Eliana Willis

A bright and cheerful mural just brought a little extra color to sunny Miami Beach, courtesy of the city and artist Jen Stark. Sundial Spectrum is the seventh work in “Elevate Española,” a public art series that launched during Miami Art Week in 2022.
The project decorates not only the walls along Española Way, but suspends art above the street, dangling between the palm trees.
“It’s beautiful, and it’s such an honor to have Jen Stark. She has strong roots here,” Lissette Garcia Arrogante, the director of the city’s Tourism and Culture Department, told me at the project’s unveiling. “Her grandfather was a resident of Miami Beach, and he was also an artist.… and now she’s come back and really left her mark with this amazing mural.”
Stark, who lives in Los Angeles but was born and raised in Miami, has added her signature psychedelic rainbow-hued designs to the street’s white walls, while creating reflective and translucent Plexiglas sculptures to hang overhead.
Jen Stark, Sundial Spectrum (2024). The seventh work in “Elevate Española,” a public art series on Española Way in Miami Beach. Photo by Peter Vahan, courtesy of City of Miami Beach Tourism and Culture.
“My work is inspired by color theory and nature. I choose a lot of geometric shapes, like fractals in nature and plant growth,” Stark said. “For this one, I wanted it to seem like an abstract sundial, where the colors will change throughout the day depending on where the sun is in the sky.”
When the Miami sun shines—as it typically does—the light casts colorful shadows across the street, adding an unexpected dimension to the site-specific installation.
Jen Stark painting Sundial Spectrum (2024). Photo by Peter Vahan, courtesy of City of Miami Beach Tourism and Culture.
“I’ve always wanted to do a public work on South Beach, so this was the perfect moment, and I’m glad that they picked me for it this year,” Stark added. “Public art is my favorite kind of art. It levels the playing field, and it adds beauty to the city.”
The city first installed public art on Española Way during Miami Art Week in 2021, with Little Cloud Sky, a friendly installation of floating inflated clouds from FriendsWithYou.
Jen Stark, Sundial Spectrum (2024). Photo by Rudy Duboué, courtesy of City of Miami Beach Tourism and Culture.
Española Way West was the first commercial development on the beach in the 1920s, and was originally home to artist studios. In 2017, the city turned it into a pedestrian-only street. The idea for “Elevate Española” was that a public art installation could help draw visitors down the corridor from the beach on Ocean Drive.
“We’re looking for work that is vibrant, that is going to help bring life and and beauty to this corridor, and spark visitors and our residents to come and hang out in this area,” Garcia Arrogante said. “When we reached out to the property owners, they were very open to having an activation from the city and presenting amazing temporary works of art on their walls. It’s the city’s first private-public partnership when it comes to contemporary art.”
Jen Stark, Sundial Spectrum (2024). Photo by Rudy Duboué, courtesy of City of Miami Beach Tourism and Culture.
Sundial Spectrum is just one of the ways the city of Miami Beach participates in Miami Art Week. For the fifth year, the city hosted “No Vacancy, Miami Beach,” with public artworks and site-specific installations by 12 artists, each at a different Miami Beach hotel.
Participating artists each have a shot at a $10,000 prize, selected by public vote and presented by the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, and a $25,000 juried prize.
dNASAb, Faux Ecologies + Augmented Visions of the Micro-verse (2024), on view in “No Vacancy, Miami Beach” on “The Egg” at the Betsy, Miami Beach. Photo by Monica McGivern, courtesy of Miami Beach Arts and Culture.
Among the highlights was a haunting display by [dNASAb] at the Betsy, displayed on “The Egg,” a spherical orb sculpture that connects the third floor of the hotel’s two buildings in dramatic fashion. Titled Faux Ecologies + Augmented Visions of the Micro-verse, the A.I.-powered piece is trained on the artist’s paintings. It is an imagined microscopic trip inside a water droplet, offering a message about the dangers of microplastics, with a message reading “The Climate Can’t Wait.”
The city also let residents vote to purchase one artwork from Art Basel Miami Beach for its public art collection, through the Legacy Purchase Program. The Miami Beach Art in Public Places Committee chose works by william cordova, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, and Nina Surel as this year’s finalists, with a $50,000 budget.
