Eliana Willis

If the African American tradition of quilting has begun to find its place in the contemporary art world, it’s thanks in no small part to Carolyn Mazloomi, a self-taught quilter who has been a champion of the medium for over 55 years.
Since founding the Women of Color Quilters Network in 1985, Mazloomi has worked tirelessly to promote other Black women making quilts, curating exhibitions of their work at no less than 35 museums and publishing 15 books. A strong sense of ethics precluded her from ever including her own quilts—although they’ve been shown over the years in 35 institutions, largely at universities and museums dedicated to textiles, craft, or folk art.
But now, at age 76, Mazloomi is entering a new phase of her career. She just opened her first commercial gallery show, at Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem.
“When I first got involved in quilt-making, it was as a maker,” the artist told me on a video call, “and I want to end my career as a maker, because quilts are my first love.”
Mazloomi met Claire Oliver about seven years ago, while the dealer was representing Bisa Butler, the African American artist who has become well-known for her vibrantly colorful quilted portraits. When Butler first began quilting, it was Mazloomi who served as a mentor, helping teach her the medium.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Ruby’s Courage. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
For years, the Oliver and Mazloomi kept their conversations about other artists who the quilting expert would recommend the dealer check out.
“She’s so humble. Carolyn never talked about her own work,” Oliver told me during a walkthrough of the show. “She would always be like, ‘oh, you need to see this artist or that artist.’”
But while the gallerist was helping younger Black women artists specializing in textile-based work like Butler and Gio Swaby become critical and commercial darlings, Mazloomi was continuing the work she been making for decades.
Her quilts are both tools for social justice and celebrations of the African American story, depicting famous figures such as Ruby Bridges, John Lewis, James Baldwin, and Billie Holiday, as well as telling less familiar stories, like that of Harriet Powers, the first documented African American quilter.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Mother of African Quilting. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
“I think it’s really important now more than ever. At this point in our country, we have over 30 states that have legislated laws restricting the teaching of Black history,” Mazloomi said. “My quilts are visual, historic documents to tell our story, because it’s becoming increasingly difficult [to do so].”
The artist hopes her quilts can help inspire social change, and raise awareness about systemic racism and the role it has played in U.S. history, through to the present day.
“When most people they see quilts, they think about heart and home and warmth and security,” Mazloomi added. “We all as human beings have a relationship with the cloth. It is the first thing we’re swathed in at birth. It’s the last thing that touches our body upon our death. So in telling these stories about civil rights and race relations in this country, the use of quilts is an easy fix. It’s a soft landing. Because people are familiar with cloth, it’s an easy way to tell very difficult stories.”
Carolyn Mazloomi, Strange Fruit #3. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Even before the show’s official opening reception, the largely black-and-white quilts were drawing in passersby from the streets of Harlem.
“Everybody just walking down the street, getting a coffee, eating, going to the bus stop, everybody stops and looks in,” Oliver said, noting that she was constantly having to clean the front windows where people were pressing up against the glass to get a better look.
Visitors are so eager to learn the stories behind each quilt that the gallery has put together a guide to the works, offering biographies for the subjects. Those also include civil rights activist and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, and Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cancer cells became—without her consent—the first immortalized human cell line, used to this day in biomedical research.
Carolyn Mazloomi, The Immortal Legacy of Henrietta Lacks. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
And collectors are responding too—Oliver told me that she has sold many of the works, priced at $65,000 to $95,000, to museums.
Mazloomi’s bold, graphic designs are based largely on photographs, and are reminiscent of woodblock prints. In the background, she often incorporates more traditional quilting patterns into her narrative scenes.
Before she was a quilter, Mazloomi, who grew up in Baton Rouge, was an aerospace engineer. She was a young mother living in Los Angeles when she caught the quilting bug after seeing a book about narrative art quilts while on a business trip to Dallas. Back home, she bought a how-to book and set about teaching herself.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Ida B. Wells: A Crusader for Justice. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Mazloomi still has her very first quilt, made using First Aid cotton when she couldn’t find cotton batting for filling.
