Eliana Willis

A devastating world war, widespread use of penicillin, the adoption of jet engine propulsion, and the very first electronic computer: the events of the 1940s would have a defining impact on the course of the 20th century. The art world also underwent a major transition, as the bold experiments of European modernism paved the way for New York artists to unleash a fresh, re-energizing proposition in the form of Abstract Expressionism.
At least this is the dominant narrative, and not without reason.
However, a new survey of 1940s art and design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art invites visitors to consider a more complex, comprehensive picture. With over 250 pieces of painting, photography, jewelry, ceramics, fashion, and furniture, “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” provides the evidence for a rich variety of visual languages beyond Abstract Expressionism, from charming figurative studies of everyday life and wartime propaganda to resourceful tailoring and eccentric takes on traditional home decor.
Installation view of “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” at the Philadelpha Museum of Art, 2025. Photo: Aimee Almstead.
“As an art historian, there’s a tendency to try to make sense of things, to tell a more linear narrative,” said Jessica Smith, the PMA’s chief curator. “By focusing on a decade, you pivot away from the idea that there’s one story. We’re able to give a more multivalent, subtle message.”
All works on view have been sourced from the museum’s own collection, and the desire to tell a more complex narrative about the 1940s has created the perfect opportunity to spotlight some of its lesser known gems. Around 40 percent of the works in the show have never been exhibited before. “What’s most exciting is the way the media interact with one another,” according to Smith. “They’re greater for the collective conversations they have than they are as individual pieces.”
Jackson Pollock, Male and Female (1942-1943). Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Visitors can rest assured, however, that the expected classics are not in short supply. As Smith pointed out, “the 1940s is a generative moment, a moment of genesis for things that develop more maturely in the 1950s.” As such, visitors can expect to see early works from celebrated American artists like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, and designers like Charles and Ray Eames, whose ideas would go on to shape midcentury movements.
Though Pollock and Krasner each had a distinct practice, their aims overlapped enough that Pollock’s Male and Female (1942–43) and Krasner’s Composition (1949) make useful bookends to the decade. In the earlier work, the quintessential AbEx artist seeks to push through figuration to access abstraction. The later work, in a style Krasner called “hieroglyphs,” was made while the couple were living together and both working on canvases laid horizontal. Her highly controlled mark making appears to have a logic and rhythm but it resists narrative.
Installation view of “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” at the Philadelpha Museum of Art, 2025. Photo: Aimee Almstead.
Though Pollock, Krasner, and their peers’ experiments with abstraction would change the course of modern art, plenty of artists had a different story to tell that relied instead on figuration. One such group was a milieu of queer artists like Paul Cadmus, Beauford Delaney, George Platt Lynes, and Romaine Brooks, whose network extended to include figures like Man Ray and Isamu Noguchi. Some created blatantly homoerotic artworks and many depicted each other, as in the case of Delaney’s 1945 portrait of his close friend, the writer James Baldwin. Two years earlier, the Harlem Renaissance artist had also been the subject of a rare portrait by Georgia O’Keeffe. She described Delaney, by all accounts a magnetic presence, as “impossible to define” and “a special kind of thought.”
Horace Pippin, The Park Bench (1946). Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Self-taught American artist Horace Pippin, meanwhile, used figuration to create records of the deeply racist, segregated society he had returned to after serving in World War I. The double standard in treatment of Black and white veterans is the subject of Mr. Prejudice (1943), an unflinching worked haunted by the presence of a hooded member of the Klu Klux Klan looming on the upper-right. But Pippin was also drawn to scenes of everyday life, as evident in The Park Bench (1946), in which a man enjoys a moment of peace. It was possibly inspired by a local resident the artist has observed in Everhart Park, West Chester.
Though politics are not a principal focus of the show, any viewer preoccupied with the current state of affairs will find plenty to mull over while looking back on the 1940s. It seems unlikely that the U.S. will be forming an international alliance to fight fascism any time soon, but a series of propaganda posters remind us of a time when the U.S., Britain, and Soviet Union joined forces to defeat the Nazis. Though the text is in Russian, the message is clear. In one image, the three countries’ flags unite to create a lightening bold striking down on Hitler and Mussolini, both bloodied and cowering in fear. These fragile pieces were recently uncovered in the PMA’s store room and conserved for the exhibition.
Kukryniksy (artists’ collaborative), Mikhail V. Kupriyanov, Porfiry N. Krylov, A Thunderous Blow (1942). Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Other wartime messaging that feels relevant to the present moment includes posters that call for cutting down on food waste and fashion designs that balance practicality with a more efficient use of material. Everyone had to play their part in the communal effort to ensure the military remained well-supplied. The same spirit of sustainability has proven to be a harder sell in the 2020s, despite our understanding of how overconsumption is fueling climate catastrophe.
