Eliana Willis

One of the world’s only green dinosaur fossils will soon go on view in a new wing of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.
“It’s pretty green. It’s not neon green. But it has a distinct green color… which is truly unique,” Luis M. Chiappe, the curator of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute, said in a phone interview. “There is no other dinosaur like that in the world.”
Gnatalie, measuring 75-feet long, is described as Diplodocus-like dinosaur—a typical dinosaur species in the same group as the famed Brontosaurus. It came from what the team calls the Gnatalie Quarry in southeastern Utah, not far from a town called Bluff. Chiappe said he believes Gnatalie is a new species, yet to be publicly named. “But the official name in the study has not been published,” he said. “So, at the moment, we’re just saying it is Diplodocus-like and leaving it at that.”
Gnatalie is seen mounted inside of a new wing at L.A.’s Natural History Museum. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
The skeleton appears to be a mix between two well-known diplodocids, a family of dinosaurs in the sauropod group. In this case, the green dinosaur appears to be a mix between Barosaurus and Diplodocus.
“The neck is much more like Barosaurus, and the hip and the tail are more like Diplodocus,” Chiappe said. “So, we’re naming a new species.”
The specimens used in the Gnatalie mount were discovered in 2007, buried in what was a riverbed in Utah about 150 million years ago, during the late Jurassic period. Other specimens from other dinosaur species were also found at the site, in digs led by Chiappe.
Preparators are seen working on Gnatalie. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County
To maximize the real bone in the skeletal mount, the paleontologists combined five or six specimens from the same species—but the bulk of the green dinosaur’s composition comes from two more-complete specimens. The Frankenstein-ed fossils all have a unique green color caused by the mineral celadonite infilling the bone during the fossilization process.
“By doing that, we end up with a mount that’s made of about 80 percent real bone. Otherwise, we would have had maybe 30 percent of a single individual of this species,” Chiappe said. “It’s what we call a composite and that’s something very typical of many dinosaur mounts around the world. Dinosaurs are very rarely found complete, particularly the big ones.”
He added that the Natural History Museum believes in authenticity and wants to show museum-goers the real thing, rather than replicated parts. Still, there’s about 20 percent of replica bones in the mount because the team didn’t have the pieces needed to complete it.
Gnatalie’s feet are seen at their arrival and installation. Photo courtesy of Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County
And though the name Gnatalie implies the dinosaur is female, Chiappe said “there’s no way to tell” its actual gender, especially since multiple specimens were used in its composition.
Before its display, Gnatalie’s specimens were packed and shipped to Ontario, Canada, for armature and “mount” fabrication. Over the summer, Los Angeles residents voted to keep the nickname long used by the dig team, which was plagued by “stinging gnats that pestered its excavators during the digs.”
NHM Commons exterior. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County © Benny Chan.
Gnatalie is considered one of the “star attractions” for the opening of the new $75 million NHM Commons wing and community hub on the southwest side of the museum’s campus on November 17. The massive new facility and its grounds will allow the museum to expand programming while offering open spaces for community use.
The expansion will also feature Barbara Carrasco’s once-censored mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, which is woven with vignettes from the city’s history, with an emphasis on the perspectives of marginalized communities.
Judith Perlstein Welcome Center. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County © Benny Chan.
The day after opening, the museum will debut the film T.Rex 3D to share its latest research into the notorious terrible lizard, narrated by Sam Neill of Jurassic Park fame, followed by a new show featuring prehistoric and contemporary sea creature puppets on November 23.
“The Commons is a community space that allows us also to showcase some of our work that has been very community-based,” Chiappe said. “Hundreds of people over the years went to collect Gnatalie. The Carrasco mural also engaged lots of artists. So, the Commons is really a reflection of the community-based work that the museum does.” More

In 1954, experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger unleashed Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. What his 38-minute opus lacked in narrative, it more than made up for with a flamboyance of style. And though made in the heart of Hollywood, the short film was far removed from the movie-making glamour and machinery of Los Angeles. In fact, Pleasure Dome, which loosely unfolds a fete hosted by the Great Beast itself, unpacked an alternative L.A., one steeped in the avant-garde, the occult, and the magickal.