“I kept going back to the drug store,” she recalled. “One day I was getting a batch of this cotton and the pharmacist came out and he says, ‘lady, I don’t know who’s sick in your home, but I think you need to get them to the hospital.’”
The first aid supply turned out not to be a good substitute, as the quilt did not survive its first trip through the dryer.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Rainy Day Twins in the Time of Covid. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
“My sons often tease me about that quilt. They say I have to pay them not to show it to anybody,” Mazloomi admitted. “It looks like a fried egg. The middle of it shrunk in all kinds of weird places.”
Founding the Women of Color Quilters Network was a way to learn more about quilting, and to help build a new quilting community, in the tradition of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and other historic groups of African American women quilters.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Voting Rights. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Today, there are about 500 women in the group, down from 1,700 at its peak.
“That’s because most of them have passed away,” Mazloomi said. “Most of our members are between 76 and 104.”
Faith Ringgold, the great artist known for her narrative quilts, for instance, died in April at 93. Though Ringgold wasn’t a member of the network, Mazloomi was a friend, and the first owner of Ringgold’s famous piece Tar Beach (now at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), the sale of which put the younger artist’s three sons through college.
Carolyn Mazloomi, Hands Up … Dont Shoot #2. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Mazloomi wishes the network had been more successful in passing along quilting techniques to the younger generation, but she understands why the labor-intensive practice doesn’t have more adherents.
“When you see how painstaking it is, it’s like birthing a baby. Making a quilt is so time consuming and intense,” she admitted. “But there’s no comparison as to how I feel when I finish making a quilt. I have put so much of myself into the actual making of it, so the making of quilt is a spiritual happening, and the completion of the quilt is an event.”
“Carolyn Mazloomi: Whole Cloth, Narratives in Black and White” is on view at Claire Oliver Gallery, 2288 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, New York, New York, September 3–November 16, 2024. More

You don’t have to be an art history buff to recognize the work of Vincent van Gogh. Many of his most-loved motifs have been reproduced so many times that they are instantly recognizable: Who could mistake the swirling sky from The Starry Night or the mass of bedraggled yellow petals in his Sunflowers series?
In the century since they were acquired in 1924, two of van Gogh’s archetypal paintings have been among the crown jewels of the collection at the National Gallery in London—those most famous sunflowers in a vase as well as Van Gogh’s Chair (1888) have attracted visitors from across the globe.
In celebration of its 200th anniversary, the U.K. institution is further expanding our love and understanding of the artist with a significant new exhibition: “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers,” on view through January 19, 2025. The title refers to the figures that Van Gogh portrayed, but is also inspired by the unique way in which he perceived the world and reimagined it as part of his own artistic universe.
Installation view of “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” at the National Gallery in London. Photo: © The National Gallery, London.
Over 50 works have been loaned, including prize pieces from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. These canvases will be displayed alongside the artist’s drawings, providing additional insight into his vision and process.
We took a look at some of the show’s highlights.

The Sower (1888)
Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower (1888). Photo: © Kunsthaus Zürich.
An agricultural laborer scattering seeds in the cool light of dusk was a subject that Van Gogh returned to repeatedly, creating over 30 drawings and paintings that featured the sower, a biblical figure. These works tended to be constructed using surreal colors like green or orange skies and purple plots of land that are emotionally evocative rather than closely reflecting reality. This mode of expression may have been influenced by fellow Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin who, in 1888, was also living in the southern French town of Arles.

The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Milliet) (1888)
Vincent van Gogh, The Lover (Portrait of Lieutenant Milliet) (1888). Photo: Rik Klein Gotink, © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.
When Van Gogh was living in Arles, France, he enjoyed a friendship with Paul-Eugène Milliet, a second lieutenant of the French army to whom he gave drawing lessons. In a letter to his brother Theo, the artist described how he admired the officer’s way with women, a characteristic also invoked by the portrait’s title. “Milliet’s lucky, he has all the Arlésiennes he wants, but there you are, he can’t paint them, and if he was a painter he wouldn’t have any,” he wrote.