But, out of necessity came plenty of invention. “I think there’s a misconception that creative pursuits ground to a halt during World War II,” said Smith. One of the show’s highlights, a woman’s dinner jacket form Elsa Schiaparelli’s spring 1940 collection, is a particularly charming example. The piece is part of a military-themed collection produced at a time when the Italian designer was forced to slash her workforce from 600 to 150. It’s particularly generous: gold-embroidered pockets were intended to take the place of a handbag for a wearer who was too preoccupied with carrying a gas mask she might, at any time, have to don in a hurry.
Woman’s dinner jacket from Elsa Schiaparelli’s spring 1940 collection. Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“We found inspiration from this idea that people persisted and wanted to find a way forward and continued creative pursuits, despite restrictions and adversity,” concluded Smith. “That is an optimistic message that is probably applicable at all times to a greater or lesser degree.”
“Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, through September 1, 2025. More

Celine is marking its first partnership with the Centre Pompidou by offering free public access on four select days this summer to coincide with Wolfgang Tillmans’s major new exhibition “Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us.”
The house’s “Accès Libre par Celine” initiative launches today, June 13, and will offer complimentary entry on three additional dates: July 3, August 28, and September 22.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lacanau (self)” (1986). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou.
The exhibition gives Tillmans full rein over the museum’s vast second floor, typically home to the Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi), and will remain on view through September 22. Timed ahead of Michael Rider’s arrival as the house’s artistic director in January 2025, the collaboration signals Celine’s continued investment in the cultural sphere. As the Pompidou prepares to shut down for a years-long renovation, Tillmans’s exhibition offers a final chapter for the institution—arriving just as Celine begins a new one.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Miss Kittin” (2001). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou.
Rather than a chronological retrospective, the installation engages directly with the building’s architecture, reimagining the space as a dynamic platform for images, objects, and ideas.
“Since the 1990s, Tillmans has constantly questioned the conventions of hanging: he suspends, juxtaposes and assembles works on walls and tables, mixing formats, materials and techniques,” said assistant curator Olga Frydryszak-Rétat. “At the Bpi, he pushes this even further by modifying the site itself—repurposing library furniture, redesigning partitions, and developing new structures that respond directly to the material and symbolic architecture of the space. This immersive and experimental intervention echoes a central part of his practice: bodies of works such as Lighter, Silver, and Freischwimmer—where photography is abstracted, materialized, and redefined—feature prominently in this exhibition. Shown in a public library, these camera-less or chemically manipulated works take on a new significance: they embody experimentation as a form of knowledge, and reinforce the idea that images can be tools for thinking, not just for seeing.”
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lighter, yellow green III” (2009). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou.
The show follows Tillmans’s major traveling retrospective “To Look Without Fear,” which opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2022, and his recent intimate solo presentation at David Zwirner which featured standout minimal sculptures and pieces that seemed more “Space and Light” than his usual oeuvre. Whether photographing still lifes, lovers, those in his social circle, or—as he has increasingly turned toward in recent years—the stars and the sea, what runs through Tillmans’s broad oeuvre is its earnestness and honesty. Even when his subjects challenge conventional norms, there’s no sense of subversion or irony—only his distinctive heartfelt clarity.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “in flight astro (ii)” (2010). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou. More

The monumental environmental installations of the late husband-and-wife duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude are having a major moment, timed to the 90th anniversary of their births—both artists’ birthdates are June 13, 2025. This year and into 2026, a flurry of major projects and exhibitions are revisiting or paying tribute to their groundbreaking work that transformed not just landscapes but the very definition of public art.
“Ultimately, all the work of art that Christo and Jeanne-Claude did is about freedom. And Christo’s childhood growing up in a Communist Bulgaria had a lot to do with it,” said Vladimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew and the longtime director of projects for the duo. He now helps run their foundation.
The artists, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009) and Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020), met in 1958 and began working together almost immediately. In 1961, their very first collaborative piece, Stacked Oil Barrels and Dockside Packages, featured the main elements that would become the hallmarks of their work. It was a temporary outdoor installation on the harbor in Cologne, Germany, with groups of oil barrels covered by tarps secured with ropes.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude would go on to take this vision to seemingly impossible heights, wrapping entire buildings in fabric—most recently with L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped in Paris, a piece posthumously realized under Yavachev in 2021. He’s worked on every Christo and Jeanne-Claude project since The Umbrellas, a Transpacific installation staged in Ibaraki, Japan, and Southern California in 1991.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, Paris, (1961-2021). Photo: Lubri, ©2021 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
“I was underage labor when I started,” Yavachev recalled. He was 17 when he left his native Bulgaria in 1990, and began working with his aunt and uncle.
Now, it is up to him to complete Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Mastaba in the Abu Dhabi desert. First conceived in 1977, the piece will be the artists’ only permanent installation and the largest contemporary sculpture in the world—taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza, made from 410,000 multicolored oil barrels.