This history and vision of the city—running concurrent if not underground of its leading industry—fills “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation,” an exhibition at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries in L.A. Co-curated by Alexis Bard Johnson, Kelly Filreis, and Quetzal Arevalo, the show explores how the occult, queer, and science fiction scenes mixed, mingled, and shaped visual culture in the metropolis between the 1930s and ’60s.
Installation view of “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Min Chen.
“While the exhibition is physically divided into ‘occult’ and ‘sci-fi’ rooms, we wanted to emphasize that the figures involved in these communities were deeply intertwined and inspired each other,” the curators told me in a joint interview over email, “whether that is directly within their shared social networks, or indirectly through the production and circulation of films, magazines, photographs, and artworks.”
Pleasure Dome offers a prime nexus: the film emerged from Anger’s occult leanings—particularly his interest in Aleister Crowley’s esoteric philosophy Thelema—and featured a cast of characters who were active in L.A.’s underground. Amongside them was Samson de Brier, the queer actor and occultist in whose home the movie was filmed; Curtis Harrington, filmmaker and a queer cinema pioneer; and Renate Druks, painter of the supernatural.
Renate Druks, Self-portrait (state of mind) (1967). Courtesy of The Ranch, Montauk.
Within a deep red gallery, “Queer L.A.” unearths Harrington’s early experimental films and Druks’s enchantingly surreal paintings, as well as Crowley’s Thoth Tarot deck, created by artist Frieda Harris in the 1930s (it’s still in print). They lead into a deeper space in which are arrayed relics from the Scottish Rite Temple—a Masonic house of worship on Wilshire Boulevard, now the Marciano Art Foundation—including the recreation of a massive painted backdrop originally made by the same artists who worked on 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.
Viewed together, these objects bring to life a society joined by philosophy as much as creative expression, making it an especially tolerant venue, the curators said, for queer folk and avant-gardists with unconventional lifestyles.
“Directly challenging social and religious institutions, the occult provides queer people opportunities for self-determination, the reinvention of identity through nicknames and alter-egos, costuming and ritual performance,” they added. “They are both based around processes of inner transformation and self-discovery.”
Installation view of “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Min Chen.
The era’s sci-fi fandom also provided such an outlet. In researching the exhibition some five years ago, Johnson and ONE Archives director Joseph Hawkins were mystified to find that the archives, amassed by writer and gay rights historian Jim Kepner, contained “so many science fiction materials in [an] otherwise primarily LGBTQ+ collection.” The curators would later discover Kepner’s intersecting interests in activism and science fiction: he was a member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS), collected a host of sci-fi ephemera, and edited Toward Tomorrow, a leftist sci-fi magazine.
Kepner’s sci-fi bona fides touch off the sci-fi segment of “Queer L.A.,” which untangles the many threads of the fandom through costumes, fanzines, paintings, and other historic artifacts. Margaret Brundage’s original artworks for the 1930s covers of Weird Tales paint her heroines in fearless and sapphic light; Morris Dollens’s photomontages juxtapose his photographs of the male form against otherworldly landscapes; while a pair of garments made and worn by science fiction fans Forrest J Ackerman and Myrtle Douglas to a 1939 convention represent what the curators call the earliest cosplays in recorded history.
Margaret Brundage, A Rival from the Grave (1936). Courtesy of New Britain Museum of American Art.
The sci-fi fandom, the organizers emphasized, was not an innately queer space, but like occult communities, it “became for some a place where members could be more freely ‘out.’” They added: “This led to the rich visual culture explored throughout the exhibition that embraced hidden codes and rituals, inside jokes, and aesthetics that were intentionally difficult to assimilate into larger society.”
Morris Scott Dollens, The Forest and the Far Land. Courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles.
Again, the sci-fi and occult realms were often not discrete. The curators highlight the life and work of writer and songwriter Lisa Ben, whose papers are held in the ONE Archives. Ben was behind Vice Versa, the first known lesbian magazine in the U.S., that ran from 1947–48, and was active in science fiction communities, where she was known as Tigrina the Devil Doll. Her songs and poems further embraced the occult (1941’s “Hymn to Satan,” for one) in defiance of her Christian roots.
Jim Kepner, cover of Toward Tomorrow no. 2 (June 1944). Courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles.
“Kepner and Ben,” said the curators, “are great examples of how the imaginative possibilities of science fiction allowed its fans to think more expansively about their own lives and beliefs.”