Landscape near the Abbey of Montmajour (1888)
Vincent van Gogh, Landscape near the Abbey of Montmajour (1888). Photo: © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Montmajour Abbey was once a Benedictine monastery built between the 10th and 19th centuries. Van Gogh visited often, repeatedly drawing and painting the ruin amid a rugged landscape. In this example, a protruding rock and surrounding wild grasslands take a position of prominence in the foreground, leaving us to spy the abbey in the distance. Though unusual, this perspective is truthful to the ways in which we encounter the world around us.

The Bedroom (1889)
Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom (1889). Photo: © The Art Institute of Chicago.
While living in Arles, Van Gogh rented four rooms in a building that he called “the yellow house.” He painted both its exterior and this interior view of his bedroom with green shutters, and framed pictures hanging on the wall. Researchers have recently determined, however, that the blue walls are in fact the result of partial discoloration. Originally, the walls were purple, as also referenced in a letter to Theo, in which Van Gogh described a simple but multi-chromatic composition “à la Seurat.”
“In flat tints, but coarsely brushed in full impasto, the walls pale lilac, the floor in a broken and faded red, the chairs and the bed chrome yellow, the pillows and the sheet very pale lemon green, the bedspread blood-red, the dressing-table orange, the washbasin blue, the window green,” he said. “I had wished to express utter repose with all these very different tones.”
The artist also explained to his brother that his decision to flatten the room rather than apply the principles of perspective was intended to recreate the effect of a Japanese print. He had a sizable collection of these works that he often referred to.

The Poet (Portrait of Eugène Boch) (1888)
Vincent van Gogh, The Poet (Portrait of Eugène Boch) (1888). Photo: © Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / Adrien Didierjean.
While living in Arles, van Gogh befriended another painter from Belgium, Eugène Boch. He was immediately drawn to “his distinctive face, like a razor blade, and his green eyes” and was inspired to try out a semi-fantastical portrait concept. It would reflect something of the mind of an artist or a poet, “a man who dreams great dreams, who works like the nightingale sings, because it is his nature to do so.”
“Behind his head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of this shabby apartment, I will paint infinity,” van Gogh decided, in a letter to Theo. “Through this simple combination of the bright head against this rich, blue background, I will obtain a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky”. Van Gogh christened the portrait The Poet and hung it on his bedroom wall.
“Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” is on view at the National Gallery in London until January 19, 2025.  More

Although many women artists gained recognition in their lifetimes, their names have too often fallen into obscurity as art historians privileged the achievements of their male peers. The exhibition “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920” at Tate Britain in London brings together paintings by over 100 artists with a connection to the U.K., debunking the widely held assumption that there were very few significant women artists before the 20th century.
Two women artists, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, for example, were among the founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768. In the centuries since, women have continued to work hard to forge impressive careers against the odds.
Examples of rampant sexism are rife throughout the exhibition. In 1770, the Royal Academy banned many mediums typically associated with women artists, including needle-work and shell-work. Then-president Joshua Reynolds spoke dismissively of work in pastel as “just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement.”
When one artist, Mary Black, asked to be paid for her 1764 portrait of physician Messenger Monsey, he threatened that her expectation of a fee could damage her reputation. He referred to her as a “slut” in a letter to his cousin.
It is also too often assumed that women of the past had only dull and contained existences. From romantic affairs with a U.S. founding father, to brave legal battles, living in a ménage-à-trois, and documenting the Nuremberg trials, these women artists often led unusual lives and had a unique perspective to share with their audiences. Here are six standout artists from the show who lived particularly storied lives.
Maria Cosway (1760–1838)
Maria Cosway, Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (1781-82). Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.
Born in Florence in 1760 to an English father and an Italian mother, Maria Cosway (née Hadfield) narrowly escaped becoming the fifth victim of her family’s murderous nursemaid, who was later imprisoned. Showing natural artistic talents from a young age, she studied under the artists Violante Cerroti and Johann Zoffany in Florence and Pompeo Batoni in Rome.
Shortly after moving to London in her late teens, Cosway debuted her work at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1781 and, over the following two decades, would exhibit some 30 more paintings. She gained critical acclaim for her inventive mythological scenes like Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” a portrait of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire.
