Eliana Willis

As the debut of Paris+ prepares to unfold in the Grand Palais Éphémère, the city’s museums are presenting a rich variety of visually and intellectually stimulating exhibitions. Our round-up of nine shows confirms how artists continue to reinvent the wheel while drawing inspiration from artists born decades and centuries before them.

“Things – A History of Still Life”LouvreUntil January 23, 2023
Barthélémy Toguo Le Pilier des migrants disparus © Barthélémy Toguo ADAGP Paris 2022. Courtesy de lartiste et HdM Gallery © Audrey Viger Musée du Louvre.
Soaring into I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre is a towering sculpture of fabric-covered balls by Cameroonian artist Barthélémy Toguo. Alluding to migrants that have perished on their voyage (the piece is titled The Pillar of the Missing Migrants), the commissioned work exemplifies how curator Laurence Bertrand Dorléac has sought to extend what the genre of “still life,” or nature morte, can encompass today. “Things – A History of Still Life” assembles an incredible diversity from Bottle Rack (1914/59) by Marcel Duchamp to Georges de La Tour’s painting of Mary Magdalene in front of a candle.

Frida Kahlo: “Au-delà des apparences”Palais GallieraUntil March 5, 2023
Hand-painted medical corset. © Museo Frida Kahlo – Casa Azul collection – Javier Hinojosa, 2017
Taking us behind the scenes of Frida Kahlo’s life, this insightful exhibition explores the intimate issues that informed and created the Mexican artist’s unique identity. On show are more than 200 objects from the Casa Azul, the house where Kahlo grew up, including black-and-white family photos, hand-painted orthopaedic corsets that she wore due to her disability after contracting poliomyelitis, a prosthetic leg, boots, and traditional Tehuana dresses. Kahlo’s husband, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, placed these personal items under seal after she died, and they were not discovered until 2004. Also on view are several self-portraits and a portrait of Kahlo by Dora Maar taken during Kahlo’s trip to Paris.

Alice Neel: “Un regard engagé”Centre PompidouUntil January 16, 2023
Alice Neel, “un regard engagé” © Centre Pompidou. Photo: Hélène Mauri.
Mixed-race and homosexual couples, unemployed people, and pregnant women all fell under the unflinching gaze of the 20th century artist Alice Neel—a radical feminist who was also a member of the Communist party. Yet as her figurative painting went against the prevailing vogue of abstraction, pop art, minimalism, and conceptualism, Neel’s oeuvre was largely overlooked during her lifetime. This exhibition seeks to elevate her place in the history of art cannon.

“Monet – Mitchell”Fondation Louis VuittonUntil February 27, 2023
Joan Mitchell, Two Pianos, (1980). 
Private collection
© The Estate of Joan Mitchell
. Photo © Patrice Schmidt
American artist Joan Mitchell once said that she “admired the late but not early Monet.” It is indeed with the fabulous paintings from Monet’s late period of his garden in Giverny that Mitchell’s vibrant works made with thick brushstrokes, many decades later in Vétheuil near the Seine, are juxtaposed. What’s immediately striking is how the two artists shared a similar chromatic sensitivity in their palettes and a dedication to inventing new ways to depict landscape—Monet spoke of “impression” and “sensation,” while Mitchell sought to express “feeling.”

Mickalene Thomas: “Avec Monet”Musée de l’OrangerieUntil February 6, 2023
Mickalene Thomas Le Jardin d’Eau de Monet (2022). Photo: © Mickalene Thomas © Adagp, Paris, 2022
In 2011, American artist Mickalene Thomas was an artist-in-residence at Claude Monet’s home in Giverny. For this exhibition, she has revisited that experience and interpreted the Impressionist artist’s house with her own visual language—a rich collage composed from photographs of Monet’s garden as well as printed and painted elements delineated with Swarovski crystals. Another work referring to Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe features three Black women in a celebration of pride and female power. A video work shows Thomas reclining nude, interspersed with fragments of Amedeo Modigliani’s famous nudes and abstract images, as a voice narrates the hardship of growing up as a mixed-race woman.

Kehinde WileyMusée d’OrsayUntil January 8, 2023
Kehinde Wiley Femme Piquée Par Un Serpent (Mamadou Gueye), (2022). Kehinde Wiley / Ugo Carmeni
In the nave of the Musée d’Orsay is Kehinde Wiley’s magnificent monumental bronze sculpture of a young man collapsed across the saddle of a galloping horse. Another sculpture portrays a resting male figure, ivy meandering over his body—the pose is duplicated in a richly detailed painting of a figure clad in a Louis Vuitton top, jeans, and white Nike sneakers, lying upon a rock in a landscape. Through revisiting stereotypes of Western art, Wiley majestically re-contextualizes classic pictorial forms while dwelling on violence, suffering and peacefulness.