Marvels of Engineering
But while construction on that long-gestating project has yet to begin, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are perhaps more visible than ever. The artists’ 90th birthday year has proved an apt moment to look back at some of their most famous works, marvels of engineering and visual spectacles that crisscrossed the globe, often taking many years to come to fruition.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates, Central Park, New York City (1979–2005). Photo: Wolfgang Volz. Courtesy of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
Preserving Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy is complicated by the fact that their ambitious projects were designed to be ephemeral. There are early sculptures, drawings, and preparatory works, but the big pieces that made them famous live on only in photographs and memories. They were committed to the works’ temporary nature and transient beauty.
“[Our projects] exist in their time, impossible to repeat,” Christo told Artnet contributor Devorah Lauter just two months before his death. “That is their power, because they cannot be bought, they cannot be possessed… They cannot be seen again.”
The magic of technology is helping change that.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag (1971–95), Berlin. Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © Christo and Wolfgang Volz, 1995.
This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the Wrapped Reichstag, the 1995 project in which the artists covered a Neo-Renaissance government building in Berlin with silvery fabric. And it’s the 20th anniversary of The Gates in New York’s Central Park, which saw 7,503 metal frames draped with orange fabric placed along a pathway of 23 miles.
Both have been resurrected, in a high-tech way.
In Central Park, visitors this February and March could experience the display anew via augmented reality, with the artists’ foundation recreating the dramatic addition to the park landscape digitally in the Bloomberg Connects app. (An accompanying exhibition was held at the Shed in Hudson Yards.)
A person taking part in the Augmented Reality experience and art exhibition for the 20th anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” in Central Park, New York (2025). Photo: Leonardo Munoz/AFP via Getty Images.
“People’s reaction was very similar to The Gates when they actually saw the project in real life.
So that was very, very nice,” Yavachev said.
Currently, in Berlin, the artists’ foundation is using digital projection to rewrap the Reichstag every night until June 20. The project requires some 30 projectors with a collective 1.2 million lumens, and features an animation of the silvery fabric unfurling over the building’s façade, which had to be digitally mapped for the occasion.
“It’s a little challenging because there are a lot of windows,” Yavachev said. The original piece involved fabricating 70 tailor-made fabric panels, installed by a team of 90 trained rock climbers.
A projection of the Wrapped Reichstag by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude is displayed on the Reichstag building to mark the artwork’s 30th anniversary, at Platz der Republik on June 9, 2025, in Berlin, Germany. Photo: Adam Berry/Getty Images.
“Of course you cannot replace the real feel of the fabric and the wind,” he said. “This is a way to commemorate the project and as well to introduce young people to Christo and Jean’s work.”
Exhibitions Galore
There are also currently a slew of Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibitions doing just that. That includes a permanent exhibition with documentation from Wrapped Reichstag at Berlin’s Deutscher Bundestag, the home of the German parliament. A preparatory work for Wrapped Reichstag, featuring a collaged photograph and drawing, was acquired by Bulgaria’s National Gallery in February, and will go on view at the museum on June 24.
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is also getting on the celebration for Wrapped Reichstag, having added Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon to its permanent collection display this week. (The work was also shown in Art Basel’s Unlimited section in 2024.)
Christo, Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon (1963/2014). Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © 2014 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
The artists made the original version of the work in 1964, but had to quickly unwrap the vehicle at the request of the car owner who lent it for the exhibition.
“He later said that it was the biggest mistake of his life,” Yavachev said—the young car owner wanted to be able to drive his car, but it would have proved considerably more valuable if it had remained an artwork. But Christo returned to the idea in 2014, buying the same model year car as he had the first time around to recreate the work permanently.
“The fabric is really thick, so it has great folds,” Yavachev added. “It’s a beautiful work. It just looks really, really good. And it’s almost like a shrunken version of one of the larger [wrapped structures].”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Surrounded Islands (1983). Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © 2024 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, via the Collection NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
There are also larger Christo and Jeanne-Claude shows at museums that have received generous gifts from the artists and their foundation connected to their projects. Works connected to Surrounded Islands, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1983 work outlining 11 islands in Biscayne Bay with pink polypropylene fabric, were gifted to the NSU Art Museum, in 2024, and are currently on view in a dedicated exhibition.
And later this month, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., will unveil the foundation’s gift from Wrapped Walk Ways, a 1978 project in a local park creating 2.7 miles of pathways traced in saffron-colored fabric.