Cosway changed her name after marrying the miniaturist Richard Cosway, who initially tried to prevent her from painting professionally. She later speculated that, without this interference to her career, she could have “made a better painter, but left to myself by degrees, instead of improving, I lost what I brought from Italy of my early studies.”
Despite these setbacks, Cosway kept painting and maintained strong connections with the continent. Her friend, the Neo-Classical painter Jacques-Louis David, once said of her engraving The Hours: “One could not create a more ingenious or more natural poetic work.” Later in life, she had a brief affair with founding father and future U.S., president Thomas Jefferson, with whom she bonded over their shared love of the arts.
Florence Claxton (1838–1920)
Florence Claxton, Woman’s Work, A Medley (1861). Photo courtesy of Tate.
Named after the city where she was born in 1838 to English parents, Florence Claxton’s childhood was spent moving between continents. First her family settled in Australia before moving to India, Sri Lanka, and later Egypt. By the time she moved to London, Claxton was around 20 years old. Inevitably, she was something of an outsider to English society and, therefore, able to see it with a keen satirical eye.
Having been trained by her father, an artist, Claxton made a living as an illustrator and started to gain recognition after exhibiting Scenes from the Life of a Female Artist (1858), a series of six humorous ink drawings that would establish her interest in documenting the experiences of women, always with a light, humorous touch. The Choice of Paris: An Idyll (1860) took aim at the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, densely merging together many parodies of specific paintings by male artists to undermine the patriarchal culture of the 19th century art world. In 1870, Claxton wrote and illustrated the comic book The Adventures of a Woman in Search of Her Rights.
The painting Women’s Work: A Medley (1861) is thought to be a rebuttal to Ford Madox Brown’s painting Work, which only focused on examples of men laboring. At the center a young, well-dressed, evidently affluent man lies back on his chair and the golden calf above his head is a symbol that marks him out as a false idol. Around him, some women clamor to win his favor, others engage in dreary domestic tasks, while just a few attempt escape. The work critiques the limited opportunities for professional advancement for Victorian women, forcing them to be reliant on men. Most critics disliked the painting, with one accusing it of “sermonizing on social topics” that were “not within the province of art.”
In 1859, Claxton signed a petition to allow women to join the Royal Academy of Arts and the first woman student, Laura Herford, was admitted a year later. The first woman member of the academy would not be elected until 1922, two years after Claxton died.
Louise Jopling (1843–1933)
Louise Jopling, A Modern Cinderella (1875). Photo courtesy Tate.
One of the most prominent female artists of the Victorian era, Louise Jopling (née Goode) was born in Manchester in 1843. Through her first of three husbands she met the French socialite and painter Baroness de Rothschild, who encouraged her to study art in Paris. She began exhibiting at the Salon in 1868, later showing at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876, and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Admired for her portraits of notable sitters, Jopling worked out of a studio in London’s Chelsea that is captured in A Modern Cinderella. A model takes of a smart dress at the end of a painting session and Jopling’s easel can be spotted reflected in the mirror.
During her marriage to Joseph Middleton Jopling, an artist for the magazine Vanity Fair, she was the family’s main breadwinner and had to maintain an exhaustingly high output. Jopling could also expect to earn less than her male peers. In 1883, she lost out on a commission for which she hoped to be paid 150 guineas. It went instead to John Everett Millais, who was paid 1,000 guineas for the same gig.
Jopling’s social circle quickly grew to include figures like Oscar Wilde, actress Ellen Terry, and Whistler, who also painted her. As well as becoming a regular at glamorous parties on the London social scene, Jopling was a passionate supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. She set up her own painting school for women where the students were allowed to work directly from live nude models, a radical act at a time when other schools only allowed women to draw partially clothed models.
Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907)
Edmonia Lewis, Bust of Christ (1870). Photo courtesy The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart.
Edmonia Lewis, also known as “Wildfire,” was born in 1844 in New York state to an African American father and a Native American (Ojibwe) mother. She is celebrated as one of the first Black women artists to gain international renown.