That such expressions flourished in a postwar L.A., too, was significant as the period saw virulent censorship and surveillance targeting art or individuals deemed even remotely subversive by the city’s vice squad (circumstances that the nation is once again facing down). The secrecy necessitated by this work posed a stark contrast to the self-discovery it represented—a tension woven through “Queer L.A.”
Installation view of “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Min Chen.
But perhaps what’s at the heart of the exhibition is a wall printed with a vast “name map” that links its major figures together. Fashioned like a family tree, it locates connections between sci-fi fan Ackerman and Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard via the LASFS; between Kepner and author Ray Bradbury via the zine Voice of Imagi-Nation; and between chemist Jack Parsons and Crowley via Thelema. Pleasure Dome produces no less than six branches.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame it is not. But this network is more resonant for capturing the breadth of artistic output fueled by “the search for identity, belonging, and alternative forms of knowledge,” in the curators’ words. That search, as the map illustrates, unearthed a community.
“Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” is on view at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, 909 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, California, through November 23. More

Last year the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (HSM&L) in Washington Heights reopened after a six-year, $20-million renovation. In 2024, as the jewel-box institution celebrates its 100th anniversary, the treasures amongst its trove of 750,000-plus objects continue to reveal themselves. Its compelling new exhibition is the first of its kind to examine the estrado, a multipurpose domestic space where elite households across the Spanish-speaking world displayed their finest objects. While the estrado’s origins are difficult to trace (it likely dates to the late Middle Ages in Al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled territory of the Iberian Peninsula), by the 15th century, the space became almost exclusively gendered.
A Room of Her Own: The Estrados of Viceregal Spain runs through March 2, 2025, and offers a fascinating glimpse into a lesser known side of the museum’s permanent collection (though its famed Goya portrait of the Duchess of Alba does make an appearance). In addition to paintings, decorative objects, rare books, and engravings comprise the exhibition, exploring these wondrous domicile museums.
An installation view of “A Room of Her Own: The Estrados of Viceregal Spain.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
“I was really interested in researching the lived experiences of women, not just the objects, but female agency and collecting practices,” said Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack, the show’s curator at last week’s opening. “The estrado is extremely prevalent in texts from the golden age of Spanish literature, like Don Quixote, as a metaphor for feminine extravagance and impracticality in the Hispanic world, so it’s shocking to me that it has essentially become all but forgotten.” Rodriguez-Jack explains that today the Spanish word “estrado” typically refers to a witness stand or a political platform, further masking its earlier meaning as a domestic space.
The show’s curator Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack. Photo: Alfonso Lozano. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
In addition to fictional accounts of how the estrado was perceived and the myriad ways it could be adorned, Rodriguez-Jack made sure every object within A Room of Her Own was grounded in research, whether post-mortem inventories, dowries, traveler’s texts, or Inquisition records. Through their consistent descriptions of resplendent interiors and the location of them within their residents’ homes, it is clear that one’s most valuable possessions were often reserved for the estrado as a means to display taste, wealth, status, and particularly in terms of the gendered estrado, a woman’s virtue.
Sewing Box, Mexico, Michoacán, Pátzcuaro (1800). Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
Although explicit references to the estrado are harder to come by in the visual arts, Rodriguez-Jack shares that Peruvian engravings (a prime example of which is on view in the exhibition) and Mexican casta paintings occasionally depict estrado scenes. For the curator, it was paramount to examine and exhibit non-European perspectives, so often “overlooked;” for women of European, Indigenous American and West African descent all designed estrados.
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, for example, Inca women were among its earliest adopters. “I think something that people do not realize about the Hispanic world, especially in the Spanish Americas, was the amount of material wealth that there was [largely a result of the exploitive silver mining industry]. Naturally, there was an explosion of material goods.”
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Duchess of Alba (1797). Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
To showcase the estrado’s regional variations, Rodriguez-Jack organized the exhibition primarily in geographical sections within the Hispanic Society’s Main Court, a venue whose ornate terracotta Renaissance-style architecture is the perfect complement for the dazzling pieces on view. Providing more visual context is a hybrid interior-like vignette featuring several quintessential objects, such as elaborate writing desks, the “crème-de-la-crème of estrado furnishings.” Textiles, whether lace or needlework (both common pastimes for Hispanic women to pursue in the estrado), or luxurious pillows and carpets, were abundant. Cushioned seating and textile-driven interiors directly derived from Islamic influences, which also come through in ivory-inlaid objects, such as an intricate 16th-century Spanish chest nearby, and other Moorish-inspired designs.
