Eliana Willis

A chatty crowd of people holding wine glasses milled about Goldsmiths, University of London, standing on piles of torn images. The exchanges among the seemingly cheerful group belied the seriousness of the artwork, on view in a solo exhibition titled “Please Enjoy Our Tragedies,” which documents the bleak final hours before a Burmese artist’s dangerous escape from Myanmar in May 2021 after a bloody military coup.
“This is my hello and my goodbye,” the anonymous artist behind the artwork, who goes by Sai, told Artnet News. “I want to try to reach out to people, to show them the evidence of what’s happening [in Myanmar]. Do people here give a fuck? Not really. But they give a fuck when art is rooted in tragedy, and hence the title of the show.”
“Mom was hoping that dad would be released soon,” the artist said. Photo by Vivienne Chow.
Sai, which means mister in the Shan language, said he cannot reveal his full name for safety reasons. His father, Linn Htut, was the chief minister of the Shan state in Myanmar and was a member of the now-jailed former leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which was ousted during the February 2021 coup.
Linn Htut was since sentenced to 16 years in prison on four separate counts of corruption. Sai’s mother is living under 24-hour surveillance.
Sai, who studied at Goldsmiths on a fellowship in 2019, must soon bid farewell to the U.K.: his visa expires in May. Should he choose to return to Myanmar, his life may be at risk.
“My father may die, regardless of what I do,” he said. “My mother may die. I may die. But before that, we have to let people know that this has happened.”
Initially, he planned to campaign on his family’s behalf outside the country. But after trying to reach different human rights organizations and British members of Parliament, he said he felt like his cause had become hopeless.
Faces of Mynamar dictators on the floor. Photo by Vivienne Chow.
According to the latest United Nations human rights report published this week, the junta has been suppressing resistance violently. Those who have been detained have been tortured, suspended from ceilings, injected with drugs, or subject to sexual violence. Nearly 1,700 people have been killed since last year, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
“Atrocities happen every day. Villages are burned, women are being raped, children and babies are killed,” Sai said. “But still, our tragedies are disposable.”
The works on display mirror this narrative. Included are large-scale images and a video that Sai took of his seized family residence in Taunggyi in northern Myanmar, just before he fled the country.
The images are torn, piled up, and discarded on the floor. Beneath them are the exact same images, ripped from gallery walls.
“That’s why you see them lying on the floor. That’s how we are treated,” Sai said. “Everyone shoved us under the carpet. An image may have been torn, but it is still there.”
Sai said the display was inspired by movie posters: when a theatrical release period is over, they are taken down and replaced with posters for new releases. The artworks are accompanied by installations reflecting on the military’s economic empire and fabric sculptures made of political prisoners’ clothing.
“The fabrics that cover our faces are woven in the style of a traditional Shan carpet, created from the clothes of political prisoners abducted by the regime,” the artist said.
Sai said his ongoing series, “Trails of Absence,” is expected to be included in the European Cultural Center’s group show, “Personal Structures,” at Palazzo Bembo during the Venice Biennale.
But whether he will be in attendance isn’t his primary concern.
“I can’t be depressed,” he said. “Maybe one day I will be broken into pieces. But now I’m like a broken machine, and I can only keep going.”
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Heiress, entrepreneur, scammer, prisoner—Anna “Delvey” Sorokin has worn many hats in recent years. Now she can add another to her rack: professional artist. 
Tonight, an exhibition of artworks dedicated to the “Soho Scammer” will go on view in a pop-up exhibition on New York’s Lower East Side—and it will include five drawings made by Sorokin herself. 
Both self-portraits and self-parodies, Sorokin’s cartoon sketches find the convict musing on her own persona. One shows her sunning in a prison yard, glammed out in Miu Miu shades and a Tom Ford blouse. Another depicts her using JPay, a payment platform for inmates. She’s sitting in a chair emblazoned with the word “wanted,” a pair of handcuffs dangles from her hand. “Agent Provocateur tops and accessories,” reads a caption. 