Orphaned at a young age, Lewis recalled a “wandering” childhood spent “fishing and swimming… and making moccasins.” When she attended school, she was “declared to be wild–they could do nothing with me.” She later enrolled at Oberlin, one of the first U.S. colleges to accept Black students, though she experienced racism and sexism throughout her time there.
In one case, she was charged with attempting to poison two friends who she had served spiced wine before they fell ill. She was attacked by unknown assailants before standing trial, where she was successfully defended by Ohio’s first Black lawyer John Mercer Langston. Eventually, Lewis dropped out of Oberlin but was posthumously awarded her degree in 2022.
Lewis began her career in Boston sculpting prominent abolitionists. In her early 20s, she moved to Rome where she became part of a vibrant community of artists and expats and would remain for two decades.
“I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color,” she later recalled. “The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.”
Lewis began sculpting in the Neoclassical style. The marble bust of Jesus Christ on view at Tate Britain was produced for the Scottish aristocrat and antiquarian John Crichton-Stuart, Third Marquess of Bute. In 1877, she made a portrait of ex-U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant. Lewis moved to Paris in around 1896 and then, in 1901, to London, where she spent her final years.
Clare Atwood (1866–1962)
Clare Atwood, Olympia in War Time Royal Army Clothing Depot, 1918. Photo courtesy Imperial War Museum, London.
Born in London in 1866, Clare Atwood is known for painting a great range of subjects that include portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and interior scenes in large, public spaces. During the First World War, she painted war scenes for the Canadian Government and later documented the daily activities of the Women’s Voluntary Service in a group of works commissioned by the Imperial War Museum.
One of these, Olympia in War Time: Royal Army Clothing Depot, 1918, shows a bustle of activity in a disused train station as workers are dwarfed by towering bundles of army uniforms.
Atwood lived openly as a lesbian who sometimes went by the name “Tony.” She lived with two partners, the writer Christabel “Chris” Marshall and the theater producer Edith “Edy” Craig, in Kent, and the trio’s social circle included many artists and writers. Their friend, the sculptor Una Troubridge, who was in a relationship with Marguerite “John” Radclyffe Hall, sometimes referred to them as “Edy and the boys.”
Laura Knight (1877–1970)
Laura Knight, A Dark Pool (1917). All rights reserved 2024 / Bridgeman Images, © Estate of Dame Laura Knight.
Born in England’s Midlands, Laura Knight (née Johnson) grew up in financial precarity after her father deserted her family. By the age of 13, she was enrolled at the Nottingham School of Art where her mother taught, but just two years later was forced to take over her mother’s job when she fell ill with cancer. Orphaned by her late teens, Knight continued to make a living through private tutoring and ended up marrying fellow student Harold Knight. The pair moved to Cornwall and joined an artists’ colony.
In 1913, frustrated by the expectation that women learn to draw from copying casts rather than live nude models, Knight produced Self-portrait with Nude. It was the first time a female artist was depicted painting a nude model. The bold work was well-received by some but rejected for an exhibition at the Royal Academy and labelled “vulgar” by a critic for The Daily Telegraph. The work is now held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
Knight was drawn to subjects that were often overlooked by traditional portrait painters. While living briefly in Baltimore in 1926, she became friends with and depicted the nurse Pearl Johnson who took her to meetings for the emerging Civil Rights movement. During the 1930s, she befriended a group of travelers who she often painted in works like Old Gypsy Women (1938) and Gypsy Splendour (1939).
In 1946, Knight documented the Nuremberg trials for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, from which her most famous painting contains a semi-fantastical scene in which Nazi war criminals are set against the burning ruins of a destroyed cityscape. Amazingly, Knight was the third woman to be elected as a member of the Royal Academy in 1936 and received their first retrospective for a woman artist in 1965.
“Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920” is on view until October 13, 2024 at at Tate Britain, London. More

Twice a day, the River Thames flows out towards the North Sea exposing miles of briny clay banks. During these windows of low tide, one of Britain’s largest archaeological site emerges and Londoners have long scoured the foreshore in search of all the city has lost, forgotten, or discarded.