Christo, Wrapped Walk Ways (Project for Jacob L. Loose Memorial Park, Kansas City, Missouri), 1978. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo., gift of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, 2024. Photo: Eeva-Inkeri, © The Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
The biggest outing is “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped. Tied. Stacked. Würth Collection,” a 60-year retrospective featuring over 120 works at the Würth Museum in Künzelsau, Germany. The museum has one of the largest collections of the artists’ work in the world, thanks to founder Reinhold Würth’s close friendship with the couple.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude undoubtedly shifted the dimension of what had been conceivable as a work of art until then. Their boldness to wrap a building or monument, or surround an entire coast, did not change the world, but how we see it,” museum director C. Sylvia Weber, who co-curated the show, said in a statement, calling their work “a celebration of the moment.”
Artist Tributes
Other artists are also paying tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and how their wrapped structures created moments of mystery in everyday environments, igniting the imagination.
Ibrahim Mahama’s wrapping of the Kunsthalle Bern (2025). Photo: Cedric Mussano.
In April, Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987) wrapped the exterior of the Kunsthalle Bern in jute sackcloth ahead of the renovated institution’s reopening this month. The Ghanaian artist has wrapped buildings before, like the Barbican in London in 2024, but this is his most overt homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
The duo had memorably covered the building for their project Wrapped Kunsthalle (1967–68). Mahama’s take on the piece used a material tied to colonial history and the export of African goods, while referring back to the original installation.
“It was actually the first time that Christo and Jean Claude wrapped a public building—that had never happened before,
such a serious intervention,” Yavachev said. “It’s amazing that it paved the way for young artists to do many other things, so it’s great.”
Christo during the installation of Wrapped Kunsthalle iin Bern (1968). Photo:  Carlo Bavagnoli. © 1968 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
The foundation wasn’t involved in Mahama’s project, but welcomes the creation of new work inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects.
“Any artist can do anything they want.
That’s the beauty about art,” Yavachev said.
He actually personally reached out to the French artist JR (b. 1983) to help set in motion another forthcoming Christo and Jeanne-Claude tribute, titled Projet Pont Neuf: “I’ve known him for many years and I know he’s very inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work.”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975–85), Paris. Photo:  Wolfgang Volz. © 1985 Christo.
The piece pays homage to Pont Neuf Wrapped, a 1985 project in which Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped Paris’s oldest bridge in silky, light golden-brown fabric. JR plans to tap into the city’s architectural history by installing a photographic display of the rocky outcroppings formed at the stone quarries that provided the raw materials to build Paris.
He’s re-envisioning Pont Neuf as a grotto, its arches and parapets obscured by the full-scale black and white photos of the large rock formations that celebrate the natural elements that contribute so much to the beauty of the city.
The technical details of the JR project are still under wraps (no pun intended), but when I asked if the photos would be affixed to some kind of armature, Yavachev said that it would be “more like an inflatable technology.”
JR, Projet Pont-Neuf (collage préparatoire) (2024). Courtesy of Atelier JR. © 2024 JR.
In true Christo and Jeanne-Claude fashion, the new installation is actually getting pushed back to 2026. Their works were so logistically complex that it could take decades to finally bring their vision to life. Wrapped Reichstag took 24 years to finish. The Gates took 26. So what’s one more year waiting to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pont Neuf Wrapped?
In the meantime, the foundation is partnering with Paris City Hall to stage a public art installation on the banks of the River Seine, near Pont Neuf, presenting a brief history of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Paris projects.
“The nice thing about public art is that it confronts people who are usually not interested in art with art,” Yavachev said. “If you go to a gallery or to a museum, you’re already interested to end up there.
But with public art, you can’t miss it. And as Christo used to say, whether they hate it or love it, it’s OK, because at the end of the day, they just talk about art.”
“Kunsthalle Bern Wrapped: Ibrahim Mahama” was on view at the Kunsthalle Bern, Helvetiapl. 1, 3005 Bern, Switzerland, April 30–June 1, 2025.
“Anniversary Illumination of the Reichstag Building: Tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude” is on view at the Reichstag, Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin, Germany, June 9–20, 2025, each night from 9:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Wrapped Reichstag (Project for Berlin, 1971–95) will be on view at the National Gallery, Kvadrat 500, 1, 19th February Street, St. Alexander Nevsky Square,1000 Sofia, Bulgaria, starting June 24, 2025.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Volkswagen Beetle Saloon is on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße 50, 10785 Berlin, Germany, in the permanent collection exhibition “Extreme Tension. Art between Politics and Society. Collection of the Nationalgalerie 1945–2000″ starting June 11, 2025.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Surrounded Islands Documentation Exhibition” is on view at the NSU Art Museum, 1 East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, through February 23, 2026.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped. Tied. Stacked. Würth Collection” is on view at the Würth Museum, Reinhold-Würth-Straße 15, 74653 Künzelsau, Germany, through anuary 25, 2026.
