Eliana Willis

“Desert Rider” at the Phoenix Art Museum is a trip.
The show focuses on car culture and skateboard culture in the American Southwest—specifically how it has been a resource and inspiration for both Latinx and Indigenous artists. The many sculptures within capture the exuberance of lowrider style, its concept of customization as a creative outlet, and its grassroots displays of identity.
“I hope guests see the impact that local culture has had on artists working in the Southwest and appreciate this piece of history from the land in which they were born,” curator Gilbert Vicario said in a statement about the show.
Among the highlights are Justin Favela’s Gypsy Rose Piñata (II), a full-scale sculpture of a hot-pink lowrider in the style of a piñata, newly commissioned for “Desert Rider.” Douglas Miles’s installation You’re Skating on Native Land (2022) features skate decks bearing the titular phrase alongside photos from his Apache community—the Phoenix New Times called it “a stunning reminder of place.”
And one of the works visitors will surely remember is Liz Cohen’s well-known project Trabantimino (2002–10). Cohen spent eight years merging two incongruously different vehicles—an East German Trabant and a Chevy El Camino—into one car, then transforming herself for the role of a car model for a series of set-up photos.
See photos from “Desert Rider” below.
Installation view of “Desert Rider,” Phoenix Art Museum, 2022. Courtesy of the Phoenix Art Museum. Photo: Airi Katsuta.
Justin Favela, Seven Magic Tires (Phoenix) (2022). Courtesy of the Phoenix Art Museum, Photo: Airi Katsuta.
Jose Villalobos, QueeRiders (2022). Courtesy of the Phoenix Art Museum. Photo: Airi Katsuta.
Margarita Cabrera, Agua que no has de beber dejala correr (Water That You Should Not Drink, Let It Run) (2006–22). Collection of the artist and courtesy of Tally Dunn Gallery, Dallas.
Detail of Margarita Cabrera, Agua que no has de beber dejala correr (Water That You Should Not Drink, Let It Run) (2006–22). Collection of the artist and courtesy of Tally Dunn Gallery, Dallas.
Installation view of Douglas Miles, You’re Skating on Native Land (2022). Courtesy of the artist and the Phoenix Art Museum. Photo: Airi Katsuta.
Detail of Douglas Miles, You’re Skating on Native Land (2022). Courtesy of the artist and the Phoenix Art Museum. Photo: Airi Katsuta.
Installation view of Liz Cohen, Trabantimino (2002–10). Courtesy of the Phoenix Art Museum. Photo: Airi Katsuta.
Installation view of Liz Cohen, Trabantimino (2002–10). Courtesy of the Phoenix Art Museum. Photo: Airi Katsuta.
Liz Cohen, Lowrider Builder and Child (2012). Courtesy of the artist.
Liz Cohen, Gloria Garcetti (2018). Courtesy of the artist.
Carlotta Boettcher, Cars in the New Mexico Landscape – 50s Chevy with Tree (1996–98). Collection of the artist. © Carlotta Boettcher.
“Desert Rider” is on view at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Ariz., through September 18, 2022.
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One Sunday circa 1965, while strolling along the Sangone river in his hometown of Turin, Italy, the artist Piero Gilardi stumbled upon something all too ordinary that would inspire an extraordinary new direction in his practice: a pile of trash. This was just a few years after the publication Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but a few decades before “sustainability” became a global buzzword—and the resulting series of works was nothing short of radical.
Believing that “art is life,” Gilardi hoped to catalyze a cultural “re-enchantment” with nature in its ideal, unspoiled state. For his Tappeto-Natura, or “Nature-Carpets,” the artist used intaglio carving techniques to sculpt scenes of sunflowers in bloom, ripening papaya and pitaya, and pristine seascapes into highly pigmented, high-pile rolls of polyurethane foam. They were, he explained, “aesthetic objects of practical use,” collapsing the boundaries between nature and the man-made, outdoors and indoors, art and design.
A 1967 exhibition of Gilardi’s Tappeti-Natura, or “Nature-Carpets,” at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris. Courtesy of the artist.
Gilardi first exhibited his “Nature-Carpets” in 1967 at avant-garde galleries of the era, such as New York’s Fischbach and Paris’s Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, as well as alternative spaces like Turin’s Piper Club, where he hung them on the walls as a backdrop for experimental performances featuring his Vestiti-Natura (that would be “Nature-Clothing”). In the 1980s, Italian gallerist and art collector Margherita Stein adorned her Turin home-gallery with a Gilardi rug that looked like a riverbed.