“Free Anna Delvey” is the name of the show, which was curated by artists Julia Morrison and Alfredo Martinez. The latter, like Sorokin, has some experience with prison. Two decades ago, he served time for selling forged Basquiat drawings to collectors. 

While incarcerated, Martinez turned to art, making sardonic drawings that simultaneously spoke to his situation and the follies of the contemporary art world (one even ended up at MoMA)—a similar approach to Sorokin’s.  
When Martinez saw Sorokin’s sketches on her Instagram, he fell for them immediately.
“It caught me right in the feels, someone making sarcastic drawings in prison,” Martinez told Artnet News. 
For months, Martinez tried to get in touch with Sorokin about the work, but had no luck. Finally, he resorted to planting an item declaring his interest in Page Six—and sure enough, that got Anna’s attention. They’ve been communicating on and off ever since. (Sorokin, apparently, is an avid reader of the New York Post, which appears in one of her drawings.)

Martinez said that he’s acted as Sorokin’s assistant in the lead up to the show, which will be on view through March 24 in a nondescript building on Delancey Street. With her permission, he enlarged her pencil-on-paper prison drawings, and in one case, even used watercolors to add some flavor. 
“It’s a con artist turned artist, Alfredo Martinez, helping a fellow con artist make her debut in the art world from prison,” Morrison told the Art Newspaper.
As for the other artworks in the group exhibition, many are portraits of Sorokin. One depicts her as royalty, another as a bunny. Twenty-five percent of sales from the show will go toward Sorokin’s mounting legal fees, Martinez said. (He hadn’t yet decided how to price Sorokin’s own artworks.)
He clearly has an affinity for her—or perhaps an abiding respect. “She doesn’t let the fuckers get her down,” Martinez added.
In all likelihood, Sorokin won’t be able to attend her exhibition debut. Earlier this week, she was released from ICE detention, where she’d spent the better half of the last year, and is now set to be deported to Germany. 
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Nearly 80 years after her death, Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) remains among the world’s most beloved and popular children’s book authors, having sold 250 million copies of books such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
But a new show dedicated to the artist at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum aims to paint a much fuller picture of her life, highlighting Potter’s work in the natural sciences, her stewardship of the English landscape, and her accomplishments as a sheep farmer, as well as her literary success.
“Her legacy can be seen in more than one way,” Annemarie Bilclough, the show’s curator, told Artnet News. “We wanted take a broad view of her achievements beyond her storybooks, because there was such a wide range.”
“Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” is so titled because “the theme of nature underpins everything she did,” she added.
Beatrix Potter, scientific drawings of a ground beetle (ca. 1887).Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy of Frederick Warne and Co. Ltd.
The show, which is accompanied by a gorgeously illustrated monograph published by Rizzoli, features 200 artworks, manuscripts, photographs, and other artifacts, including little-known scientific drawings. (For a time, Potter studied to be a mycologist.)
Though Potter lived until London until she was in her 40s, she grew up in a family that had a deep-seated interest in the natural world, fueling her interest in plants, animals, and the landscape. This passion is reflected even in her earliest artworks, a series of sketchbooks done when Potter was eight, nine, and 10 years old. She began formal art lessons at 12.
“She was already drawing scenes from nature, with flowers and landscapes, almost as part of homeschooling,” Bilclough said. “There is a page of caterpillars, and on the other side, she wrote notes about where they lived and what sort of things they ate and what they looked. But she finishes off mid-sentence, as if she forgot to finish her homework.”
Beatrix Potter, sketchbook kept at age nine, dated March–April 1876. Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
That careful observation of living things is at the heart of “Drawn to Nature,” which is organized in partnership with the National Trust, to which Potter had left the bulk of her manuscripts and watercolors, as well as 4,000 acres of the rural Lake District in northwest England’s Cumbria region.
