Eliana Willis

A couple of years ago, Egyptian archaeologists excavating a necropolis south of Cairo discovered a papyrus marked with ancient Greek. Analysis eventually showed it bore Euripides’s Ino and Polyidos, two lost works, previously known only by hazy plot summaries and quoted snippets. Of the 5th-century B.C.E. playwright’s estimated 90 works only 19 survive, making the discovery among the most considerable contributions to Greek literature in half a century.
The achievement will be dwarfed if progress continues to be made on the Herculaneum scrolls, a collection of 1,800 texts that were carbonized into lumps by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in in 79 C.E. It’s a potential gold mine of writings currently absent from the classical canon and a Silicon Valley-backed competition is pushing machine learning and computer vision enthusiasts to train their focus on virtually unwrapping the texts.
The thrill, in both cases, is of a past rendered ever-so-slightly richer by the discovery of things believed lost. But what of the countless other lost, disappeared, and abandoned books? What might literature (and the world perhaps) be like if it included Homer’s lost comedy Margites or the Bible still contained the Book of the Battles of Yahweh? What might it be like to stand in a room of these books? These are among the historical counterfactuals explored in an upcoming exhibition at New York’s Grolier Club, America’s oldest society for bibliophiles.
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron. Byron’s Memoirs. Unpublished manuscript. Photo: Reid Byers/Grolier Club.
Set to run from December through February 2025, club member Reid Byers has been handed the curatorial keys for “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books.” It’s the grand extension of a thought experiment Byers has been toying with for some time and arrives courtesy of thorough collaborations with printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers.
Byers has given life to more than 100 books and will spread them around the Grolier’s cozy second floor gallery. It is, the organizers admit, part conceptual art project and part literary indulgence. Visitors are asked to judge works entirely by their covers and, in so doing, dream up the stories and characters that these the unknowable books might hold inside. In turn, we find ourselves considering the first words and keystrokes for the books we know and love.
Abdul Al-Hazred, Necronomicon. In Vinegia: Appresso Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari et Fratelli, 1541. Anthropegal grimoire. Photo: Reid Byers/Grolier Club.
“An encounter with an imaginary book brings us forcibly to a liminal moment, confronted with an object that we know does not exist, but then it leaves us suspended in this strange space,” Byers said in a statement. “Every book in the world was an imaginary book when it was first begun to be written.”
Byers has devised three broad criteria for “Imaginary Books.” The first, Lost Books, counts among its number William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, the vanished complement to Love’s Labour’s Lost; Ernest Hemmingway’s first novel that was stolen from his wife (along with its carbon copies) in Paris; and Lord Byron’s tell-all memoir that was deemed worthy of burning by his publisher in 1824.
Sylvia Plath, Double Exposure (1962). London: Heineman, 1964. Manuscript disappeared c. 1970. Photo courtesy of the Grolier Club.
The second, Unfinished Books, presents works that were started but never finished or published. This includes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium inspired reverie Kubla Khan, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical Double Exposure that Ted Hughes allegedly prevented being published, and Raymond Chandler’s Shakespeare in Baby Talk.
Last are Byers’ Fictive Books, which emerge from the pages of fiction to find physical form at the Grolier Club. Chief among which is The Necronomicon the toxic, forbidden tome from H.P. Lovecraft’s writings. As is canon, it appeared locked away in a heavy-set safe. You can look and speculate but, as Byers said, “the book is not to be touched.” More

Mary Sully (1896–1963) is enjoying, perhaps, the most unlikely museum solo show debut in all of art history. A self-taught, 20th-century Dakota Sioux woman artist whose entire life’s work sat forgotten in the family home for decades, Sully is now the subject of a fascinating posthumous exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently acquired a suite of 19 of her works.
“This is a reclamation project,” Sylvia Yount, the Met’s American wing curator, said in a tour of the show, which also included 10 works on loan from the Mary Sully Foundation. “We are inserting Mary Sully into the canon of American art.”
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” follows the 2019 book Becoming Mary Sully, by Sully’s grandnephew, Phillip J. Deloria, a historian and Harvard professor who inherited the artist’s work, packed away in a suitcase under the stairs. Miraculously, he not only recognized its worth, but made it his mission to ensure that others did as well.
“Nobody ever took her seriously as an artist—no one in the family. They thought she was the crazy woman who just doodled up in her room,” Deloria said. “I think of her as the Indian Emily Dickinson.”
Mary Sully, Babe Ruth (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
Drawn on paper from the late 1920s to the early ’40s, Sully’s multi-panel compositions feature carefully composed, often symmetrical designs that employ pattern and geometry. The top panel is typically the most figurative, with Modernist-inspired abstractions of this imagery in the center page, and more overtly Native American designs on the bottom sheet.