The practice is called mudlarking, a term drawn from 18th and 19th-century mudlarks who eked out a living scavenging for scraps of metal, rope, coal, or anything else sellable. It was predominately the occupation of impoverished children and was grueling, hazardous work. Tides can shift suddenly and London’s factories pumped industrial detritus straight into the river.
Print of Peggy Jones, a well-known mudlark, produced in 1805. Photo: © London Museum.
Today, the tradition of mudlarking is continued by committed hobbyists who search for artifacts from London’s past, sometimes with the aid of a metal detector. Prehistoric hunter gathers relied on the river, so too did the Romans, Vikings, and Normans as the Thames served as Britain’s main thoroughfare from the Middle Ages through to the Industrial Revolution. There is, in short, much to uncover; the oxygen-free nature of the Thames foreshore makes it an excellent preservative.
Mudlarking taking place between Millennium Bridge and Southwark Bridge. Photo: © London Museum.
Modern mudlarking is a permitted affair. Mudlarks may dig (though scraping is preferable) no deeper than four feet and are required to report all finds more than 300 years old to a dedicated office at the London Museum, which then records and researches the items. This process will be explored at the museum as part of “Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London’s Lost Treasures,” the first major exhibition on the tradition, opening in 2025.
The exhibition builds on decades of collaboration between the museum and the mudlarking community, one that grew during 2020. “We have built a hugely significant collection that is held within the museum,” said curator Kate Sumnall, who has worked with mudlarks for almost 20 years. “We have tried to encapsulate the thrill of discovery, the meditative quality of the search, and the connection with the past that the Thames offers.”
It’s a roving exhibition that investigates miscellaneous moments in London’s history, one discovery at a time. Each object conjures a cultural moment in time and the specter of the person who once owned it.
Gold finger ring (mid 15th century) with an engraved band with inscription, “For Love I am Given.” Photo: © London Museum.
The earliest artifact is an early Bronze Age flint arrowhead which dates back 3,000 years. Another weapon on display is a 10th-century iron dagger known as a scramasax, from which the name Saxons is derived. It’s a finely worked thing, inlaid with silver, and marked with the owner’s name, Osmund. Later still, is a 16th century whistle used by a naval officer to communicate over the roar of wind and wave (the pitch could be altered). It’s made from pewter and features a lion whose tail curves into a convenient loop.
Bosun’s whistle (1550–1600). Photo: © London Museum.
Elsewhere, we encounter domestic discoveries. There’s a toy cauldron dating from the 15th or 16th century that is an exact copy of those placed over open fires to cook food. There’s a pair of late Medieval spectacles designed to bend snugly around the nose and served both short and long sightedness. There’s a set of early 18th-century false teeth made of carved ivory. They were bespoke and would have been remarkably expensive, the museum noted.
Tudor knitted woolen cap (ca. 1500–1600) found on the foreshore by mudlark Alessio Checconi. © Alessio Checconi.
Perhaps most remarkably, given its material and age, is a 500-year-old woolen Tudor cap. It’s an affordable imitation of velvet versions that were fashionable for upper-class women. Few such caps have survived.
“There are traces of everyday lives,” said Sumnall. “The food eaten, the clothes worn, their faith, skills and trade. These little insights all build up into the bigger picture of London.”
“Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London’s Lost Treasures” will be on view at the London Museum Docklands, 1 West India Quay, Hertsmere Road, London, April 4, 2025–March 1, 2026. More

“You can see the inside of the building outside” is how Olafur Eliasson described the sprawling facility that’s been housing the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA for more than four decades. It’s an apt observation as the interior of the structure—once a city warehouse, then a police car garage—is indeed reflected in its industrial exterior, forged with concrete, glass, and steel. But at his new exhibition within the space, Eliasson, as is his practice, is attempting a fresh way of experiencing the museum: by bringing its outside inside.
