Eliana Willis

For the first time in nearly 100 years, Sarah Biffin, a Victorian painter who achieved artistic greatness despite being born without arms or legs, is the subject of a solo show, at London’s Philip Mould and Company.
“Sarah Biffin really was the most extraordinarily inspirational figure,” Mould said in a video promoting the show. “She overcame such challenges—her rural background in Somerset, the fact that she was a woman artist in an age dominated by men, and those extreme physical challenges. That she transcended to become a luminary in her profession, in this respect Sarah Biffin can be seen at the very forefront of female independence of the period.”
Born with a rare congenital anomaly called phocomelia, Biffin overcame her lack of limbs by learning to perform many tasks—including writing, painting, and sewing—with her mouth.
With few other opportunities available to a young woman with disabilities from rural Somerset, Biffin joined the circus, where she became known as “The Limbless Wonder.”

Her artistic talents were so great, however, that George Douglas, the 16th Earl of Morton, became her patron. (First, he sat for a portrait and stored it in between sittings to ensure no one else was responsible for the work.) The Earl arranged for Biffin to take lessons under the Royal Academician William Marshall Craig, at a time when women were not yet permitted to study at the London academy.
“Craig was recognized as an exacting draftsman on a small scale that suited her technique,” Mould said. “The impact of Craig upon Sarah Biffin was clearly profound. I mean, if you compare a self-portrait she did in 1812 with one done five or 10 years later… the distinction is so marked.”
Frances Cooper, Sarah Biffin at Bury Fair (1810). Collection of the South West Heritage Trust and Somerset County Council.
The exhibition includes nearly every known self-portrait of the artist, including one that recently achieved significant success at auction, when it went for the record price of £137,500 ($180,125) at Sotheby’s, London in December 2019. The result was remarkable considering its high estimate was just £1,800 ($2,360) and her previous auction record, unbroken for a decade, was just £2,040 ($3,383), according to the Artnet Price Database.
Philip Mould director Lawrence Hendra is said to have been an underbidder at the sale—no word on whether the gallery has since purchased the work, or if it is once again on the market in the current show.
Sarah Biffin, Young girl, standing, wearing a white dress (ca. 1812). Collection of the South West Heritage Trust and Somerset County Council.
But it was that sale that sparked the gallery’s interest in Biffin’s work, planting the initial seed for the current exhibition. The formal planning for the show began nearly two years ago, and involved securing loans both from private collections—including works that have never been published or publicly exhibited before—and institutions, where most pieces were not on view.
The gallery also enlisted the contemporary painter, Alison Lapper, who was born with the same condition as Biffin, to serve as as advisor on the exhibition.
Sarah Biffin, Self Portrait (ca. 1825). Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
“She seemed to transcend her disability and almost convince people that this wasn’t what it was all about,” Lapper told the Financial Times. “I’m still struggling now to break through the same barriers Biffin faced.”
In the course of research, Philip Mould and Company was able to track down many lost works after realizing that for some 20 years, Biffin painted under the name Mrs. Wright—her husband’s name. (The circumstances of the marriage are still being researched, but the gallery told the Guardian that its initial findings indicate that Wright was a fraudster, and may have absconded with his wife’s life savings.)
Sarah Biffin, Sarah Biffin Self Portrait Before Her Easel (ca. 1821). The watercolor on ivory sold for £137,500 ($180,125) on a high estimate of £1,800 ($2,360). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s, London.
A tireless and ambitious businesswoman, Biffin worked hard to promote herself, placing notices in newspapers, signing her works “without hands” to call attention to her unusual skill, and creating self portraits that advertised her abilities as a painter by surrounding herself with her wares and the tools of her trade.
“She was so canny and so commercially minded in a way that I don’t think women of the period are often really given credit for,” said Ellie Smith, a researcher at the gallery.
Self-portrait Sarah Biffin, Forget-me-not (1847). Courtesy of Philip Mould and Company.
Biffin’s clientele included royal and noble figures: King George III even appointed her as the miniature painter to his second daughter, Princess Augusta Sophia. And she was even immortalized in fiction, receiving several mentions in novels by Charles Dickens.
In addition to her prowess in portraiture, Biffin was also known for her hyperrealistic feather still-life paintings. The show includes her second-most expensive work at auction, Study of Feathers (1812). In July 2021, the watercolor sold for £65,520 ($90,335), crushing the £6,000 ($8,272) high estimate. (No word if Mould was the winning bidder that time around.)
Sarah Biffin, Study of Feathers (1812). The watercolor sold for £65,520 ($90,335), on a high estimate of £6,000 ($8,272). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s, London.
But regardless of market interest, the gallery believes that Biffin is artistically worthy of the renewed attention her oeuvre is attracting.
“This work is hugely accomplished. There is a fineness of detail, a quality of characterization,” Mould said. “This is exactly the sort of miniature that could hold its own in a highly competitive and crowded market of distinguished miniature painters.”
“Without Hands: The Art of Sarah Biffin” is on view at Philip Mould and Company, 18-19 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5LU, U.K., November 1–December 21, 2022. 

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The tourist arrives at an iconic attraction, turns their back, and snaps a selfie. It’s a behavior that’s preoccupied larger-than-life photographer JR for years. In 2016, he disappeared the Louvre’s glass pyramid using a giant anamorphosis lowered from a crane. At the Eiffel Tower, he did something similar. Now, at the Giza pyramid complex, the Frenchman is making the visitor selfie redundant altogether.
In the foreground of the Egyptian monuments, JR has installed his own pyramid: it’s a black-and-white photo booth where passersby are invited to enter and have their portrait taken. These images are turned into five meter (16 feet) posters and pasted onto billboards backed by the pyramids. “The participant[s],” JR’s press release states, “become co-creators, collaborators, and protagonists in the long artistic history of this site.”
It’s the second year in a row JR has created work at Giza and this latest installation forms part of Forever is Now, a festival organized by contemporary art promoters Art D’Egypte that spans the month of November. In its second edition, the event has invited 10 international artists, including sculptor Lorenzo Quinnto and Egyptian painter Moataz Nasr, to install large-scale pieces around the perimeter of a site that attracts 14 million visitors annually.
“It is a site of global influence,” Art D’Egypte founder Nadine Abdel-Ghaffar said. “We work to revitalize the glory of ancient civilizations with public art and contemporary significance, linking the old and the new, the past and the future through artwork.”
Meta’s AR filters created for Forever is Now. Photo courtesy of Meta.
This year’s art also has a technological bent with the festival’s organizers partnering with Meta to launch 11 augmented reality (AR) filters on Instagram. Guided by a digital Bastet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of the home and fertility, users explore the backstory of each installation through on-screen illustrations, images, and videos.
“Through the AR capabilities we are introducing at the exhibition, we want to merge ancient cultural and artistic heritage with immersive technologies to elevate our communities’ experience on site and online,” said Fares Akkad, Meta’s MENA Regional Director, on the subject of Meta’s first XR investment in Egypt.
In 2021, Meta announced a $50-million fund to invest in metaverse-related projects around the world; Arte D’Egypte is one of more than 20 organizations with which it has established agreements.
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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. 
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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.
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