Many of these kaleidoscopic colored pencil works, of which roughly 200 are known to exist, were what the artist called “personality prints,” inspired by the celebrities of the day, from Gertrude Stein to Babe Ruth to Fiorello La Guardia. Upon close examination, each one contains figurative elements that relate to their subject’s life, like a baseball diamond for Ruth—although the imagery, while beautiful, can be hard to parse.
Mary Sully, JT (Julia) (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
That these pieces are now in the collection of the nation’s foremost art institution, which is showing no less than 25 of her drawings, would have been a dream come true for Sully.
Suffering from social anxiety and mental illness that was never formally diagnosed, she had struggled to find her way as an adult, with an unsuccessful stint as a shop owner after failing to complete her college education. Sully lived with and relied financially on her sister, Ella Deloria, an ethnographer who, like Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, trained under the noted anthropologist Franz Boas.
Though the family may not have appreciated them, her drawings were something that Sully excelled at, and gave purpose and meaning to her life.
Mary Sully, Fiorello La Guardia (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of the Mary Sully Foundation, 2023.
“Her being isolated in her room, spending hours—years really—drawing, that’s actually now something that’s really encouraged in regards to self-care,” Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Met’s associate curator of Native American art, said. “Now we have all the adult coloring books for people.”
Sully took up her art with a unique vision, exacting detail, and a determined dedication, creating her own personal style and visual language. She was informed both by her Native heritage—techniques such as quillwork, beadwork, and quilting—and the prevailing trends of the day, including commercial design and fashion, as well as mainstream pop culture.
In this, Sully was unique among other Indigenous artists working at the time, who typically hewed more closely to traditional Native subject matter.
Mary Sully, Eugene Field (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
Despite her lack of formal training, Sully saw art as her birthright. Her great-grandfather was Thomas Sully (1783–1872), one of the most famous and successful early American painters.
Thomas Sully’s son, Alfred Sully (1820–1879), was also an artist—as well as a military man, rising to the level of a brigadier general in the Army. Alfred’s service brought him out West, where he commanded U.S. forces in the 1863 Whitestone Hill Massacre, killing as many as 300 Native Americans.
But before that, he had an intimate relationship with a Dakota woman named Susan Pehandutawin, who gave him a pair of beaded moccasins that he sent back East—and, more importantly, bore him a daughter, also named Mary Sully.
It’s not clear if Alfred ever knew Pehandutawin had given birth to his child, but his daughter and grandchildren knew the artistic lineage from which they were descended. And when Sully began making her art, she eschewed her birth name, Susan Mabel Deloria, in favor of her mother’s name, which reflected this ancestry.
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Paul Lachenauer, ©the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York.
Just as Thomas Sully painted portraits of the leading citizens of Early America, his great-granddaughter looked to celebrities—some of whom have long since been consigned to obscurity—for inspiration. Her “Personality Prints,” Deloria said, “are really a portrait of America in the 1930s,” and reflect the artist’s engagement with literature, theater, and popular music.
Sully was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, but spent her life between two worlds, Native and non-Native. Her father, Philip J. Deloria, was a leader of the Sioux Episcopal Church. Ella Deloria’s work took the sisters across the country, with Sully serving as driver, and the sisters even lived for a time in New York.
But in her only brush with fame, as the subject of one of Paramount Pictures’s “Unusual Occupations” shorts in 1944, Sully was exoticized. Shooting her drawing in the desert in a stereotypical “Indian Princess” outfit, the film identifies her as a member of New Mexico’s Zuni tribe.
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Paul Lachenauer, ©the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York.
“Obviously cultural and historical accuracy were not of concern. There was more for entertainment value,” Marroquin Norby, who is herself a Purépecha Indian woman, said of the footage, which is included in the show. “It’s just such a quirky, fun video.”
Some of Sully’s drawings delve into the complex question of Native American identity, like the Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present, and Indian Church.
The former wrestles with the sad trajectory of Native life under colonial rule, her people shown trod beneath the foot of the white man and forced off their land into reservations. (Sully conveys this masterfully in four vertical layers.) The latter depicts a Native congregation gathered before an altar in front of the cross, but inside a tipi, illustrating the ways in which Indigenous communities blended their own traditions with settler culture.
Mary Sully, Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present (ca. 1920s–40s). Courtesy of the Mary Sully Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Despite some efforts to attract collectors, Sully never sold her work. And she appears to have only exhibited three times, at two Indian schools and at the Milwaukee Women’s Club. But Deloria’s book opened new doors for the late artist, as scholars and academics began to discover her extraordinary art.
In 2019, a trio of Sully’s works appeared in “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” which opened at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), and traveled to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville; the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. (The Met show was originally going to be organized in partnership with Mia, which has also acquired several Sully drawings; instead, a separate exhibition will open there in March.)