The winner was Miami-based, Argentine-born Surel, who is represented by local gallery Spinello Projects, and her monumental 100-piece stoneware ceramic wall relief Allegory of Florida. The work casts Florida as a goddess of feminine fertility and matriarchal figure surrounded by symbols of the local flora and fauna.
Nina Surel, Allegory of Florida. Photo courtesy of the artist and Spinello Projects, Miami.
Surel joins a select group that includes Ebony G. Patterson, Amoako Boafo, Sanford Biggers, Farah Al Qasimi, Juana Valdés—also represented by Spinello Projects—and Anneke Eussen. Each winning piece goes on permanent view in the Miami Beach Convention Center, where the fair is held each year.
“It’s my pleasure to represent and place the second work into the Legacy Collection by a woman artist,” Anthony Spinello, the artist’s dealer, said in a statement. “This acquisition and recognition hits differently considering women artists are still underrepresented, undervalued, and especially at a time when women’s rights are being challenged.”
“Jen Stark: Sundial Spectrum” is on view on Española Way between Washington and Collins Avenues, Miami Beach, Florida, December 3, 2024–February 9, 2025.
“No Vacancy, Miami Beach” is on view at Avalon Hotel Miami, 700 Ocean Drive; the Betsy Hotel, 1440 Ocean Drive; Cadillac Hotel and Beach Club, 3925 Collins Avenue; the Catalina Hotel & Beach Club, 1732 Collins Avenue; Esmé Miami Beach Hotel, 1438 Washington Avenue; Faena Miami Beach, 3201 Collins Avenue; Hotel Croydon Miami Beach, 3720 Collins Avenue; International Inn on the Bay, 2301 Normandy Drive; Kimpton Hotel Palomar South Beach, 1750 Alton Road; Kimpton Surfcomber Hotel, 1717 Collins Avenue; Royal Palm South Beach, 1545 Collins Avenue; Sherry Frontenac Hotel, 6565 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida, November 14–December 12, 2024.  More

London’s National Gallery is finally unveiling the U.K.’s only Parmigianino altarpiece on the occasion of the institution’s 200th anniversary. The early Mannerist master’s towering The Madonna and Child With Saints John the Baptist and Jerome (1525-27) will resurface after 10 years of conservation in the exhibition “Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome.” Eight preparatory sketches will supplement Parmigianino’s 12-foot-tall feat of oil painting.
Born Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola in 1503, Parmigianino was later named for his Italian hometown of Parma. He grew up among painters, but already stood apart by the time he was in his 20s. Pope Clement VII personally received Parmigianino upon his 1524 arrival in Rome. The artist’s taste for idealized beauty and sumptuous hues earned him a reputation as Raphael’s heir apparent.
Parmigianino, The Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome (1526-7). © The National Gallery, London. Presented by the Directors of the British Institution, 1826.
As Giorgio Vasari’s famous story from the Sack of Rome goes, Charles V’s troops were so taken with this very painting upon storming his studio that they decided to just let him work. Parmigianino had been at work on the piece since 1526, when noblewoman Maria Bufalini commissioned it for her husband and father-in-law’s burial chapel at Rome’s San Salvatore in Lauro. Parmigianino put his all into this big break.
In the ensuing nine-month occupation, The Madonna and Child With Saints was stowed in the refectory of Santa Maria della Pace, and Parmigianino moved home, where he died in 1530. In her will, Bufalini had included instructions to have the altarpiece framed and installed, but her great-nephew only brought it to their family headquarters of Città di Castello 30 years later. The work remained in their chapel at the church of Sant’Agostino until about 1772, when it was replaced with a copy and sent to their palazzo. The National Gallery acquired it in 1826, two years after the museum’s founding.
Parmigianino, Study for a Composition of the Virgin and Christ Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Jerome below (recto) (1526-27). © The Trustees of the British Museum
The past decade’s conservation efforts have revivified the artwork and adorned it with a new, period-appropriate frame. The painting’s lush greenery, striking light, and bold bodily movements might even distract viewers from its most uncommon feature—the slumbering Saint Jerome.
“Numerous interpretations for this figure have been put forward,” curator Maria Alambritis explained over email of this “unusual” element. “After deciding on an asymmetrical arrangement for the saints—bringing the Baptist forward and reclining Jerome into the middle distance—the most plausible state for Jerome to be depicted in was asleep,” she wrote.