“Reversing the Eye: Arte Povera and Beyond 1960-1975: Photography, Film, Video”Jeu de Paume and Le BalUntil January 29, 2023
Giuseppe Penone Svolgere la propria pelle (1997) © Archivio Penone.
The title of this show is taken from the work Rovesciare i propri occhi (To reverse one’s eyes), 1970, depicting a young Giuseppe Penone—who was the youngest member of Italy’s Arte Povera group—wearing mirrored contact lenses he had custom made. Spread across two venues, the exhibition features seminal works by Arte Povera artists, such as Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Sfera di giornali, a ball made of newspapers that he rolled in the streets of Turin, and his mirror paintings. It also looks at the work of lesser-known photographers who influenced or exhibited with the Arte Povera artists, thus bringing a wider context to the radical Italian movement.

Cyprien Gaillard: ‘Humpty Dumpty’Palais de Tokyo and Lafayette AnticipationsUntil January 8, 2023
Reference for “Humpty/Dumpty” on view at Palais de Tokyo. © Cyprien Gaillard. Photo: Max Paul, (2021)
Entropy and man’s quest to overcome it and failure to do so lies at the heart of Cyprien Gaillard’s double exhibition. From the restoration of the Eiffel Tower to the removal of love locks from the Pont Neuf because they were weighing down the bridge, Gaillard’s gaze is turned to Paris and the attempts to spruce up the city ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games. The second-part of the show, at Lafayette Anticipations, is focused on literally trying to make a clock sculpture work again.

Anri Sala: ‘Time No Longer’Bourse de Commerce – Pinault CollectionUntil January 16, 2023
Anri Sala, Time No Longer, 2021. Pinault Collection © Anri Sala / Adagp, Paris, 2022. Photo Aurélien Mole
Projected onto a vast, curved screen in the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce is Anri Sala’s Time No Longer (2021) – an elegy to African-American astronaut and saxophonist Ronald McNair who never fulfilled his dream to record music in space as his space shuttle exploded seconds after takeoff. As with ‘Ravel Ravel Unravel’, which the Albanian-French artist unveiled in the French Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2013, it is a mesmerizing exploration of recomposing sounds and images. Other new works by the artist are on display in the vitrines while older videos are on show in the ground-floor gallery and basement.

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

What do the port cities of Venice and Mystic in Connecticut have in common? Both share a long seafaring history and world-class art. On October 15, Mystic Seaport Museum opens “Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass: American Artists and the Magic of Murano,” an exhibition organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum that features more than 115 artworks from over 40 institutions and private collections that explore how Venetian arts influenced American artists. The show debuted in Washington, DC, and stopped in Fort Worth before docking in Mystic, where it will remain through February 27, 2023.
Christina Brophy, Senior Vice President of Curatorial Affairs, told Artnet News that she had collaborated with the Smithsonian on a previous show, and jumped at the opportunity to host this art exhibition at the maritime museum.
The Mystic edition of “Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass” shifts the show’s sequence to highlight cultural connections between Venice, Mystic, and greater New England. For this edition, Rhode Island’s Tomaquag Museum is loaning a trade bead necklace and beaded top hat, both by Indigenous artists, to emphasize “the incorporation of Venetian and other trade glass into the vernacular of traditional work, which also includes elements of wampum, bone, and porcupine quill,” Brophy said.
Mystic Seaport Museum has also pulled rarely-seen works from its own collection, including glass-plate negatives taken in Venice by the whaler, merchant, and diplomat Henry Hiller, along with a diary documenting one mariner’s Venetian adventures. Lino Tagliapietra, a glass maestro from Murano, appears alongside other living legends he inspired, including Debora Czeresko, Dale Chihuly, and Kim Harty.
Local glass artist Jeffrey P’an also makes an appearance—museum members will have the opportunity to visit his studio for a live glassblowing demonstration. Other programming for the general public includes on-site tours and talks by glass and lacework experts. Throughout the duration of the show, visitors entering the lobby will be greeted by a 35.5-foot Venetian gondola from La Gondola in Providence. The Rhode Island-based specialist gondola tour company will also offer rides on the Mystic River in another of its vessels during the show’s opening weekend.
Since 1929, Mystic Seaport Museum has dedicated its 19 acres to America’s maritime past. Facilities include a 75,000-volume research library, a recreation of a 19th-century seafaring village, and the Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard. It also has an extensive collection of film, photography, and over 500 different types of watercraft, as well as a choice selection of prints and paintings.
The museum has plans both to show more of its permanent art collection and to increase its engagement with living artists by commissioning site-specific works that address issues such as climate change and ecology. Rhode Island artist Sue McNally was commissioned to paint an on-site mural called Mystic Blue, and the museum has also commissioned Alexis Rockman to produce 11 paintings around the theme of climate change in the maritime industry for a show called “Oceanus”, which will premiere in May 2023 before traveling domestically and abroad—in true seafaring fashion. Brophy also mentioned a forthcoming call for artists to create an installation for its planned exhibition “Entwined”, slated for 2024, “on Indigenous, African, and African American Maritime Social History.”
Below is a preview of works to be featured in “Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass” before the exhibition sets sail.
Attributed to Società Veneziana per l’Industria delle Conterie (SVC), “Sample Cord with Flameworked Beads”, (Late 19th century—1904). Image courtesy of Illinois State Museum.
Maxfield Parrish, “Venetian Lamplighters” (1922). Image courtesy of National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI, and American Illustrators Gallery, New York, NY.