Mary Sully, Indian Church, top panel (ca. 1920s–40s). Courtesy of the Mary Sully Foundation.
At the Met, the drawings are shown exactly as Sully intended—thankfully, they were carefully packed away in neat groups, still with the tape she used to present them as vertical triptychs during her lifetime. Otherwise, it might have been quite a challenge to match the corresponding panels together.
“When my wife and I saw them on the wall, we just kind of burst into tears,” Deloria recalled. “To see Mary Sully’s works now hung on the walls of major museums, it’s just this amazing thing. But she’s wholly and completely deserving of it.”
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, July 18, 2024–January 12, 2025. More

With a record number of countries holding elections in 2024—including the U.S., where Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are battling it out for the White House this week—the future of democracy feels more at stake than ever. At the National Gallery of Greece in Athens, the so-called birthplace of democracy, a sweeping show looks at the history of the government system that is meant to bring power to the people. It is also a roadmap for navigating our present political moment.
Staged to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the restoration of democracy in Greece, “Democracy” is an ambitious exhibition that is billed as the first to examine how artists captured the quest for democratic rule in Greece, Spain, and Portugal during the 1960s and ’70s. The result of two years of research by Syrago Tsiara, the curator and director of the National Gallery of Greece, the show highlights 140 works by 55 artists. But it is more than just a historical exhibition looking into the evolution of political art, according to Tsiara.
Installation view of “Democracy,” “Facing the Enemy” chapter, featuring Yannis Gaitis’s sculpture Five or Six. Photo credit Stavros Psiroukis © National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum.
Instead, the exhibition “helps us to realize, understand, and decode the experiences that we live in nowadays [so that] we can become critical citizens and critical thinkers,” she said, noting that extremist voices have been on the rise around the world while voter turnout in many countries has declined amid the public’s growing skepticism of institutional credibility. “[This show] serves as a poignant reminder of the ongoing need to defend democracy.”
Another mission of the exhibition and her role, noted Tsiara, is to propagate what is known as “sentimental education,” a term some literature aficionados might recognize from Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel of the same name. The phrase refers to developing a refined understanding of emotions, ethics, and aesthetics—an “education of the heart” that goes beyond emotional intelligence.
Giorgos Ioannou, Protest at the polytechnic … Athens 17/11/73 B (1973). Photo: Thanos Kartsoglou/Giorgos Ioannou Collection Archive.
For Tsiara, it’s about cultivating a deeper, more nuanced way of seeing and valuing the world so that we can see ourselves and our current struggles as part of something larger. “Sentiments have history, too,” she explained. “The way they have been expressed is very interesting for us to explore, because we don’t know how to deal with our feelings, how to express them.”
Many of the works in “Democracy” respond to a specific series of events that transpired between July 20 and July 24 in 1974, when the Turkish invasion of Cyprus led to the fall of the military junta that had placed Greece under dictatorship rule for seven years. Former prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis then ended his self-imposed exile and returned to Athens afterwards, leading the country to transition to democracy. The same year also saw the bloodless coup that ended the 40-year long Estado Novo fascist dictatorship rule in Portugal. Spain also began its transition to democracy the following year after the death of Francisco Franco, the military dictator who ruled the country as a dictator from 1939 to 1975.
Reflecting on this powerful political moment in Europe, the show brings together historical works from institutions such as Spain’s Reina Sofia, Museu d’Art Contemporarni de Barcelona, Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Centro de Estudos Multidisciplinares Ernesto de Sousa, as well as private collections in Greece and Portugal. Together, the artworks map the emergence of artistic movements and art forms utilized by artists to illustrate social upheaval, such as critical realism and abstract art as well as performance and conceptual art.
Giorgos Sikeliotis, Angel Warrior (1976). © National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos MuseumPhoto Credit: Stavros Psiroukis
The exhibition is organized to chart the emotional journey many experienced in the pursuit of civil liberties and democratic rule. These feelings are categorized into four themes: “Facing the Enemy,” “Resistance,” “Uprising,” and “Arousal.” While the joy of being able to gather and express opinions freely following the collapse of the military regime was apparent in the era in the second half of the 1970s, the trauma of dictatorship was still haunting Greek society, a sentiment that was difficult to express, Tsiara noted.
“Facing the Enemy” highlights works that capture the impression of figures representative of the authoritarian regimes, such as Colombian artist Fernando Botero’s depiction of a bloated Franco (1986). Murdering Freedom or The Colonels (1968), a canvas work by Greek artist Yannis Gaitis, depicts a group with nearly identical faces dressed in military uniforms pointing their guns at a pigeon, a symbol of freedom, illustrating not only what the country was going through at the time, but also the mechanism of control and dehumanization under an authoritarian regime. Jannis Psychopedis, also from Greece and a key figure of the critical realism movement, portrayed political figures in his monotone oil canvases.