Now, the artist’s carpets and clothing are on display together at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, New York, as the subject of “Gilardi: Tappeto-Natura” (through January 9, 2023). While Gilardi is known as a protagonist of the Arte Povera movement and as a founder of the International Association Ars Technica, as well as Turin’s Parco Arte Vivente (PAV), an experimental center for contemporary art in nature, this is his solo debut in the U.S.
Gilardi’s “stone” and “birch” dresses, on display at Magazzino. Photo: MARCO ANELLI/TOMMASO SACCONI ©
Gilardi has long aimed to remove the “frame of artistic representation.” At Magazzino, you’ll find 29 works of his sculpted flora covering walls and floors without frames. To celebrate the opening, dancers from the local Cold Spring Dance Company engaged with the carpets while activating the artist’s stone-like Vestito-Natura (Sassi), one of his two wearable “Nature-Dresses” on display.
Anyone is welcome to sit on Gilardi’s rock-shaped cushions in the lobby, even play catch with them, nodding to early exhibitions where visitors were invited to walk atop and lie down on his rug creations. As curator Elena Re said in a statement, “Overcoming the aesthetic dimension of the product, the art called its audience into play, or, better, people became a lasting part of the artistic process.”
Below, see close-ups of Gilardi’s nature carpets on display at Magazzino.
Piero Gilardi, Papaya e pitaja (2018). © Piero Gilardi. Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, Cold Spring, New York. Photo: Marco Anelli.
Piero Gilardi, Cavoli sotto la neve (1974). © Piero Gilardi. Collection of Galleria Girardi, Livorno.
Piero Gilardi, Greto di torrente (1967). © Piero Gilardi. Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Piero Gilardi, Mare, 1967. © Piero Gilardi Collection of of Galleria Girardi, Livorno.
Piero Gilardi, Girasoli caduti (1967). © Piero Gilardi Private Collection. Photo: Cristina Leoncini.
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Isaac Julien has a history of working with the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance. So it makes sense that his latest commission, for Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, circled back on writer, philosopher, and “father” of the Harlem Renaissance Alain Locke.
Locke and Albert Barnes had a history. The collector was one of the first in the United States to collect and show African Art, amassing a collection that Locke, the first African-American Rhodes Scholar, visited and photographed. But their relationship soured: they had clashing interpretations of African art, and Barnes accused Locke of stealing his ideas.
Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022), Julien’s five-channel film about Locke, is installed among items from Barnes’s collection of African sculpture and works by Richmond Barthé and Matthew Angelo Harrison. The work takes many positions, using texts by Bell Hooks alongside writings, performed by actors, by Barnes and Locke.
Julien also shows a black female curator walking through the Pitt Rivers museum today and an imagined interaction between Locke and artist Richmond Barthé. Shot against the backdrop of the collection, this beautiful film takes us on a journey as nuanced and varied as the debates it touches upon.
On the occasion of the show, we spoke with Julien about the work, how it connect to old and new debates, and the artist’s thoughts on restitution.
Isaac Julien: Once Again … (Statues Never Die), (2022) The Barnes Foundation, installation view. Image courtesy Isaac Julien and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. Photo by Henrik Kam.
You have a history of working with the Harlem Renaissance. What about it speaks to you?
Well, you could say this work is almost like a prequel to Looking for Langston (1989), which, of course, was a film very much looking at the Harlem Renaissance. I look back to that period—the late ’80s—because that was when I first met artists like Glenn Ligon and curators like Thelma Golden, art critics like Kenny Jones and Dawoud Bey, the photographer. There was a real synergy taking place.
Paul Gilroy had just written The Black Atlantic or was about to finish it, but I had been able to read some of his early chapters, which was pretty much an entrance to my conceptual thinking about Black art movements. I wasn’t taught about Black Modernism in its American variants, with movements like the Harlem Renaissance, when I was at art school. These had been absences in my art history lessons at St. Martin’s School of Art. But also, there was the question of themes around sexuality and desire, which were also very centrally located in the Harlem Renaissance.
Looking for Langston was also made during the AIDS crisis. So that’s a kind of echo, in terms of making Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022) during the COVID crisis, in the middle of another pandemic and thinking about questions of mortality.
Do you think these ideas have become part of wider thinking?
These debates are seen as new today, but they’re actually not new. They’ve just been articulated separately by different generations.
That’s one of the reasons why in Once Again… (Statues Never Die) there’s this scenario where we have young African artists or students examining African sculptures. That is taken from a film that was made in 1970 called You Hide Me by Nii Kwate Owoo. It was made 50 years ago, and is all about questions of restitution, which we’re debating today.
Isaac Julien: Once Again … (Statues Never Die), (2022) The Barnes Foundation, installation view. Image courtesy Isaac Julien and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. Photo by Henrik Kam.
What made you want to make a film specifically about Alain Locke?