Now on view, “Olafur Eliasson: OPEN” takes over the entirety of MOCA Geffen with about a dozen site-specific installations commissioned by the institution, as well as other recent pieces. While individually distinct, the latest works all emerge from Eliasson’s ongoing inquiries into how color, light, and geometry in concert can reshape and reawaken perception and environmental awareness. The exhibition marks the Icelandic-Danish artist’s first major outing in Los Angeles, as part of the fourth edition of South California-wide Getty initiative, PST ART.
Olafur Eliasson, Kaleidoscope for beginning at the end (2024). Photo: Olafur Eliasson © 2024 Olafur Eliasson; Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; neugerriemschneider, Berlin © 2024 Olafur Eliasson.
“I’ve been very interested in slowness,” he said in opening remarks at the exhibition’s preview. “Slowing down is part of opening up. It’s in slowing down your attention that you suddenly see more than you thought you would see.”
The main gallery delivers on Eliasson’s promise. Centered here are a handful of observation towers, tapering up toward the ceiling, under which visitors are invited to glance skyward. What they’ll see are the artist’s signature kaleidoscopic sights, formed by light and mirrors, that conjure his speculative futures (a yellow-tinged solar future circulating with plastic garbage bags, say). Other towers offer glimpses out the museum’s skylights, reflected by mirrors and LED strips, which allow the works to shift with the weather and time of day.
Inside Olafur Eliasson’s Viewing machine for imagining oceanic futures (2024) at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen.
In another gallery stands a pair of nondescript triangular devices. But peer into their apertures and you’ll find complex spheres containing myriad other geometric forms, created once again with colored lights and mirrors. It’s a technique the artist has perfected over more than two decades. Even as you discover the optical trick, the kaleidoscopic effects still wow the eye.
Olafur Eliasson, Kaleidoscope for uncertainty and surprises (2024) at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen
A colorful sculpture of a rhombic triacontahedron hangs nearby, seemingly bringing those prismatic illusions into reality—its combination of polarizing filters and plastic amplifying the mind-boggling interaction between light and shapes. The work bears the apt title, Your changing atmosphere.
Olafur Eliasson, Your changing atmosphere (2024) at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen.
The museum’s environs also fuel another work: Weather-drawing observatory for the future (2024), a giant drawing machine, its stylus equipped with ink, that creates marks based on meteorological data. A new drawing is created each day, its patterns determined by factors including temperature and solar radiation. When I visited, the machine had already produced a wonderfully detailed radial composition based on the day’s balmy weather. Drawings from past days will be hung around the gallery, in a display that will evolve as the exhibition progresses.
Olafur Eliasson, Weather-drawing observatory for the future (2024) at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen.
Typical of Eliasson’s productions, the throughline of audience engagement runs through his new pieces. Save for Weather-drawing, the bulk of his latest commissions invite visitors to interact with them, to see through their lenses, and to play. As Eliasson noted, with the exhibition, “we are trying to democratize the accessibility to art… This is like, ‘You are welcome.’”
Visitors gazing up at one of Olafur Eliasson’s observational towers at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen.
That’s most evident in Your sunset shadow, an installation, tucked at the rear of the exhibition space, which shines 11 color-filtered spotlights against a large white wall. When visitors pass through the beams of light, they cast gradated, dusk-tinged silhouettes, which change proportion and intensity depending on their position. The work evolves from Eliasson’s 2010 piece, Your uncertain shadow (which was recently featured, along with the artist, in Peggy Gou’s “1+1=11” music video). Like its predecessor, this iteration offers immersive, Instagram-ready fun.
A visitor interacting with Olafur Eliasson’s Your sunset shadow (2024) at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen.
Eliasson himself appears to not have sat out on the exploratory play. A wall in a gallery features his series of “Seeing Paintings,” the latest in his color experiments, which he began more than a decade ago. These new circular creations were made by ice melting in a pool of blank ink, leaving arbitrary stains and trails that spread out from the center toward an outer ring of colored paint. They’re a record of time as much as Eliasson’s own abiding embrace of unpredictability.
It’s an openness that the artist emphasized at the preview, as he ran through a manifesto-esque list that guided the exhibition (and is printed on tote bags available at the MOCA Geffen store). The show’s title, he noted, is purposeful.