Fernando Botero, Franco (1986). @Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Photo: Joaquín Cortés / Román Lores.
The “suffering body” plays a part in the subsequent section, “Resistance,” as a metaphor for the dictatorship experience of torture and repression. Wood cut work on paper In Memory of Che Guevara. The Dead (1968) by Greek printmaker Tassos (Anastasios Alevizos), for example, depicts Guevara, the Cuban revolution leader who was executed in 1967.
“Resistance is an attitude,” Tsiara noted. “Here, Guevara is depicted as the body of the dead Christ. The iconography of the church becomes political art, and martyrs of the dictatorship become the new saint.” Photography works capturing the environment of the Athens-born performance artist, Maria Karavela, whose performance exhibitions depicting bodies tormented by teh regime were censored and shut down.
Marios Vatzias, National Technical University of Athens (1975) © National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum. Photo Credit: Stavros Psiroukis
“Uprising” features Revolução, a key video work by Portuguese artist and writer Ana Hatherly who captured the streetscape of Lisbon full of graffiti and posters with a Super 8 camera following the Carnation Revolution, which ended the 50 years of dictatorship in Portugal in 1974. Tsiara said the element of sound plays an important role in not just Hatherly’s work but also in the works chronicling the political struggles throughout this period. The work was first exhibited in Portugal’s participation of Venice Biennale in 1975, a remarkable gesture to illustrate its importance as “a national representation of the country,” she added.
This opposes Marios Vatzias’s complex painting and Manolis Tzobanakis’s sculpture, which reflect on the events 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising, the student-led protest against the Greek military junta that ended up with very different outcome. The crackdown saw the junta’s tank crushing the gate of the campus killing those inside. It also caused the death of 24 civilians outside the campus and hundreds injured. “We have all this anger, all this pain for the lost bodies, the pain for the students and those who lost their lives in the uprising,” the Tsiara said.
Yannis Gaïtis, The Bird (1971). © Irene Panagopoulos. Photo: Thanos Kartsoglou.
The exhibition concludes with “Arousal,” featuring works that deal with the underlying trauma and grief that coexist with the joy of liberties and the reclamation of the lost voice brought by democratization, such as Pop works by Portuguese painter Nikias Skapinakis, and the surrealist drawings of Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego.
This politically-charged exhibition also poses questions about the nature of political art and the artistic value of creative expresses conceived in response to socio-political challenges. So, what makes good political art?
“There is good and bad political art, just like good and bad performance or oil painting,” Tsiara said. “It’s not just about one work or one project. To me, it is important that an artist does not work in isolation, following and searching only for his or her own existential anxieties. Art is a social practice, so it is political.”
“Democracy” runs through February 2, 2025, at the National Gallery of Greece, Athens.  More

Halloween at the Brooklyn Museum, dear reader, is a riot. The museum is a polling place, and when I visited, early voters streamed through, poll workers letting out a round of applause every time a first-time voter cast their ballot. School groups abounded, and education department staffers were reportedly giving school tours upstairs in costumes based on works in the institution’s collection. 
Also in the mix, just a few feet from where the voters stood on line in the lobby, is Trailer (1998–2000), a resonant artwork by American artist Liza Lou that plumbs Hollywood images of crime and violence, toxic masculinity and communal femininity, fine and decorative art, and the American obsession with guns and hunting—all packed into one 35-foot-long 1949 Spartan Royal Mansion mobile trailer. It’s on public view for the first time in a decade.
Liza Lou, Trailer (1998-2000). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. © Liza Lou. Photo: Danny Perez.
Step up into a little space for one person at a time to survey the interior, and you’re transported in the dimly lit black-and-white world, whose interior, save for the quilted fabric black ceiling, is covered with millions of black and white beads, from the linoleum-tiled floor to the top of the (faux?) wood-paneled walls. The compact space is packed with the owner’s possessions. The curtains are all drawn, lending an air of secrecy or even malice.
Whoever it was loved their guns; a shotgun is propped against the wall by the door, while another hangs above the couch. A lamp is propped on a pile of three books: Proud Guns, Shooter’s Bible, and How to Hunt Deer. (The latter two, at least, show up online as real books.) A copy of Guns magazine (“Be a pistol champ”) sits on a coffee table along with a hunting knife, a pack of Marlboros, and a whisky bottle. A pornographic magazine resting on the floor nearby points to much darker territory.
Liza Lou, Trailer (1998-2000). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. © Liza Lou. Photo: Danny Perez.