As a teenager, Potter began vacationing in the area, and fell in love with the picturesque countryside. In 1905, she purchased and moved into the 17th-century farm Hill Top, the first of many properties she bought in the district as part of her efforts to protect the landscape there. (Later in life, Potter actually became a prizewinning breeder of Herdwick sheep.)
Hill Top, the 17th-century farmhouse that was Beatrix Potter’s first property in the Lake District, now a historic site run by the National Trust. Photo ©National Trust Images.
Potter often based her drawings on her real-life pets. During her lifetime, she had 92 of them, including rabbits Peter Piper and Benjamin Bouncer, who became Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, perhaps her best-known characters.
Rupert Potter, Beatrix Potter, aged 15, with her dog, Spot (ca. 1880). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Designed to appeal to Potter fans all ages, the exhibition includes interactive elements and, if you listen carefully, a cheeky soundtrack of mice scrambling in the walls, as if her characters are getting into mischief just out of view.
See more of Potter’s work below.
Beatrix Potter, The Mice at Work: Threading the Needle from The Tailor of Gloucester artwork (1902). Courtesy of Tate, London.
Beatrix Potter, Examples of a Yellow Grisette (Amanita crocea) (1897). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, Studies of bees and other insects (ca. 1895). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, Cornflowers (ca. 1880). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, illustration for Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908). Photo ©National Trust Images.
Beatrix Potter, illustrated letter to Nancy Nicholson (ca. 1917). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, Water lilies, probably on Esthwaite Water (ca. 1906). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, Four rabbits in a burrow (ca. 1895). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, View across Esthwaite Water (1909). Photo ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London, courtesy Frederick Warne and Co Ltd.
Beatrix Potter, illustrated letter to Noel Moore from Heath Park, Birnam, Scotland (1892). Photo courtesy Princeton University Library.
“Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” is on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL, February 12, 2022–January 8, 2023. 
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The interactive exhibition Color Factory, known for its photogenic displays and massive ball pits, is opening its third permanent location, inside Chicago’s Willis Tower.
The 25,000-square-foot space—the Color Factory’s biggest to date—will feature artists from around the world, including Camille Walala, Yuri Suzuki, Tomislav Topic (of the artist duo Quintessenz)  Liz West, Anne Patterson, Christine Wong Yap, Harvey and John, and Michele Bernhardt, as well as four artists with ties to Chicago in Edra Soto, Akilah Townsend, Adrian Kay Wong, and Emilie Baltz.
Longtime Color Factory fans can rest assured that their favorites installations, such as Confetti Accumulation, which constantly rains confetti, will appear in new forms.
“There are certain things that we cannot take off the menu—there would be a revolt if we did not have a ball pit!” CEO Tina Malhotra told Artnet News. “There’s going to be familiar rooms, but with a completely new design and color story, and new concepts with new artists. We like to give our artists the freedom to bring their own perspective and color story.”
Confetti Accumulation at the Color Factory in New York. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Putting together the lineup, Malhotra said she was looking for “artists who are eager to step outside the traditional museum and gallery world,” she said. “When we’re picking artists, we want people who believe in our mission of inspiring joy through the combined power of art and color, and making art accessible.”
For Walala, a French artist who lives in London, the idea of making an interactive installation for the Color Factory was instantly appealing. She’s planning a mirrored maze featuring colorful, geometric patterns, similar to a 2017 installation she did at Now Gallery in London, but inspired by architectural details from important Chicago buildings.
“What I would love to do is bring back your inner child. When you go to the Color Factory, that’s exactly what you get—the excitement of being a child again,” Walala said. “A lot of people are quite intimidated going to art spaces. I want people who come not to feel the pressure of expressing what the art means to them. It’s more about emotion.”