Parmigianino, Studies of Saints John the Baptist and Jerome, a Crucifix and Various Heads (recto) (1525-27). © Image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program
On the other hand, the figure also vaguely resembles the Vatican’s Greco-Roman copy of Sleeping Ariadne, which Parmigianino may have seen. Furthermore, his decision could symbolically reference the dream state’s more mystical nature, and its role as “the cousin of death.” See the skull, a prop appropriate for a burial chamber, nestled near the sleeping saint’s knee.
Five institutions have lent sketches to round out the showcase, including Los Angeles’s J. Paul Getty Museum—which tangled with the British government in 2017 over another Parmigianino that had long been on view at the National Gallery. A new catalogue, rich with new scholarship, also commemorates the occasion.
“Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome” will be on view from December 5, 2024 through January 9, 2025 at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London. More

“Dick had put up this huge bubble-jet poster of a sequence of pictures he’d taken of Marilyn in a tight sequined dress,” photographer Tim Walker once wrote of a photoshoot that friend and colleague, Richard Avedon, did with actress and fashion icon Marilyn Monroe.  
“One morning the first thing, when I was making the coffee, I observed him standing in front of the poster mimicking all her poses, reliving the shoot in a way—almost asking, with his own body, ‘Did I get all I could?’ And of course he had!”
This anecdote, taken from Walker’s 2018 book Avedon: Something Personal, perfectly encapsulates Avedon’s approach to photographing celebrities and artists—the practice for which he is most often remembered today. Now, 20 years after his passing, Avedon is getting a long-overdue retrospective at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona.
Richard Avedon, Paul McCartney, The Beatles Portfolio, London, England, August 11, 1967. Photo: Center for CreativePhotography, University of Arizona: Richard Avedon Archive. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
The museum’s new exhibition, “Richard Avedon: Among Creatives,” opened on December 6, 2024, running until May 25, 2025. Curated by Emilia Mickevicius, an art historian who specializes in 20th century photography, “Among Creatives” brings together work from various stages of Avedon’s decades-spanning career, from the early fashion photography he did for Harper’s Bazaar, to the photographic portraits of celebrities like Monroe, which he produced later in life.
Born in New York City in 1923 to Russian-Jewish immigrants who fled the Bolshevik Revolution, Avedon’s artistic career began when he started photographing his sister Louise as she began suffering from schizophrenia. His keen eye for lighting and composition helped land him jobs as a fashion photographer for numerous prestigious magazines, including Vogue, Elle, and—as mentioned—Harper’s Bazaar, leading him to befriend many a rising star.
Richard Avedon, Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957. Photo: Center for Creative Photography, University ofArizona: Richard Avedon Archive. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
Like pop artist Andy Warhol, Avedon was interested in celebrity culture. But where the former depicted his subjects as cultural, consumerist commodities, the latter wanted to capture their humanity. While agents, managers, and publicity firms work to present a consistent, positive image of their client, Avedon captured their inevitable multitudes through his deceptively simplistic portraiture, straying closer to the likes of the Old Masters than to Warhol.
His commitment to authenticity and transparency even carried over into his fashion photography. As Amanda Hopkinson wrote for The Guardian after Avedon passed away in 2004:
Richard Avedon, Marian Anderson, contralto, New York, June 30, 1955. Photo: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
“Avedon’s own interest was always in the people, never in the fashions. In fact, the models tended to add a layer of complication to what he fundamentally believed was the relationship between photographer and sitter. As he said: ‘A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he (sic) is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks.’”
Richard Avedon, Dovima with elephants, evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955. Photo: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Richard Avedon Archive. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
In addition to scrutinizing his approach to portraiture, “Among Creatives” promises to explore how Avedon’s photographs of troubled celebrities like Monroe reflect his own lifelong struggles with fame, mortality, and the demands of his craft.
Aside from Monroe, visitors will get face-to-face with photographs of John Ford, Allen Ginsberg, Marlene Dietrich, Paul McCartney, and Warhol, as well as those of renowned fashion models like Veruschka, Dovima, and Penelope Tree. More

Few exhibitions have been more mythologized than the one that opened in a Parisian photography studio on April 15, 1874. There, over the course of a month, the trajectory of art was altered, launching a movement, Impressionism, that’s still being dissected 150 years later.