The piece prompted me to think Lou was ahead of the game in thinking about so-called toxic masculinity, but a quick Google revealed that the term was coined during the men’s movement of the 1980s, and thus likely on the artist’s mind as she conceived the piece. 
Liza Lou, Trailer (1998-2000). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. © Liza Lou. Photo: Danny Perez.
Keep looking around, and you see a typewriter perched on the table in the kitchenette. Next to it is a sheet of paper with the words “Keep your eyes on the road to liberty,” a reference to an unsolved 1937 attempt on the life of Los Angeles District Attorney Buron Fitts. Those words were mailed to Fitts just hours before he was shot at and slightly wounded, possibly connected to a strike at a Douglas Aircraft Factory, according to a March 8 New York Times item. Are we in the home of a would-be assassin?
Liza Lou, Trailer (1998-2000). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. © Liza Lou. Photo: Danny Perez.
A television appears to play just out of sight in the bedroom; we see flashing lights and hear dialogue from what sounds like a classic film noir, where hardened gangsters discuss a numbers-running operation. What’s more, a leg is stretched out on the floor, visible only up to the ankle. A dead body? A woman’s? It inevitably recalls the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East poking out from under Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz. (Perhaps incidentally, the film dates from 1939, just two years after the attempt on Fitts’s life.)
“The work is labor-intensive but also meditative,” said Catherine Futter, the museum’s senior curator of decorative arts, who joined me for a while. “She’s looking at the big issues of life but it’s also internal.” Part of Trailer’s inspiration, she revealed, was not just Hollywood film noir in general but in particular Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), one of the greats of the genre, in which the darkness is leavened by a liberal sprinkling of irony and black humor, which Futter sees in Lou’s piece as well.
Actor Charlton Heston with director and screenwriter Orson Welles on the set of his movie Touch of Evil (1958). Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images.
The obsession with firearms in the piece comes across, Futter pointed out, a bit more nostalgically now than it might have a quarter-century ago. Indeed, the revolvers and shotguns in Trailer, if the piece were done today, might be more likely to be assault-style rifles and automatic weapons. Guns tragically remain the leading cause of death for children and teens, and disproportionately affect people of color, according to a recent report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. 
A group of seventh-graders, polled by this reporter, eagerly posed questions—why did he have so many guns? Is that a dead body?—before sharing their TikTok handles, presumably in hopes of boosting their follower counts. (Can’t knock the hustle!)

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An educational video playing nearby sates visitors’ curiosity with interviews with the artist and conservators who worked on the piece. “What would sexy maleness be?” asks Lou, recounting one of the subjects she felt compelled to address.
Conservators discuss some of the challenges of putting a work on show that had long sat outdoors at the sculpture park created by collectors Sherry and Joel Mallin, who recently donated the piece. Some 10 conservators worked on it for six weeks, cleaning it and removing individual beads that had fallen off in transit or during handling, and clearing up evidence of incursions by mice and squirrels. You’d never guess—inside, the trailer smells fresh and clean. Such a large piece also presented installation challenges; the museum had to remove three of the glass doors on its facade to be able—barely—to fit it inside. 
Liza Lou, Trailer (1998–2000). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. © Liza Lou. Photo: Danny Perez.
Just about a half-hour away via the 2 or 3 subway train is the Whitney Museum of American Art, which owns Lou’s installation Kitchen (1991–96), finished two years before she began work on Trailer. That piece (not on view, alas) could serve as a pendant to this one, depicting a feminine-coded locale, and created not in black and white but in a veritable party of colored beads.
Liza Lou, Kitchen (1991-96). Photo: Tom Powel Imaging. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Where Trailer has revolvers, whisky bottles, and Marlboros, Kitchen has Lay’s potato chips and a six-pack of Budweiser, a box of Tide laundry detergent (“the washing miracle”), Cap’n Crunch, and Frosted Flakes. The wallpaper carries messages of domestic labor like an iron, and a passage from an Emily Dickinson poem that runs “She rose to His Requirement, dropped the playthings of her life to take the honorable work of woman and of wife.” The work, Lou has said, “argues for the dignity of labor,” presumably both of the fictitious woman occupying the beaded kitchen as well as of the artist. 
Liza Lou, Kitchen (1991-96), detail. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.
So if you’re in the city, head to the Brooklyn Museum and spend some time contemplating America, gender, firearms, and all the other dimensions of this rich piece. Or, if you’re anxious because of the heightened drama of our current moment as the voters stream in and out, and you need a more meditative experience, maybe just count the beads, one by one.
“Liza Lou: Trailer” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York. More

“Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak” opened on October 13 at Denver Art Museum, the largest retrospective of the work of the beloved American author and illustrator to date. The exhibition includes over 400 sketches, artworks, storyboards, and paintings by Sendak. Christoph Heinrich, the director of Denver Art Museum, called the large-scale show “a huge logistical undertaking,” telling viewers of a behind-the-scenes video posted on Rocky Mountain PBS YouTube that, “with more than 400 objects it’s very big… probably one of the most objects we’ve ever had in a show.”