Francesco Toso Borella, Vittorio Toso Borella and Compagnia di Venezia e Murano, “Replica of a Renaissance Goblet (Campanile Cup)” (1903—12). Image courtesy of Iris and Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.

Scuola dei Merletti di Burano, “Lace Panel with Lion of St. Mark” (20th century). Image courtesy of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Thomas Moran, “A View of Venice” (1891). Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

John Singer Sargent, “A Venetian Woman” (1882). Image courtesy of Cincinnati Art Museum.

Louise Howland King Cox, “May Flowers” (1911). Image courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Roman Empire, “Mosaic Glass Bowl”, (1st century B.C.E. – 1st century C.E.). Image courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Giovanni Boldini, “Portrait of James McNeill Whistler” (1897). Image courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.
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

This week, the Museum of Design in Atlanta unveils “Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture,” a survey of temporal, reactive, and improvisational architecture, designed by scholar and architect Sekou Cooke.
“Hip-hop architecture had been talked about and debated at Cornell University in the mid-90s, after the legendary thesis project by Nathan Williams,” Cooke told Artnet News. The curator has since written a book on the topic, hosted a symposium, and organized this touring show. “Close to the Edge” outlines the movement’s 25-year rise through facade studies, urban development proposals, installation strategies, and building designs.
While on the surface hip-hop and architecture might appear at odds—one celebrates spontaneity, the other relies on structure—the combination of the two is an “anti-style” design movement that riffs off the music’s playful pastimes: deejaying, emceeing, b-boy dancing, and graffiti.
Sekou Cooke. Photo: Michael Barletta. Courtesy of Sekou Cooke Studio
Cooke has identified three categories that are particularly important to the movement: Identity, Process, and Image. Together, he said, these categories hold space for “designers with deeply rooted, hip-hop identities, those committed to processes extracted from hip-hop elements, and reflecting an image that may somehow be tied back to aspects of public consciousness attributed to hip-hop.”
Designing the show specifically for MODA’s sprawling galleries, Cooke sought to create intimacy through wall text and sonic environments. He met the museum’s mandate for interactivity with a turntable feature “where visitors can manipulate 3D prints in action.” He has also expanded the traveling show’s “If Ya Don’t Know…” glossary wall with “historical images of hip-hop’s elements, grounding them back to a Southern context.”
Altogether, the show asks how call and response can become an architectural imperative, in the same way hip-hop and its entourage activities are all based on flow.
“Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip Hop Architecture” is on view October 15 through January 29, 2023 at the Museum of Design in Atlanta. Take a sneak peek of the exhibition below.
“Close to the Edge” at the Center for Architecture in New York, late 2018. Photo: Erik Bardin, courtesy of MODA.
Ujijji Davis, The Bottega project (2015). Photo: courtesy of Sekou Cooke Studio.
Boris Delta Tellegen, Barlagelaan (2011). Photo: courtesy of Sekou Cooke Studio.
Wildstyle, a proposed new design for the Museum of Hip Hop in Brooklyn, New York by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee students Jessie Christensen, Kate Greskoviak, Claudia Lu, and Michael Muchmore. Photo: courtesy of MODA.
ITN Architects, construction photograph from “The End to End Building” in Melbourne, Australia (2015). Photo: courtesy of MODA.
A view of City Thread by design duo SPORTS (Molly Hunker, Greg Corso), in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2018). Photo: courtesy of MODA.
Studio Malka Architecture, Bow-House in Heerlen, Netherlands (2014). Photo: courtesy of MODA.
Lauren Halsey, Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (2016). Photo: courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
4RM+ULA Architects, exterior perspective rendering of JXTA Arts Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota (2010). Photo: courtesy of MODA.
Maurer United Architects, Zedzbeton 3.0, with Zedz, project poster (2002). Photo: courtesy of MODA.
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