Tomislav Topic, of the artist duo Quintessenz, Central Color Station. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
The Color Factory has spent the past two-and-a-half years planning the new space, which will join two other large-scale art installations in Willis Tower. Olafur Eliasson’s mosaic of curved metal tiles, Atmospheric Wave Wall, was unveiled on the building’s facade in January 2021, and Jacob Hashimoto’s In the Heart of this Infinite Particle of Galactic Dust, a hanging sculpture of paper kite discs hanging from the lobby ceiling.
The Color Factory also has spaces in New York, which opened in 2018, and Housto which followed in 2019. The original Color Factory was unveiled as a pop-up space in San Francisco in 2017, when the craze for immersive art experiences—or Big Fun Art—was still in its infancy. It was an instant hit, extending its planned one-month run to eight-and-a-half months.
“It blew up,” Malhotra said. “It broke the Eventbrite site we were using. The tickets were $30, and they were going on Craigslist for $300!”
In the five years since, the appetite for engaging art experiences has only grown.
“We stand out,” she said. “We’re different from conventional museums. Our experiences really engage all the senses. Smell, touch, taste, sight, sound—and it’s all connected to the art.”
See more works from the featured artists below.
Anne Patterson, Pathless Woods. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Tomislav Topic, of the artist duo Quintessenz, Chang(n)ing Colorways. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Liz West, An Additive Mix. Photo by Stephen Iles, courtesy of the Color Factory.
Liz West, Our Colour. Photo courtesy of the Color Factory.
Yuri Suzuki, The Welcome Chorus. Photo by Kate Radiomargate, courtesy of the Color Factory.
The Color Factory will be on view at Catalog at Willis Tower, 233 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, beginning in June 2022. 
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Dorothea Tanning is known as one of the great Surrealists, but a new show at New York’s Kasmin Gallery reveals a very different side of the artist.
In the artist’s biggest U.S. show in decades, the New York gallery has staged a remarkable showcase of Tanning’s work from between 1947 and 1987. Many of the dreamlike canvases, in washes of color and light, blur the boundaries of figuration and abstraction with fragmented imagery.
The show, titled “Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All,” features works dating from 1947 to 1987. O`rganized in conjunction with the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, it brings together 19 loans, including the show-stopping 1962 canvas Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity), from the Whitney Museum of American Art.
As in many of the works on view, mysterious figures seem to shimmer in and out of focus in the painting. Hazy body parts emerge piecemeal from swaths of vibrant colors.
“Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered,” Tanning wrote in her memoir. “I broke the mirror, you might say.”
Dorothea Tanning, Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity), 1962. Collection of the Whitney Museum, New York. Photo courtesy of the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York.
Yet Tanning, who died in 2012 at the age of 101, remains almost exclusively associated with Surrealism, and for works like her haunting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, an unsettling interior scene of a girl whose hair stands on end, a life-sized doll in a state of undress, and a massive sunflower.
“Dorothea would say, ‘I am a Surrealist, but my art is not necessarily Surrealism,’” Kasmin Gallery director Emma Bowen told Artnet News. “What you think of with Surrealism are these dreamscapes that don’t really make any sense, that are highly figurative and highly rendered.”
But while Tanning’s best-known work tends to be from the 1940s, there’s little knowledge of the very different styles she was working in for most of her life. The show encapsulates her growth over the later years of her career, including after the death of artist Max Ernst, her husband of 30 years, in 1976.
“While she didn’t want to subscribe to specific genres of paintings, she kind of hits them all,” Bowen said. “There’s Expressionism and abstraction and figuration and Mannerism and Impressionism—she’s not doing any of those things specifically, but she’s pulling from them.”
See more works from the show below.
Dorothea Tanning, Pour Gustave l’adoré (1974). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York.
“Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All” at Kasmin Gallery, New York. Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Dorothea Tanning, Far From (1964). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Dorothea Tanning, Philosophie en plein air (1969). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Dorothea Tanning, Portrait de famille (1977). Photo by Diego Flores, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, New York, ©2022 the Destina Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Painting Say It All” is on view at Kasmin Gallery, 509 West 27th Street, New York March 3–April 16, 2022.
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