Sendak was born in Brooklyn in 1928 to Jewish immigrant parents who had fled political turmoil in Poland. At 19, the young Sendak—almost entirely self-taught—began to illustrate his first books.
Author and illustrator Maurice Sendak standing by an life-size scene from his book Where the Wild Things Are at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. Photo by James Keyser/Getty Images.
Written across an illustrious 65-year career, Sendak is known for his children’s books including Where the Wild Things Are, Nutshell Library, Outside Over There, Alligators All Round, and In the Night Kitchen. He is the world’s most celebrated picture book artist in history, having won the Caldecott Medal and the Hans Christian Andersen Awards for children’s literature and illustration respectively, as well as the National Medal of Arts.
Installation view of the Maurice Sendak retrospective in Denver. Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post.
“Maurice Sendak tells stories of curiosity and courage, adventure and discovery, resilience and a deep understanding of the human desire for connection. He invented a new visual language and approach to figuration with almost every project he embarked on. Growing up in a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland folk stories and handed down traditions shaped his perspective as well as WWII and the Holocaust. This makes his personal perspective and artistic production immensely powerful and timeless.”
Here are four key items from the exhibition which is impressing critics.
Where The Wild Things Are Original Artworks
Original illustration for ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ (1963). Image courtesy of Denver Art Museum. © The Maurice Sendak Foundation.
Denver Art Museum’s Sendak retrospective takes its name after the artist’s most famous work: Where the Wild Things Are. The 1963 book—which has sold more than 19 million copies worldwide—follows the story of Max, a boy who enters a world of wild beasts from his bedroom and is eventually crowned the wildest among them. This original watercolor, ink, and graphite illustration shows Max’s happy descent into the mystical jungle.
Costumes from Sendak’s Theatrical Escapades
Costumes from the 2009 movie of ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ at ‘Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak’ (2024). Image courtesy of Denver Art Museum.
In addition to his books, Sendak worked on projects for theatre. This included designing the sets and writing the libretto for the Where the Wild Things Are opera which was first performed in 1980, set to music by British composer Oliver Knussen. Set designs for the opera are included in the exhibition along with costume designs Sedak created for productions of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker during the 1980s. Costumes from the 2009 live-action, feature-length movie of Where the Wild Things Are also stand among the exhibits at DAM.
Newly-Restored Original ‘Scribbles’
Screengrab taken from Rocky Mountains PBS’ ‘Behind the scenes of Denver Art Museum’s Maurice Sendak ‘Wild Things’ exhibit’.
Heinrich explained in the PBS video that “Sendak kept everything – every piece of paper that he ever scribbled on is part of this amazing legacy”, and DAM Director of Conservation Sarah Melching then shows how she is working to conserve some of these beautiful “scribbles.” We watch as she fixed a tear in tan original illustration for 1962’s Alligators All Around using a wheat starch paste with a mylar spatula. Melching describes Sendak’s habit of listening to Mozart as he created his artwork, and how she has begun to do the same when conserving the artist’s work. References to Sendak’s other musical inspirations, including singer-songwriter Carole King, are noted on the walls of Wild Things.
Artworks by Sedak’s Idols
Install View of ‘Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak’ (2024). Image courtesy of Denver Art Museum.
Also on display are artworks by the creatives who most inspired Sendak, from fellow children’s classics author Beatrix Potter to the 18th century poet and artist William Blake. Work by American cartoonist Winsor McCay, Romantic painter George Stubbs, and animator Walt Disney feature. It was Disney’s 1940 movie ‘Fantasia’ that first inspired a then 12-year old Sendak to become an illustrator.
Images of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ book covers printed in different languages from around the world are on display. Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post.
“Sendak’s art has been meaningful for so many of us and will certainly be for future generations,” said Heinrich. “Wild Things not only offers visitors an opportunity to enjoy his original drawings for these books, but also to explore Sendak’s artistry and the depth and complexity of his exhaustively creative mind.”
Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak is open to view until February 17 2025. More

The annual Forever Is Now exhibition, curated by CulturVator and Art D’Egypte, aims to blur the lines between past and present, inviting visitors to explore artworks that look to the intersections between ancient history and modern day creativity. Set against the backdrop of the Pyramids of Giza, a UNESCO World Heritage site that dates back 4,500 years, the fourth edition of the exhibition explores ancient rituals, civilizations, and forgotten folktales buried in the sands of time. Running from October 26th to November 18th, the exhibition offers visitors an immersive experience that integrates contemporary art with ancient history.