When I got the commission, I thought the thing about Barnes is that he has an omnipresence. There’s a way in which his fixed gaze, or the way that he wants to control how people look at works, is something Locke was unpicking. I saw Locke’s point of view as important, and it would also connect to earlier explorations of Locke in Looking for Langston. I think the piece of work is, in a way, utilizing the commission to think about Locke as someone who could be turned to.
In addition to making this, I would look at the collection not from Barnes’s view, but more from Locke’s point of view. But then, of course, developing the work, I do realize that both these points of views are in a way from the West, and that’s where I began to develop the Black curator’s voice in the piece, because I felt we needed to have someone who had a completely different relationship to those objects.
Isaac Julien: Once Again … (Statues Never Die), (2022) The Barnes Foundation, installation view. Image courtesy Isaac Julien and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. Photo by Henrik Kam.
Why do you think engagement with the Harlem Renaissance and the Black intellectuals of that time is so popular at the moment?
People have framed it as a paradise of decolonial thinking, and I’m not quite sure what that means. So I am a bit hesitant to use it in terms of my own work. But I think maybe that’s because I was involved in [that] debate. For example, I made a film on Frantz Fanon called Black Skin, White Masks in the mid ’90s with my partner Mark Nash. It’s a debate, which I don’t see as unfinished, between the post-colonial and the decolonial. I think I can see generationally how one wants them to mark a particular moment. But it feels that we’re still in the throes of the unfinished business of these moments and conversations, which constitute a kind of reckoning. We’ve seen various forms of existential crises and political upheavals, cultural debates and controversies that can all change around these different questions around nationalism, race, and culture. It is a contentious time.
Isaac Julien: Once Again … (Statues Never Die), (2022) The Barnes Foundation, installation view. Image courtesy Isaac Julien and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. Photo by Henrik Kam.
What do you feel when looking at Barnes’s collection of African art?
I see lots of things. I think it’s an amazing collection, an astonishing collection. Obviously, I can see the kind of kleptomania Barnes was involved in. I think Barnes, in the end, wanted to amass a statement. He came from a working-class background, was an outsider to Philadelphia white bourgeois society, and left the majority control of the foundation’s board to a Black college, Lincoln University. All these things have now manifested over time as something very controversial.
It’s great to be able to have some of the African works displayed in the actual gallery, and to have this kind of seance between the objects and sculptures. There’s a kind of dialectic that takes place and I think it’d be interesting one day if there could be the possibility for the works to be moved, and the display to be altered. I think the creators in the Barnes Museum should be free to make interpretations of that collection.
Isaac Julien: Once Again … (Statues Never Die), (2022) The Barnes Foundation, installation view. Image courtesy Isaac Julien and Victoria Miro, London/Venice. Photo by Henrik Kam.
What is your view on active collections of historical African art and artifacts today?
These debates have been taking place for a long time. The only thing new is the difference in contexts. You have the beginnings of the repatriation of objects taken under violent conditions, and I think that’s good. Ultimately, that needs to happen.
Correction, 8/19/22: An earlier iteration of this article and its headline suggested that Alain Locke was the curator of Albert Barnes’s collection. This is not the case. The article also erroneously stated that a Black character in Julien’s film visits the Barnes Foundation. In fact, it is the Pitt Rivers museum. We apologize for the errors.
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In what is being billed as the largest M.C. Escher exhibition ever, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is presenting more than 400 works by the beloved graphic artist, providing a fresh look to an artist who was once called a “one-man art movement.”
Born Maurits Cornelis Escher in the Netherlands in 1898, Escher would come to define a 1960s aesthetics inspired by psychedelic culture known for creating “mental images” that drew on mathematics, physics, and various branches of science and architecture.
The exhibition contains a survey of the artist’s most well known works, including an impressive array of prints, drawings, watercolors, printed fabrics, constructed objects, wood and linoleum blocks, lithographic stones, and sketchbooks.
The bulk of the material is on loan from the private collection of Michael S. Sachs, a former clinical psychologist based in Connecticut, who acquired 90 percent of Escher’s oeuvre from the artist’s estate in 1980 for about $1 million. Now 84, Sachs said he has “sold about half” of the original collection, with the Art Newspaper reporting earlier this year that together with Jan Vermeulen, Escher’s business advisor and executor, the two had begun selling Escher prints as early as the 1970s.
M.C. Escher, Symmetry No. 62 (1944). ©The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands; courtesy of Michael S. Sachs.
Today, prints of Escher’s works continue to adorn dorm rooms from Toronto to Tbilisi, with Escher’s unique and original style borrowing elements from both Op-Art and Surrealism, and forging them into meticulous dreamlike creations distinctly his own.
