Didion’s California lineage. Her 2003 book Where I Was From goes deep into her family’s history in the state: how her great-great-great-grandmother, Nancy Hardin Cornwall, traveled West toward California with the Donner-Reed party, breaking off from the group before the members famously found themselves snow-bound in the Sierra Nevadas, resorting to cannibalism. Throughout Where I Was From, Didion repeatedly mentions the potato masher that Cornwall brought West with her—for Didion’s family, “the potato masher that crossed the plans” was treated as “evidence of family endurance, proof of our worth.”
The masher is displayed in the “Holy Water” section of the Hammer exhibition (it may not have appeared in the show if Los Angeles Times columnist Carolina Miranda had not tracked it down following Didion’s death, finding it at the Pacific University Museum in Oregon, and inspiring Onyewuenyi to get in touch with the museum as well), alongside multiple other objects that belonged to Didion’s ancestors such as William Geiger, her great-great-grandfather. Geiger, a surveyor, studied at an abolitionist college in Illinois; yet when he arrived in California, he surveyed land for John Sutter, the founder of Sacramento known for murdering and exploiting the labor of Indigenous people. “For me, I was interested in giving some materiality to this history and [Didion’s] past,” said Onyewuenyi. “It also almost revealed these kinds of paradoxes.”
Still of Andy Warhol, Reel 77 of **** (Four Stars), (1967). Courtesy of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute
After “Holy Water” comes “Goodbye to All That,” featuring photographs by Diane Arbus and a film of a sunset by Andy Warhol, and tracing Didion’s first move to New York in the late 1950s (where she wrote for Vogue and married her husband, John Gregory Dunne) and then back to Los Angeles.
Next is “The White Album,” a section of the exhibition that treats Didion’s writing about the 1960s more like a jumping-off point than a template. Vija Celmins’s pithy yet haunting 1964 painting of a hand pulling a trigger shares space with Betye Saar’s explorations of mysticism and astrology (Mystic Chart for an Unemployed Sorceress from 1964 is layered with marks, suns, and moons). Saar lived in Laurel Canyon before the musicians Didion wrote about, including Jim Morrison, moved there, and her presence in the exhibition underscores how worlds overlapped in the period when Didion penned some of her best-known essays. Elsewhere, 1974 surveillance footage of Patty Hearst robbing the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco (which Didion wrote about) loops on the same monitor as footage of activist Angela Davis’s 1971 trial (which Didion did not write about).
Vija Celmins, Untitled (Double Desert), (1974). Photo: Ian Reeves
Only a few works reference the writer directly, among them a nostalgic installation and two drawings by Jack Pierson, and two portraits Don Bachardy made of Didion in the 1970s. Both show her pensive and unsmiling. In 2016, Bachardy, longtime partner of the novelist Christopher Isherwood, told Vanity Fair that Didion and her husband Dunne used to pursue Isherwood, courting his attention: “They were both highly ambitious, and Chris was a rung on the ladder they were climbing.”
Many valid, well-formed criticisms have been leveled at Joan Didion over the decades (see: Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s 1979 essay “Only Disconnect”), but I am always struck by those who take issue with the writer’s ambitions and contradictions, using these to call her work into question. Consider Daphne Merkin, who quotes Didion writing that “I was obscurely ashamed to go to dinner with yet another editor, ashamed to sit down again and discuss this ‘work.’” Then Merkin quotes a close friend of Didion’s saying that “I never saw ambition like that,” as if it is somehow suspect—or, in Merkin’s words, “almost transactional”—to be both ambitious and embarrassed about it.
These criticisms seem often to stem from frustration over Didion’s prominence, over her status as “legend” rather than just “writer.” The proliferation of other voices in “Joan Didion: What She Means” makes it clear that she was one of many figures trying to make sense of the world, and within this chorus, there’s space for Didion to mean more than one thing—and to change.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More