“Am I open to my vulnerability? Am I open to other’s perspectives?” he said. “Am I open to sharing? This is why I am here today: I am very much in the spirit of wanting to share, [even] my uncertainty and inconclusiveness. [I want to] lean into that unknown-ness that might create space for your own story. The show is open to your interpretation, your own view, your own world.”
“Olafur Eliasson: OPEN” is on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 N Central Ave, Los Angeles, California, September 15, 2024–July 6, 2025. More

To call attention to the climate change crisis, New York’s American Museum of Natural History is teaming up with French artist JR on an installation of photographic portraits titled “Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry.”
The project is part of the museum’s growing efforts to put science and art in conversation, Jacqueline Handy, the museum’s director of public programs, told me. “It’s connecting with folks and I think will reach people in a way that we haven’t before.”
JR’s “Inside Out Project” set up shop outside the museum in Theodore Roosevelt Park with its photo booth truck last week. Over the course of three days, the truck captured 736 black and white images—my infant son and I were among several mom and baby double portraits—each printed out on the spot for participants.
The project also recorded 175 testimonies, with sitters sharing their thoughts about climate change and the risks it poses to our planet and civilization.
A long line of people waiting to take their portrait with JR’s “Inside Out Project” photo booth truck for “Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry” at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Photo by Alvaro Keding, ©AMNH.
“It’s just saying that we are all impacted by climate change and we can all be a part of the solution,” Handy said.
Many of the audio messages came from Indigenous filmmakers who are being featured in “The Wayfinders Film Series: Indigenous Wisdom Leading in the Climate Crisis,” another climate-themed event taking place at the museum for Climate Week NYC, taking place September 22–29.
The museum’s Climate Week events are also part of Canopy, an citizen art and science festival and network from Wellcome and Climate Group launching this month.
An installation of portraits taken by JR’s “Inside Out Project” photo booth truck for “Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry” on view in the Ellen V. Futter Gallery at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Photo by Alvaro Keding, ©AMNH.
It was an upbeat atmosphere outside the truck when I visited the truck, the late afternoon sun filtering through the trees on a beautiful late summer day. There was a long line of people waiting to get their photo taken, but they were cheering excitedly each time someone stepped outside of the photo booth and picked up their portrait.
“It seems like we bribed to New York to give us the best days of the year for this—folks have been in good spirits and really just want to participate,” Handy said.
A woman getting her portrait taken by JR’s “Inside Out Project” photo booth truck for “Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry” at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Photo by Daniel Kim, ©AMNH.
That’s often the case with the “Inside Out Project,” which JR launched in 2011 with his $100,000 winnings from the TED Prize. He wanted any community to be able to create their own versions of the large-scale black and white photographs he is known for wheat-pasting around the world.
To date, the project has held events in 152 different countries, taking over 560,000 portraits. Most of the time, a partnering organization takes the photos themselves, and JR’s team edits, prints, and ships them back. But there are also “Inside Out Project” trucks based in New York and Paris, which have traveled to 18 countries, taking over 270,000 portraits at 122 different events.
“The ‘Inside Out Project’ is really a platform for people to spread all sorts of messages. So there’s been actions about climate change, but also about diversity, feminism, human rights, and other issues” Camille Rousselet, the project coordinator, told me. “The goal is really to give the tools to people to create their own art installations and spread their voices.”
An installation of portraits taken by JR’s “Inside Out Project” photo booth truck for “Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry” on view in the Ellen V. Futter Gallery at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Photo by Alvaro Keding, ©AMNH.
For “Portraits on Climate and Health,” those voices will be heard in two places in the museum. The walls of the museum’s 77th entryway (named after longtime former president Ellen V. Futter) have been papered over with select portraits from the projects, for an exhibition that officially begins September 23.
The full selection of images will be shown in a projection in the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation—the cavernous new expansion that opened last year. And you can also check out all the portraits and the accompanying testimonials on the “Inside Out Project” website.
“Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry” is on view at the American Museum of Natural History, 200 Central Park West, New York, New York, in the Ellen V. Futter Gallery, September 23–30, 2024; and in the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation September 23–27, 2024. More