“Wrapped Walk Ways – A Gift From the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation” will be on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, 4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, Missouri, June 28, 2025–January 18, 2026.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971–95. A Documentation Exhibition” is on view at the Deutscher Bundestag, Platz der Republik 1, Berlin, Germany, through November 25, 2035.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Paris Projects” and will be on view on the banks of the River Seine, near Pont Neuf, Paris, France, September and October 2025.
“JR: Projet Pont Neuf” will be on view at Pont Neuf, Paris, France, fall 2026. More

The circus has come to town, courtesy of Joe Coleman (b. 1955), painter, performer, and collector of the odd, unusual, and grotesque, from mummies to side show ephemera to true crime artifacts.
The artist is currently enjoying two star turns. One is as the subject of How Dark My Love, a nonfiction narrative film directed by Scott Gracheff that premiered this weekend at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. The other is as curator of “Carnival,” a wild group show at Jeffrey Deitch, also in New York, that seamlessly melds Coleman’s own paintings and offbeat holdings with high-end art by the likes of Derrick Adams, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, George Condo, and Anne Imhof.
The show also includes Coleman’s magnum opus, a life-size portrait of his wife, Whitney Ward, in his signature hyperrealistic style. Working with jewelers’ glasses and paintbrushes so fine he has been known to use one with just a single hair, Coleman has illustrated Ward’s entire life, filling every square inch of the canvas with different vignettes drawn from her biography. Nearly four years in the making, the painting’s creation became the heart of How Dark My Love, which itself actually began production way back in 2012.
The painting, Doorway to Whitney, is a companion piece to Coleman’s self portrait, Doorway to Joe. Coleman’s approach to portraiture is unique, choosing to incorporate minute details into text-rich paintings that craft a compelling narrative and demand close looking. An art school dropout, he works unconventionally, completing one small section at a time until the blank canvas is entirely filled in, rather than sketching out the entire composition with a preliminary drawing.

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“I don’t know what the whole image is going to become—it grows organically,” Coleman said in the movie.
The film begins with Coleman already about one year into work on the Whitney painting. (“I can’t believe he started with the rack,” Ward tells the cameras, standing next to a canvas that so far depicts only her shoulders, upper arms, and ample cleavage in the central portrait.)
Joe Coleman, Doorway to Whitney (2011–15). Photo: courtesy of Whitney Ward.
Long before the song “Nasty” wondered “Is somebody gonna match my freak?” there were Coleman and Ward. She’s a dominatrix and photographer (and suspects her 1998 profile in the New Yorker helped cost editor-in-chief Tina Brown her job). He’s bitten the heads off live rats and detonated explosives strapped to his chest during his performances. In recounting their love story in the film, Ward spoke fondly of introducing him to her mother’s ashes on an early date, taking the lid off the urn so the two could hold hands through a fistful of human remains.
At their wedding 25 years ago, Coleman arrived at the ceremony at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum via hearse, and was carried up the aisle in a wicker casket. The officiant was “Dutch,” a ventriloquist dummy who invoked the power of Satan before pronouncing them man and wife (and is among the objects on view in “Carnival”).
Installation view of “Carnival” curated by Joe Coleman. The works on view include a waxen effigy of St. Agnes in the foreground, flanked by two fantasy coffins of the artist and his wife, Whitney Ward, in their wedding attire by Ghanaian artist Theophilus Nii Anum Sowah. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
“Whitney and I are so fortunate that we found each other. And you know, it’s almost like in this lifetime we were searching for each other,” Coleman told me. “Psychics have said that we’ve been together many lives.”
Once introduced in public access TV interview as “a totally bizarre… despicable, vile, horrendous, rodent-like facsimile of a human,” Coleman is open about the dark chapters of his life, recounting his years of heroin addiction. At the depths of his ten-bag-a-day habit, Coleman would drive his taxi cab to an Alphabet City drug den, reach in with his money, get injected through a glory hole, and then pick up passengers.
Joe Coleman, Stigma Stigmata Camille 2000 (2019). Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
But his years as a cabbie also facilitated his entry into the art world. In 1986, he happened to pick up David Owsley, then a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Before the ride was over, Owsley had agreed to a detour to see Coleman’s first-ever solo show at a gallery called Chronocide. (The owner, who lived upstairs, kindly opened up the show in the middle of the night.)
“David bought two paintings from that show.
Later he showed me where they were hanging in his home, and they were between an actual Brueghel painting and a work by Reverend William Blayney, an Outsider artist,” Coleman said. “He got it started, you know, got the ball rolling.”
The film has a few glimpses of how Coleman has flourished in more conventional settings, such as his 2017 solo show at the Begovich Gallery at California State University, Fullerton. (Even then, the white cube gallery space was painted a deep red.)