Not that its protagonists anticipated as much. The 31 artists who convened at the studio of Felix Nadar at 35 Boulevard des Capucines were disgruntled, underpaid, and largely unknown. The exhibition was indeed a revolution, though not simply in artistic terms: these were the rejects of the Académie des Beaux-Arts Salon, the state-sponsored arbiter of artistic value, and by hosting an alternative show, the artists controlled how their work was to be exhibited, priced, and sold.
This note of pragmatism was touched upon at “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism,” the landmark Musée d’Orsay exhibition that recently traveled to Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. Throw in the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and the chaos of the Commune insurrection, and those dreamy works by Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir seem less like reflections on modern society and more like willful escapes.
Monet paints the scene at Le Havre, from the VR experience “Tonight With the Impressionists.” Courtesy Gedeon/Excurio.
One component of the Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition that stuck rather more closely to the romance was “Tonight With the Impressionists,” a 45-minute virtual reality experience. It casts back to the fateful night of April 15 and plunges visitors into the rapidly modernizing world of the late 19th century, one the Impressionists so vividly captured. There are the grand new boulevards designed by Baron Haussmann, electric lamps, and, of course, a steam engine pulling into the Gare Saint-Lazare.
After showings across France and in Atlanta, Georgia, “Tonight with the Impressionists” is set to open on December 13 at Eclipso in Midtown Manhattan, an 11,000-square-foot space purpose-built to stage V.R. experiences. It’s the latest in a trend that’s using immersive technology to make some of the art world’s most popular figures, such as Frida Kahlo and Vincent van Gogh, more engaging and approachable.
Interior of the first exhibition of the Impressionists, from the VR experience “Tonight With the Impressionists.” Courtesy Gedeon/Excurio.
Gedeon Media Group, which co-produced the V.R. experience alongside the Musée d’Orsay, has worked to maintain historical accuracy alongside the entertainment. The experience’s narrative may be invented, but the details remain accurate—to the degree possible. Nadar’s studio, for instance, was knocked down in the 1990s, and there are no photographs of the 1874 exhibition itself. To compensate, Gedeon used architectural plans, exterior photographs, and upholstery and wallpaper information to recreate the space.
Beyond the studio and the febrile streets of Paris, “Tonight with the Impressionists” rides into the countryside and looks on as painters now considered masters got to work. Renoir paints the scene at La Grenouillere, a boating and bathing resort on the Seine, and Monet steps onto the balcony of his Le Havre hotel room and paints the work that granted the movement its name, Impression, Sunrise (1872).
“This experience offers a journey through time and invites visitors from all over the world to experience the emotions that inspired the painters, particularly in two well-known regions of France, Normandy, and the Paris region,” said Stéphane Millière, CEO of Gedeon Experiences. More

Marina Abramović, performance artist extraordinaire, is not sitting out the festivities at Miami Art Week. In collaboration with Spanish clothing brand Massimo Dutti, the artist is presenting “A Tribute to the Nomadic Spirit,” an exhibition at the city’s Faena Art Project Room, to coincide with the release of her coffee table book, Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places.
As hinted at by the exhibition and book titles, the show is offering a rare glimpse into Abramović’s artistic process, exploring the creative journeys she’s undertaken through four decades’ worth of drawings, poetry, photographs, and reflections.
Installation view of “Marina Abramović & Massimo Dutti: A Tribute to the Nomadic Spirit” at Faena Art Project Room. Photo courtesy of Massimo Dutti.
Born in the Serbian province of Belgrade in 1946, Abramović first became interested in performance art while she was studying at Belgrade’s Academy of Fine Arts, recognizing the largely unexplored medium as a means to communicate her political views. One of Abramović’s most well-known pieces of performance art, 1997’s Balkan Baroque, saw her try and fail to clean some 1,500 cow bones—an obvious metaphor for how the violence of historical events can never be washed off.
Marina Abramović’s sketches on hotel stationery. Photo courtesy of Massimo Dutti.
Her other performance work is just as provocative. Relation in Time (1977) saw her and her professional and romantic partner, German visual artist Ulay, spend 17 hours with their hair tied together, symbolizing their connection. Most famously, for The Artist Is Present (2010), Abramović spent a total of 750 hours seated in silence, inviting visitors to engage her in uncomfortably intimate staring contests.