Tyler Mitchell has unveiled his latest portraits of Black utopia at Gagosian Davies Street, marking his first solo exhibition in the U.K., and setting the stage for a busy season in London ahead for the artist. 
On view through November 12, the photographs in “chrysalis,” propose a counter-narrative for Black folks, which erases historical trauma, capturing youthful Black bodies in an idyll of nature and leisure, playfully surreal and serene.
From the Greek origin khrysallis, the name denotes the stage in a butterfly’s life cycle where, enclosed within a cocoon, a metamorphosis and maturation take place before it emerges in its final form.
It speaks to the essence of Mitchell’s show, which depicts Black men and women at the cusp of adulthood, and also finds a parallel in the artist’s career—Mitchell has rapidly matured since his debut as a commercial photographer in 2018, and is now a respected voice in conceptual photography, whose work will adorn walls at Frieze Masters, Saatchi Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, all before the end of the season. 
Tyler Mitchell, Chrysalis (2022). ©Tyler Mitchell. Image courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Gagosian.
The photographs capture protagonists simultaneously poised and relaxed, whether in positions of rest, recline, and suspension, or mid-movement; swimming, splashing, and playing with the natural elements of land, sky and water. “Collectively, these become the figments of an imaginative and psychic state of being, one in which radiance, resistance, restraint, comfort, and full agency exist,” Mitchell said of his work in a press statement.
Part imagination, part reality, Mitchell’s cinematic dreamscapes create a space where Black-skinned bodies are free to exist in a way that they cannot always in contemporary America, positioning themselves joyfully in any scenario they please, unencumbered by social prejudice.
In Cage, a young Black woman lies, debonair, propped up by her elbows on the grass, legs crossed nonchalantly in the air, against a painted backdrop of garden enclosed within a white-picket fence. In A Glint of Possibility, a young male figure suspends from a tire swing, resting in equilibrium as he contemplates his reverberating reflection in the surface of a lake, while Treading shows a boy’s head emerging from the water, flanked by a cluster of balloons.
Tyler Mitchell, A Glint of Possibility (2022). ©Tyler Mitchell. Image courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Gagosian.
Though surreal, Mitchell’s illusory world constructs an optimistic vision, of subjects existing freely in the outdoor space, of a carefree and dreaming youth denied many due to historical, economic, and social exclusion. No work exhibits this quite like Mitchell’s Simply Fragile. Depicting a bare-chested young man leaning aback on a patch of grass near bordering water, he fixates a downward gaze, cross-eyed, on a beetle fleetingly settled on the tip of his nose, expressing a moment of harmony.
“Tyler grew up in Atlanta, so he’s thinking about Black relationships to the land, historically and present, and how those relationships are both real and mythic,” gallery director Antwaun Sargent told Artnet News, adding that the artist is thinking about “the duality around Black identity, and how different movements, Black gestures, have been interpreted in very different ways.” 
Tyler Mitchell, Tenderly (2022). ©Tyler Mitchell. Image courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Gagosian.
Indeed, juxtaposed with these images of subjects in harmony with nature are smaller ones set in diptych pairings depicting figures wading, swimming, and struggling in muddy waters, emanating a palpable sense of danger, that pervades the experience of green spaces, asserting the need to remain vigilant, and not, for example, tread in someone else’s yard. In the expressionistic The Heart, Mitchell depicts a boy half-submerged under a layer of sediment, lying horizontally with his eyes closed shut. In Rapture, a hand reaches out of rippling muddy water, implying a sense of struggle.
As for the triptych Protect from all Elements, it concurrently calls upon elements of both harmony and struggle, as a figure pulls a painted sky backdrop to shroud a coffin-like structure containing tilled earth.
The exhibition has positioned Mitchell, who has become an established name in the U.S., to break out in London. He will be one of the central artists in Sargent’s exhibition “The New Black Vanguard,” at Saatchi Gallery, and later this week will debut new works in Regent Park as ”the first contemporary artist to be commissioned by Frieze Masters,” according to Sargent. Along with curating a night of art and cinema at the V&A, these elements well set the stage for what Sargent calls the “London takeover of one of the defining photographers of his generation.”
“Tyler Mitchell: Chrysalis” is on view through November 12 at Gagosian Davies Street, London.
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