Crowds at the opening of “Carnival, Curated by Joe Coleman” at Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: by Christos Katsiaouni, courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
But for the most part, the filmmakers stay firmly planted in Coleman and Ward’s world. Their home, now in an old Victorian upstate where they moved in 2020, is a veritable museum that he’s christened the “Odditorium” and hopes to open to private tours. The artist credits a childhood trip to Times Square to see the old Hubert’s Museum—a Coney Island-style attraction where Madame Tussaud’s wax museum now stands—for his fascination with the fun house aesthetic. (The original painting advertising the Hubert’s flea circus, from about 1935, is included in “Carnival.”)
“There was this kind of chamber of horror, with a woman in wax, and this one little door with a tiny window on it.
And you could see this eye staring through this opening. It was frightening, but fascinating,” Coleman said. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
I said ‘When I grow up, that’s where I wanna live.
In the place that has the burlesque, the sideshow, the wax museum.’”
Johnny Meah, Boy changing to girl (1989). Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Darkness clearly fascinates Coleman, who has made paintings about drug use, murderers, and serial killers. (His piece inspired by the so-called Slenderman stabbing even led to a lawsuit with HBO.) But How Dark My Love is at its heart a love story—and Door to Whitney is nothing if not a labor of love.
“It was hard to finish because I didn’t want to stop making it, if that makes any sense,” Coleman admitted. “And Whitney told me that she missed me making her, because that I would constantly be asking her questions.”
The film indulges Coleman and Ward’s quirkiness, but it also acknowledges the realities of what it means to be an artist in New York City. Because he spent so many years singularly devoted to Doorway to Joe and then Doorway to Whitney, Coleman wasn’t making or selling anything else. (Coleman didn’t want to talk prices, but his record at auction, set in 2011 at Christie’s New York, is $98,500, according to the Artnet Price Database.)
Joe Coleman paints with jeweler’s glasses in a still from How Dark My Love (2025). Photo: by Gregg de Domenico.
As the film goes on, the need to sell the painting so they don’t go broke is very real. Doorway to Whitney is unveiled to great fanfare during Art Basel Miami Beach, as part of Deitch’s 2015 “Unrealism” show with dealer Larry Gagosian.
Seeing the work in person today, reunited with Doorway to Joe at Jeffrey Deitch, is not to be missed—although they have plenty of competition amid the eye-catching display, which includes paintings hanging from the ceiling by Johnny Meah, who’s been called “the last carnival sideshow banner painter.”

There is a full-scale, bedazzled carousel by Raúl de Nieves, and an interactive Narcissister sculpture in which you crank a bike pedal to activate a praxinoscope—a kind of spinning flip book that creates animation—cheekily nestled amid the pubic hair of a female circus performer mannequin clad in sequined-trimmed pink spandex.
And then there’s a life-size wax model of Johnny Eck, a sideshow performer born without legs due to a rare congenital disorder affecting the development of the lower spine. Coleman has brought together a collection of archival photographs from Eck’s life and career, as well as puppets that Eck made himself and the working Railmaster train that he used to bring with him to fairs and carnivals across the country for children to ride. (It’s one of only two surviving models, built by Bruce Rowell in the 1940s.)

Another highlight is Dedicated to Coney Island (1984–2002), Tom Duncan’s mechanized miniature of the boardwalk and amusement park at Coney Island, crafted over the course of nearly 20 years from found objects.
You’ll spot life-size funerary sculptures of Coleman and Ward lying in caskets in their wedding garb by Ghanaian artist Theophilus Nii Anum Sowah, who specializes in fantasy coffins.
Also from Coleman’s personal collection is a waxen effigy of the martyred St. Agnes said to contain a piece of her actual bone, displayed next to wax figures of serial killer Richard Ramirez and cult leader Charles Manson by Hollywood practical effects sculptor Henry Alvarez. And there are elaborate nautical-themed costumes that Ward made for the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, where she and Coleman are the reigning king and queen.
Installation view of “Carnival” curated by Joe Coleman. Two paintings by Derrick Adams are displayed next to an Octopus Mermaid Queen costume designed by his wife, Whitney Ward, with Mr. Gorgeous, for the 2024 Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
The exhibition grew out of his most recent book, A Doorway to Joe: The Art of Joe Coleman. When it came out last fall, Deitch, who had included the artist in group shows in the past, agreed to interview him at a talk promoting the 450-page tome.
“After, Jeffrey had a big party at his home, and he and I got to talking. He just got it in his head that he wanted me to curate this carnival show,” Coleman said. (Deitch has long had a fondness for Coney Island, curating the “Coney Island Walls” outdoor street art museum from 2015 to 2018.)
Installation view of “Carnival” curated by Joe Coleman, showing a wax figurine of sideshow performer Johnny Eck, and his train. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
It proved the perfect partnership, with Deitch there to help bring in contemporary artists exploring carnival-related themes to go with the works that Coleman picked out, including by his friends from the burlesque, sideshow, and Mardi Gras communities.
“Those really complement the show in a really great way and go perfectly with the older, you know, crazy stuff,” Coleman said, “I didn’t have access to them, but Jeffrey did.”