Marina Abramović’s sketches on hotel stationery. Photo courtesy of Massimo Dutti.
In “Nomadic Journey” are prints of the artist’s original drawings and doodles—some of them casual and spontaneous, others unveiling a creative mind at work. Some are scribbled on hotel stationery, capturing the roads she’s taken over the decades: a piece of Venice’s Bauer Hotel note paper is traced with outlines of her hand and foot, while another doodle under the letterhead of Brazil’s Fasano Hotel offers the cryptic phrase: “…if you could see.”
Marina Abramović’s sketches on hotel stationery. Photo courtesy of Massimo Dutti.
Even when residing in temporary residences, Abramović apparently found space for reflection and inspiration.
“I believe we humans need to keep moving forward, and my own life was purely nomadic,” Abramović noted of these travel journals. “My home was everywhere I went because my home was my own body.”
Cover of Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places. Photo courtesy of Massimo Dutti.
The accompanying book, Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places, similarly chronicles her nomadic lifestyle, which has taken her from Serbia to the United States. It also explores her evolution as an artist through a self-curated selection of her work, combining poetry, notebooks, and personal observations. It will be available for purchase in select Massimo Dutti stores.
“A Tribute to the Nomadic Spirit: An Artistic Intervention by Marina Abramović” is on view at Faena Art Project Room, 3420 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida, December 3–8, 2024. More

A giant ape has overtaken Los Angeles exhibition venue Beyond the Streets—not King Kong, but Queen Kong. The official mascot of the Guerrilla Girls, in fact. This looming inflatable crowns “Laugh, Cry, Fight,” the first-ever L.A. exhibition for the famed anonymous art collective of rebellious women.
Each member of the Guerrilla Girls assumes the name of a historic female artist. They make public appearances only wearing their iconic gorilla masks. Regarding the exhibition’s title, founding member Käthe Kollwitz told me over Zoom, “We knew the show was going to start after the election, but we didn’t know how the election was going to turn out. It just seemed like a great motto for what we do.”
Exterior view of the new Guerrilla Girls exhibition “Laugh, Cry, Fight” on view in Los Angeles. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
The Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985 in response to the show “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—which widely omitted women. They made posters highlighting the lack of female representation in art museum collections and posted them on the streets of New York art strongholds. This was a decade before Cost and Revs popularized wheat-pasted posters as street art—but six years after Jenny Holzer papered subway stations with her Inflammatory Essays. Reactions to the stunt were swift, widespread, and spirited.
“Laugh, Cry, Fight” encompasses the many methods and messages that the Guerrilla Girls have played with over the past 39 years. “It’s not organized in any usual way,” Kollwitz said of the show. “We have this giant wall, the biggest wall in the space, which has a crazy montage of some of our old work and a lot of our very, very recent work.” That includes English and Spanish editions of their infamous 1989 poster “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?” which exposes the disparity between female artists and nudes in museums. A 1988 poster cites the “advantages” of being a woman artist, “which, of course, are all disadvantages,” Kollwitz noted.
Installation view, featuring posters from the Guerrilla Girls’s history. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
Since then, museums have started “casting a wider net,” as Kollwitz put it, by diversifying the artworks they exhibit. The Guerrilla Girls have played a real part in this shift. Ten years ago, they inspired the Uffizi Gallery to make material advancements, and in 2008, the collective confronted the Tate Modern’s chief curator, Frances Morris. “You have completely changed my mind, and I am changing this institution,” Morris reportedly responded. “And she did,” Kollwitz said. “It’s quite incredible.”
Such real shifts have empowered the Guerrilla Girls to tackle wider social issues, like homelessness and inequality in the film industry. The collective has also turned its gaze towards art world machinations that materially impact the rest of the world, like the way rich museum donors use their art collections to enhance their wealth. Last year, for example, the collective stationed a nine-foot-tall monument bearing updates to its 1990 museum code of ethics outside New York’s premier museums. The sculpture, which states “thou shalt honor thine employees” and “not consort with art dealers or collectors who commit tax evasion,” appears in “Laugh, Cry, Fight”—alongside new works like Meet The Creeps Who Stripped Our Abortion Rights (2022).
Interior, featuring a vitrine of ephemera. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
Despite their outsized reputation, the Guerrilla Girls aren’t a large group. Too many cooks would impede their efforts in the kitchen. “Our dirty little secret is that while we’ve had over 60 members, at any one time, we’re very small,” Kollwitz said. They typically have fewer than 10 members at once, she said, adding, “That’s how you get things going.”