Federica Di Carlo, I See, I See. Courtesy of the artist and Art d’Egypte. Photography: © MO4.
This year’s exhibition brings together 12 international artists, including Chris Levine (UK), Federica Di Carlo (Italy), Jake Michael Singer (South Africa), Jean Boghossian (Belgium/Lebanon), Jean-Marie Appriou (France), Khaled Zaki (Egypt), and Luca Boffi (Italy). These artists are described as ‘modern-day archaeologists’ who aim to unearth narratives that connect the past within a contemporary context. The exhibition presents a range of mediums, including sculpture, installations, and digital works, creating a multi-sensory exploration of history and the human condition.
Ik-Joong Kang, Four Temples. Courtesy of the artist and Art d’Egypte. Photography: © MO4.
Korean-born, New York-based artist Ik Joong Kang presents a new work titled Four Temples, an installation that displays drawings from around the globe, especially from children and those facing political and social challenges, such as refugees from conflict zones and individuals displaced by the Korean War. The work uses architectural symbolism to promote global harmony, bridging connections across cultures. Similarly, Rashid Al Khalifa’s geometric maze installation features relics that emerge from the ground at varying angles, inviting viewers to traverse history and explore the patterns that bind humanity together. Each fragment is adorned with motifs inspired by the labyrinth diagram presented by 17th-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in his book Turris Babel, written in 1679.
Jean-Marie Appriou, Vessel of Time. Courtesy of the artist and Art d’Egypte. Photography: © MO4.
At the heart of Forever Is Now lies a metaphor of excavation, not only of physical artifacts, but of stories, ideas, and emotions. This act of uncovering is both intellectual and emotional, revealing layers of meaning that challenge our understanding of the world. The exhibition emphasizes that history is not a static entity; rather, it is an ever-evolving narrative shaped by each generation’s contributions and perspectives. In the 2023 edition, artist Arne Quinze’s circular lupine sculpture offered an alternative viewpoint of the iconic pyramids, emphasizing the delicate interplay between nature and the legacy of ancient Egyptian culture.
Jean Boghossian, Desert Waves. Courtesy of the artist and Art d’Egypte. Photography: © MO4.
By incorporating unconventional materials, artists challenge viewers to discover new ideas and perspectives. The interplay between excavation, interpretation, and creation lies at the heart of Forever Is Now, where the process of uncovering history becomes an emotional, intellectual, and participatory journey.
Nassia Inglessis, Liquid Solid. Courtesy of the artist and Art d’Egypte. Photography: © MO4.
Founded by Nadine Abdel Ghaffar, Art D’Egypte has emerged as a leading force in Egypt’s cultural landscape, evolving into CulturVator—a multidisciplinary platform that fosters international collaborations across art, design, and heritage. CulturVator’s mission is to build bridges between cultures, promoting cross-cultural exchanges that expand contemporary art’s reach while deepening global appreciation for Egypt’s rich artistic legacy.
Jake Michael Singer, we will meet again in the sky. Courtesy of the artist and Art d’Egypte. Photography: © MO4.
Forever Is Now actively encourages participation from its local communities, including craftspeople, students, and laborers, who are invited to participate in the exhibition, aligning with its commitment to inclusivity, sustainability, and site preservation. Local residents are encouraged to attend free lectures, panels, and community programs. This aligns with the vision set by UNESCO’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, whose patronage Art D’Egypte has operated under since 2019. Forever Is Now honors Egypt’s ancient heritage whilst also contributing to a contemporary artistic legacy that engages with history and looks forward to carving new cultural pathways.
Shilo Shiv Suleman, Padma/Lotus. Courtesy of the artist and Art d’Egypte. Photography: © MO4.
Each installation reminds us that the past is not confined to textbooks or excavation sites, rather it lives on through art, culture, and the collective memory of humanity. More

There is a burgeoning constellation of Lower East Side venues nestled around Henry Street, making the corridor a must-go for Saturday art crawls. Now the formerly Berlin-based gallery Cabin is joining the ranks and making its stateside debut.
“We’re interested in creating environments where the art lives,” said Cabin founder Lawrence Hazen. “Definitely not white cube.” Maybe brown cube then? With it’s freshly stained walls, the cozy space is darker than a boutique hotel’s hallways. Its first show, “Scotopia,” just opened and runs through November 8. It’s a fabulously melancholic affair, a strange somnambulant sleepwalk, and the title is a term that describes the “ability to see in low-light conditions.”
Ted Gahl, Light Sleeper (2024). Courtesy of Cabin.
Last week, Hazen was setting up the vernissage with his show collaborators the London-based curator Hugo Alcantara and Raja Umar Jamalullail of MENĀEA Collection, a nontraditional gallery that specializes in Asian antiquities and contemporary art, on the mystical, brooding, assemblage. Buckets of beer and stools were outside the gallery and the sun was setting. The first guests began to arrive. “There’s such a nice sense of community with the other galleries on Henry Street,” Hazen said.