KAWS, UNTITLED (BELIEVE IT OR NOT), 1998. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
That’s not entirely true. The street artist Chris “DAZE” Ellis is a longtime friend due to their shared interest in Coney Island. And there is also a piece by KAWS, who has become well-known as a collector with a penchant for Outsider art, and included Coleman in a show of his holdings at New York’s Drawing Center.
And the film has a few celebrity cameos from fans of Coleman’s work such as singer Iggy Pop and guitarist Dave Navarro. He also has a studio visit with actor and filmmaker Asia Argento, a friend who appears in the Whitney painting and also cast Coleman in her debut film, Scarlet Diva (2000), in a role inspired by her alleged sexual assault at the hands of producer Harvey Weinstein.
Joe Coleman and Whitney Ward at the opening of “Carnival, Curated by Joe Coleman” at Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: by Christos Katsiaouni, courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Less sympathetic is Coleman’s time with a friend and painting subject, Sam “Sammytown” McBride, a punk singer for the band Fang who killed his girlfriend, Dixie Lee Carney. It’s a reminder that many of Coleman’s works depict, if not celebrate, humanity’s darkest impulses, blurring light and shadow.
“It’s a show that you can keep going back to and finding more,” said Coleman.
”And the same is true for my paintings, too.”
“Carnival, Curated by Joe Coleman” is on view at Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, New York, New York, May 3–June 28, 2025.
How Dark My Love is screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, AMC 19th St. East 6, 890 Broadway, New York, New York, June 12, 3 p.m.; June 13, 9:15 p.m.; and June 15, 8:15 p.m. More

Art Basel, the art world’s premiere art fair, is once again upon us, returning to its namesake Swiss city from June 19 to 22, with VIP days on the June 17 and 18. While there’s plenty of art to see at the fair, we recommend getting out of the Messe and into the city for a bit. There, an abundance of top-tier exhibitions await, from a recently rediscovered nightlife scene by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at the Kunstmuseum Basel to a major survey of Vija Clemins’s work at the Fondation Beyeler.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at Kunstmuseum Basel
While in Basel, you must make a pilgrimage to see Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s long-lost Tanz im Varieté (1911). This work’s public reappearance after a century in private hands is a genuine art historical event. Acquired at Ketterer Kunst in June 2024 for €6.96 million (approx. $7.5 million) by the Im Obersteg Foundation, the painting was subsequently restored after surviving both wartime concealment and physical damage by occupying soldiers.
Kirchner, captivated by dance and drawn to Black models and performers, made dozens of sketches from nightlife scenes, which he later transformed into iconic works like Tanz im Varieté. A striking tribute to Berlin’s prewar cabaret scene, the work captures a so-called cakewalk performance between a Black male dancer and a white female partner, set against a dreamlike theater backdrop. It reflects Kirchner’s fascination with movement, modernity, and the expressive potential of the human body—particularly outside bourgeois norms.—Kate Brown
Medardo Rosso, “Inventing Modern Sculpture” at Kunstmuseum Basel 
Medardo Rosso, Enfant au soleil (1891–1892) featured in “Inventing Modern Sculpture” at Kunstmuseum Basel. Credit: Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Photo: Max Ehrengruber.
French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire called Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) “the greatest living sculptor” in 1918, yet the Turin-born artist has not received the same recognition as his contemporary Auguste Rodin. The Kunstmuseum Basel aims to change that with its exhibition “Inventing Modern Sculpture,” which features around 50 sculptures and 250 photographs and drawings. This retrospective explores Rosso’s pioneering artistic approach at the turn of the century and highlights his lasting influence on contemporary art by displaying works by over 60 artists alongside his own. This is Switzerland’s first major Rosso exhibition in 20 years, showcasing rarely seen works from outside Italy—a must-see for anyone visiting Basel. The exhibition runs through August 10. —Vivienne Chow
Maison Clearing
The pastoral home of Maison Clearing. Photo courtesy Clearing.
The Clearing gallery has taken part in the last three editions of Art Basel, but this time the New York and Los Angeles outfit has opted instead to set up shop in a capacious-looking house about 10 minutes from the Messeplatz, at Bannwartweg 39. (Mark it on your map now.) Works by more than 40 artists will be on offer in its many rooms—and its gardens, which measures an astonishing 10,000 square feet.
Notable names include Sebastian Black, Violet Dennison, Ryan Foerster, Tobias Kaspar, Zak Kitnick, and Anne Libby. Writer Olamiju Fajemisin, who recently joined the firm as its director of programming, will curate. Maison Clearing, as the project is titled, will include screenings in the residence’s attic and al fresco dining. A nice bonus: While a ticket to Art Basel runs 69 Swiss francs (about $84) this year, admission is free.—Andrew Russeth
Thomas Ott at Cartoonmuseum Basel
Thomas Ott at his solo show “From Scratch” (2025) at Cartoonmuseum Basel. © Cartoonmuseum Basel. Photo: Derek Li Wan Po.