But, while they don’t recruit new Guerrilla Girls, they would like fans to copy them. Although the group began in the streets, most of their projects—ironically, or perhaps fittingly—take place in museums. Beyond The Streets, meanwhile, is a different kind of institution—one that attracts the fine art crowd as well as those beyond it, from sneakerheads to Instagram girlies.
Installation view, featuring their Complaint Department. Photo: Beyond the Streets.
Two installations at “Laugh, Cry, Fight” invite participation—a photo booth and an iteration of the Guerrilla Girls’ Complaint Department, where guests write what they’d like to change about society. “I would say it took about one hour for the entire thing to be totally filled up,” Kollwitz said. “We are used to that. People want to have their say, and they should.”
“Laugh, Cry, Fight” is on view through January 18, 2025 at Beyond the Streets, 434 N La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. More

The piano at the gallery entrance, with an array of framed photographs lovingly displayed on the lid, could be found in many family living rooms. But these portraits, along with more on the wall, depict members of the trans community in Argentina, collected by the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina (Trans Memory Archive Argentina).
The 15,000-object archive, founded in 2012 to safeguard the history and memory of a community that has historically faced violence and the threat of erasure, contains newspaper clippings, police files, and personal letters as well as photos and films spanning the 20th century.
Selections from the archive are on view in an installation titled Constelaciones: Entre estrellas y cenizas (Constellations: Between Stars and Ashes) at New York’s Ford Foundation in the show “Cantando Bajito: Chorus.” It’s the finale of a three-part exhibition series celebrating artworks that fight for bodily autonomy and oppose gender-based violence, collectively curated by Isis Awad, Roxana Fabius, Kobe Ko, Beya Othmani, Mindy Seu, and Susana Vargas Cervantes.
The Archivo was conceived of by María Belén Correa and the late Claudia Pía Baudracco, who died in 2012, mere months before Argentina passed the Gender Identity Law allowing transgender people to legally change their name and gender. It was a major step forward for trans rights in the nation.
Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina’s photo installation Constelaciones: Entre estrellas y cenizas (Constellations: Between stars and ashes), 2024, at “Cantando Bajito: Chorus” at the Ford Foundation. Photo courtesy of the Ford Foundation.
“Trans women were tortured [and] brutalized during the Argentinian dictatorship and even after,” Fabius told me during a tour of the exhibition. “So there’s the celebratory aspect of the gathering and the collecting, but also the aspect of gathering information for a case against the state.”
But the Archivo, like the exhibition as a whole, is less about the suffering experienced by vulnerable communities than it is about their ability to thrive despite their struggles.
A photo of women toasting at a party from the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina. Photo courtesy of the Ford Foundation.
The show’s title, which translates to “singing softly,” is inspired by Nicaraguan political activist Dora María Téllez Argüello. She remained unbowed in the face of two years of solitary confinement as a political prisoner, defiantly singing throughout, refusing to be silenced. (She has since been freed.)
The installation of photographs from the Archivo, showing women who were unabashedly themselves throughout decades of discrimination, reflects the same spirit. But where Argüello struggled alone, “Cantando Bajito” emphasizes the importance of banding together to combat gender-based violence.
Selections from Los Angeles Contemporary Archive’s “Private Practices: AAPI Artist and Sex Worker Collection” on view in the “Collective Desk” in “Cantando Bajito: Chorus” at the Ford Foundation. Photo: Sebastian Bach, courtesy of the Ford Foundation.
The show also features a “Collective Desk” that brings together even more archival materials from trans and feminist communities from around the world, including the Cyberfeminism Index in the U.S.; FAQ?, a queer feminist collective from Tokyo; and the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive’s project “Private Practices,” which features Asian American and Pacific Islander sex workers.
It’s an exhibition where art meets activism, past meets present, and tragedy meets triumph, the artists and their subjects rising above difficult circumstances against the odds.
“It’s the idea of not showing the violence, not showing the victim,” Fabius said, “but rather holding a place of resilience, resistance, and flourishing.”
“Cantando Bajito: Chorus” is on view at the Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 East 43rd Street, New York, New York, October 8–December 7, 2024. More