Alcora, Snuff box with metal mount (1775). Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
Globalization via expanding trade routes, such as the Manila galleon, brings additional inspiration into estrado furnishings. Imported goods, especially Japanese and Chinese screens, become “distinctive markers of the estrado in New Spain,” says Rodriguez-Jack, while around the globe, local craftsmen would copy international designs, mixing, for example, Flemish engravings or Asian lacquer with indigenous motifs. Smaller objects ranged from silver frames and reliquary jewels to porcelain cups and carved-stone figures, rendering the estrado a veritable cabinet of curiosities.
Estrados could be a room, or a space, sometimes demarcated on a platform, or tarima, within a room. There are also instances where a home had more than one estrado, such as one for a formal reception area, and another private space near the bedroom. During the 17th and 18th centuries when specialized furniture became commonplace, the estrado would house muebles ratones, or “mouse furniture,” which were petite versions of the latest chairs or other furnished forms, presumably used by men, further promoting a gender binary.
An installation view of “A Room of Her Own: The Estrados of Viceregal Spain.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
Rodriguez-Jack shares that in addition to educating children, estrados were used as all-day “hangouts” to socialize and dine with friends. “Women could barely leave their homes — the outside was considered unsafe, and staying home was seen as protecting their virtue,” she explains. “However, the estrado was a place where women could exercise their independence within the confines of their home by being artistic patrons and displaying their collection, giving them a semblance of agency that’s rare compared to other women in Europe during this period.”
This paradox comes through poignantly in Novelas Ejemplares y Amorosas, a collection of novellas written by Spanish feminist author, María de Zayas y Sotomayor, in 1637 (a fact that is in itself astounding for the time; likewise, A Room of Her Own also includes an 18th-century framed headboard with a painting by María Villamor to further honor women who defied social norms). The estrado, writes, de Zayas: “was to be a throne, seat, and refuge for the beautiful Lisis [the novel’s protagonist], who, as a sick woman, was able to enjoy this privilege: it was similarly of green brocade, with golden fringe and tassels of gold. As she [Lisis] was so devoid of hope on the inside, she wished to appear hopeful on the outside.”
José Campeche y Jordán, Doña María Catalina De Urrutia (1788). Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
According to Rodriguez-Jack, the female protagonist goes on to lament the injustices and double standards women face simply due to their sex. It’s these kinds of frustrations that drove some women and their servants to practice witchcraft, reinforcing the notion of the estrado as a space of subversion. Often, this came in the form of food. Drinking hot chocolate was a common social ritual in the estrado (as several specialized cups and objects in the exhibition attest).
“Chocolate was frequently gendered, as it was considered an indulgent feminine weakness, in part because it wasn’t cheap,” says the curator, who in her research, particularly in 17th-century Mexican records, came across instances where women combined chocolate with unsavory mix-ins, like menstrual bed, to spite a man who wronged them.
The final section of the exhibition illustrates the 19th-century decline of the estrado, as England and France were producing more comfortable furniture, and the drawing room rose to international prominence. Nevertheless, with its intercultural aesthetic and array of uses, from female artistic patronage to witchcraft, the estrado is certainly a worthy subject for further investigation. More

She was a promising young artist whose luminous and gestural abstractions earned the attention of the New York art world in the 1940s and 1950s. But Rosemarie Beck’s fall into the marginalia of art history has its own twist.
In many ways, Beck had been celebrated by the establishment. In the 1950s, her works were exhibited, and collected by, the Whitney Museum of American Art. Robert Motherwell, a titan of Abstract Expressionism, took her on as a protege. She even earned the attention of Eleanor Ward, the legendary dealer who championed Louise Bourgeois and Robert Rauschenberg; Ward exhibited Beck’s work at her esteemed Stable Gallery.