A visit to Cartoonmuseum Basel may not be the first stop for the typical Art Basel crowd, but it’s well worth exploring. Located in Basel’s old town, the museum has been housed in a building renovated by Herzog and de Meuron and is featured in this year’s Art Basel VIP program.
During the fair week, the museum is presenting “From Scratch,” the first museum retrospective of award-winning artist and comic book creator Thomas Ott. Born in Zurich in 1966, Ott is celebrated in the German-speaking comics world, debuting with Tales of Error (1989). Known for his masterful scratchboarding and wordless storytelling, Ott creates dark, haunting worlds. He is also an animated filmmaker. The exhibition runs through June 21, and Ott will host two signing sessions at I Never Read, Art Book Fair Basel from June 18 to 21 at Kaserne Basel. —V.C.
Ser Serpas at Kunsthalle Basel
Ser Serpas in her studio. Courtesy de Pinault Collection. Photo : Florent Michel
In a recent New Yorker profile, Serpas was described as a trash-art assemblagist. Put another way, the Los Angeles native has developed an art practice centered on collecting found objects and reimagining them as readymades so transient they seem as if they could vanish as quickly as they appeared. Her recent show at Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection in Paris was haunting with its dreamlike arrangement of sculptures and paintings set in an attic-like space accompanied by an ambient soundtrack.
For her upcoming exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, “Of My Life,” Serpas will present both paintings and sculptures, along with a performative element developed in collaboration with the Margo Korableva Performance Theater from Tbilisi, where she once lived. The theater will reenact select works from its repertoire, engaging directly with Serpas’s sculptures. This show is likely to have particular depth, given that Kunsthalle Basel director Mohamed Almusibli and Serpas have a collaborative history; they co-founded the project space Cherish in Geneva, Switzerland.—K.B.
Irène Zurkinden at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger
Irène Zurkinden. Courtesy Meredith Rosen and the Estate of Irène Zurkinden
This Swiss painter is finally receiving an overdue homecoming. While long recognized in Swiss art circles, Zurkinden’s work has been under-appreciated internationally, despite her significant contributions to 20th-century European modernism. That’s beginning to change, however. At last year’s At Art Basel, Meredith Rosen showcased five oil paintings and 12 drawings spanning 1930 to 1955. Now, this major institutional exhibition—the first of its kind in nearly 40 years—will offer fresh insights into her practice.
Born and based in Basel, Zurkinden spent formative years in Paris, like her friend Meret Oppenheim, where she absorbed the influences of French modernism and Surrealism. Her work often depicts women in solitary yet empowered positions, or in intimate domestic settings. A member of the Basler Künstlergruppe 33 and a close companion of the surrealist Meret Oppenheim, she painted the celebrated artist’s portrait several times.—K.B.
Vija Celmins at the Fondation Beyeler
Vija Celmins, Lamp #1, 1964. © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Photo: Aaron Wax
Vija Celmins exhibitions are exceedingly rare pleasures. So far this decade, the gimlet-eyed artist has had a grand total of two: one at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, where she is based, and the other at Glenstone in Potomac, Md. Now the Beyeler will stage a full survey that includes her tender and disarmingly realistic paintings of subjects like waves and star-filled skies, as well as her rare sculptural pairings, which set a found object (a small stone, say) alongside a copy of gobsmacking verisimilitude.
Viewing Celmins’s work can be humbling, as she invites you to look harder and harder, and then to grapple with your limits. (That great line from Sturtevant could have been said by her: “I create vertigo.”) Her 2018 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, curated by Gary Garrels and Ian Alteveer, remains one of the most satisfying, and beguiling, shows I have ever seen. Who knows when we will get another one?—A.R.
“History of Pharmacy” at the Pharmaziemuseum Basel
A display at the Pharmaziemuseum Basel. Photo courtesy Pharmaziemuseum Basel
Let’s wish a hearty happy birthday to the Pharmaziemuseum Basel, the Pharmacy Museum of the University of Basel, which turns 100 this year! The museum was founded in 1925 by a professor named Josef Anton Häfliger and has collections that may bring to mind the sculptures and installations of Damien Hirst and Mark Dion. Its delights include an alchemist’s workshop, an apothecary’s lab, and three historical pharmacies, one from Innsbruck, Austria, in 1755.
Even the building itself intrigues. Dating to at least the early 14th century, it has served variously as a public bath and the residence of a printer who hosted Erasmus from 1514 to 1516. Did I mention its vast holdings in pharmaceutical ceramics and its store of unusual remedies, like powdered mummies? There is something here to delight everyone. —A.R. More