The artist eluded easy categorization by crafting a career as an illusionist who instead intended to re-make the rules of a three-dimensional vanishing point on a two-dimensional surface. The result is a riveting rabbit hole for the senses, as astonishing trompe l’oeil that attempts to deceive not only the eye, but also the mind. 
Perhaps most well known for his series “Impossible Constructions,” which include the paradoxical staircases of Ascending and Descending (1960), also included in the show are examples from his “Transformation Prints” series, which include Metamorphosis I, Metamorphosis II, and Metamorphosis III (1939-1968), and depict animals and shapes gradually transforming into one another. 
The exhibition in Houston is organized both chronologically and thematically, and because this is 2022, and immersive Van Gogh-esque touring installations are basically the art-world equivalent of off-Broadway now, the exhibition includes several interactive auxiliary rooms where visitors may play with optical illusions inspired by Escher.
“By spanning Escher’s entire career, this extraordinary exhibition explores Escher’s detailed thought process,” the exhibition’s curator, Dena M. Woodall, said in a release. “It reveals, in a way, the magic behind the final prints, with the inclusion of preparatory drawings and progressive printing proofs as evidence of his working process.”
“Virtual Realities” is on view at MFAH through September 5. See images of the exhibition below.
M.C. Escher, “Virtual Realities,” exhibition view, courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2022.
M.C. Escher, “Virtual Realities,” exhibition view, courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2022.
M.C. Escher, Sky and Water. ©The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands; courtesy of Michael S. Sachs.
M.C Escher, Relativity (1953). ©The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands; courtesy of Michael S. Sachs.
M.C. Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935). ©The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands; courtesy of Michael S. Sachs.
M.C. Escher, Drawing Hands (1948). ©The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands; courtesy of Michael S. Sachs.
M.C. Escher, Castrovalva (1930), ©The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands; courtesy of Michael S. Sachs.
M.C. Escher, Day and Night (1938). ©The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands; courtesy of Michael S. Sachs.
M.C. Escher, Reptiles (1943), ©The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands; courtesy of Michael S. Sachs.
M.C. Escher, Virtual Realities, exhibition view, courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2022.

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For generations, art historians believed Johannes Vermeer was a perfectionist who worked very slowly—a theory supported by his precisely placed brush strokes and relatively limited career output. But in examining one of the painter’s masterpieces, researchers at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C., found that may not have actually been the case. 
Underneath Woman Holding a Balance, Vermeer’s classic canvas dated from around 1664, are layers of spontaneous brushstrokes, chemical imaging has exposed.
That is just one of the revelations at the heart of a new exhibition that foregrounds the work of conservationists, an effort to show viewers “what makes a Vermeer a Vermeer.”
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Flute (c. 1665-75). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.
“Vermeer’s Secrets,” as the exhibition is called, includes four paintings by or attributed to the Dutch master, all owned by the NGA. The show opens in October and runs through January 8, 2023, at which point the artworks will head to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam for a rare—retrospective.
Capitalizing on the pandemic-induced closures of 2020 and 2021, researchers at the NGA conducted advanced technical studies on the four Vermeer paintings, which otherwise remain on near-permanent display. At the forefront of their work was a particular goal: to determine the authenticity of one canvas—Girl with a Flute (c. 1665-75)—that has historically divided Vermeer experts. 
The expert’s final assessment of this painting will be announced “ahead of the exhibition’s opening,” the museum said. (The fact that the painting is slated for inclusion in the Rijksmuseum exhibition could be a clue as to which side of the authenticity debate the NGA is leaning, the Art Newspaper pointed out.) 
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Red Hat (c. 1666-67). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.
The legitimacy of another Vermeer-attributed painting, Girl with a Red Hat (c. 1666-67), has similarly been debated by experts. But NGA conservationists discovered a key to the artwork’s past that may provide clarity. 
Using hyperspectral reflectance imaging techniques, researchers found an unfinished portrait of a man with a wide-brimmed hat underneath the canvas’s surface, suggesting that the artist remodeled his original subject into the eponymous one we now see. If the painting was indeed done by Vermeer, this strategy would prove doubly interesting as the artist often preferred to depict women over men. 
“‘Vermeer’s Secrets’ encourages visitors to play the role of art detective, inviting them to join our art historians, conservators, and scientists in studying the works and learning what stories paintings tell about the hand that made them,” NGA director Kaywin Feldman said in a statement. 
“The National Gallery’s paintings by Johannes Vermeer are some of the jewels of our collection,” Feldman went on, “and thanks to this talented team of collaborators and their cutting-edge research, we have a greater understanding of this Dutch master and his process.”
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