“It was a very unique creative process,” Hazen said of putting the exhibition together. “We were sharing works and we were like, what is connecting this? Because there was definitely a subconscious link to everything. There was something about darkness and seeing in the dark.”
An installation view of “Scotopia.” Courtesy of Cabin.
Artworks range from a red sandstone Indian relief from between the 10th and 12th century, a 1935 Henri Matisse drawing Lydia au Chapeau, to paintings from this year. But it is hard to place a time period upon anything, and a sense of the ancient pervades. Yes, the cabin-like feel is certainly singular, but the curation and inclusion of antiquity and a late period Impressionist drawing sets a tonal shift from nearby galleries like Situations, Elliott Templeton Fine Arts, and Fierman.
Phil Davis, Child Actor in the Sun (2024). Courtesy of Cabin.
The Danish painter Christian John Munks has two standout works in the show, and he channels his master forebears in his brooding scenes. “He’s a young artist that produces five to eight works a year,” Hazen said. “He places people in domestic scenes that have ethereal, otherworldly qualities to them.” Jamalullail stood next to the relief he sourced and explained the narrative.
Red Sandstone Relief of a Scene of the Ramayana India (10th-12th century CE). Courtesy of Cabin.
“They are the human incarnations of the god Vishnu and his wife,” he said. “They’re brought into this world to destroy evil and along their journey they meet a lot of interesting characters. One of them is this monkey God.”
Nearby was an abstract squall by Swiss painter Raphael Egil. “It feels very dystopia, like someone looking and emerging through the darkness,” Hazen noted, “and then almost like a sailor finding this Medusa.”
Cabin is located at 93 Madison Street, New York, NY 10002. More

For the final three decades of his life, the self-taught Dutch artist Joris Hoefnagel drew his way through the known natural world, one creature at a time. The result was a multi-volume manuscript, Four Elements, a glorious series of 270 watercolor miniatures that organized nature largely along the lines set out by Aristotle some 1,900 years earlier.
Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art owns a copy (it once belonged to Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor) and it forms a linchpin in the museum’s upcoming exhibition “Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World,” which looks at the vital role of art at the beginning of European natural history in the 16th and 17th centuries.
It’s a collaboration between two museum’s on the National Mall with the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), bringing fur, feather, and flesh to the NGA’s drawings via its taxidermy specimens—think beetles, marmots, and peacocks. Surprisingly, given the two museums’ proximity and overlap, it’s the first such partnership.
Jacob Hoefnagel, after Joris Hoefnagel, Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592). Photo: NGA.
The show’s title is taken from the Dutch word beestjes, which connotes fascination with even the smallest of creatures, sparked partly through colonial exploits in the New World. It’s a genre that runs parallel to the Dutch Golden Age preoccupation with still-life painting, partly initiated by Hoefnagel and continued by Jan van Kessel, the 17th-century Antwerp artist.
Beyond demonstrating artistic virtuosity, these intricate renderings—often small enough to require a lens, as will be kindly provided at “Little Beasts”—served as scientific and natural historical references, which in turn inspired future artists. In the upcoming show, NGA seeks to show something of this lineage by including work by Albrecht Dürer, Teodoro Filippo di Liagno, and Wenceslaus Hollar.
“Art and science have been closely aligned,” Kirk Johnson, NMNH’s director said in a statement. “Even today, researchers at the museum depend on scientific illustrators to bring clarity and understanding to the specimens they study.”
“Little Beasts” is divided into three sections. The first centers on Hoefnagel’s Four Elements, an exceptionally rare display given the work’s sensitivity to light. The pages of the books will be turned sporadically during the exhibition’s run.
Jan van Kessel the Elder, Study of Insects and Reptiles (1660). Photo: NGA.
The second looks at the dissemination of period images of the animal world, largely through printmaking. Among others, Hoefnagel’s son, Jacob, published prints of his father’s work that reached a broad audience.
The third section focuses on the aforementioned Kessel and his celebrated paintings, prints, and books. The museum pairs his work with actual specimens from NMNH and allows for visitors to judge the verisimilitude of the artist. One highlight is Sprig of Rosemary (1653) for which the exhibition has created a custom tableau that identifies every insect painted by Kessel.
“Artists have always helped us make sense of the world,” said the NGA’s director Kaywin Feldman. “At ‘Little Beasts,’ delightfully detailed drawings, prints, and paintings invite art lovers of all ages to marvel at these artistic feats and to explore our wondrous word.”
“Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World” will be on view at National Gallery of Art, Washington, Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, D.C., from May 18 through November 2, 2025. More