Today, Beck (b. 1923) is little known, barely a footnote—that’s because in 1958, just as her career was rising, the artist decisively abandoned abstraction, feeling a call to a radiant style of figuration. For more than 40 years, until her death in 2003, she stayed true to her vision, painting dynamic mythological and literary themes, filled with rebellious women. “The ore in my abstract veins had thinned. I thought I would nourish my abstract painting by painting subjects. Then I couldn’t go back. I must have been a secret realist all along because I had never stopped drawing from life,” Beck recalled of this transition.
Her figurative works would garner attention for a time, with shows at Peridot Gallery and acquisitions by the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran, and the Hirshhorn. But Beck’s fame had crested and by the time of her death in 2003, she was little known even in curatorial circles.
Rosemarie Beck, Studio in Venice (1964). Courtesy of Van Doren Waxter.
But a moment of reappraisal for the artist has finally arrived. This week, “Rosemarie Beck: Earthly Paradise” opened at Van Doren Waxter in New York, a show that offers a tantalizing introduction to Beck and her rarely seen figurative works, through paintings, works on paper, embroideries, as well as photographs, sketches, writing, and correspondence.
“I was completely transfixed by the figuration,” said Elizabeth Sadeghi, partner at the gallery, recalling her first visit to the artist’s foundation over a year ago. Doria Hughes, the artist’s granddaughter, who runs  Beck’s foundation, had introduced herself to Sadeghi at Independent 20th Century art fair, a few years back. The gallery had presented the work of Hedda Sterne, a daring woman Abstract Expressionist, and Hughes took note.
Rosemarie Beck, painting in her studio.
“Twenty years ago, when I started archiving my grandmother’s work, I felt her art was neglected,” said Hughes. “I kept seeing shows of her male peers, people that she had taught with, worked with—Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Bradley Walker Tomlin. She was close with these people and they respected her and her work during her lifetime. I just kept thinking there have to be people out there who will recognize this treasure of art here.”
Van Doren Waxter became that place of recognition. Last year, the gallery showcased Beck’s work at Independent 20th Century. Soon after, it announced representation of her estate. “Earthly Paradise” marks the first exhibition of her work at the gallery.
More than 25 works made from 1959 to 2000 are on view and chart her varied interests and influences, from Paul Cézanne to William Shakespeare. “Hers is a story that needs to be told,” said Hughes, “There’s a lot of inspiration and hope in her story and now is the time when we really need inspiration.”
Rosemarie Beck, Concert in Tuscany (circa 1989). Courtesy Van Doren Waxter.
That story begins with her childhood.
Beck was born in New Rochelle, New York, just north of New York City, to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants. She frequently traveled down to the city and grew up in a cultured milieu (Beck played the violin in addition to painting). After attending Oberlin College and earning a degree in art history, she would commit herself to painting, studying at Columbia University, the Art Students League in New York, and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She and her husband, the writer and publisher Robert Phelps, moved to Woodstock, N.Y. soon after their wedding in 1945. Up in the wooded Catskill Mountains, she became close friends with Guston and Tomlin. During these early years of her career, she was regarded as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist. Her abstractions, which could appear like dappled sunlight, would ultimately be championed by artists including Kurt Seligmann and Robert Motherwell.
But a desire for the narrative pulled Beck back into figuration. Indeed, she may have been a “secret realist” all along. As the exhibition reveals, Beck kept her embroidery practice private throughout her adult life. Even at the height of her abstract career, her embroideries, several of which are included in the exhibition, had always been figurative, and her themes were often rooted in mythology, an unexpected union of “domestic craft” and the grand-scale themes of art history.
Installation view “Rosemarie Beck: Earthly Paradise” at Van Doren Waxter, 2024. Photography by Charles Benton. Courtesy Van Doren Waxter.
“For a woman during that time, it’s pretty extraordinary. Beck signed a lot of them, too. She meant them to be pieces that she put in the world,” added Sadeghi. Her paintings, meanwhile, subtly hint at her own dynamic, unabashed personality. One of the most evocative works in the exhibition, Studio in Venice (1964), is a self-portrait Beck made while in the Italian city (the canals are visible beyond her studio window).
“She went to Venice, Italy, and had an extended trip there. She took a studio. Being exposed to all that incredible history of figurative art and churches and frescoes emboldened her to listen to her calling and really move back into figuration,” said Sadeghi.
In this painting, Beck places herself in the lineage of male artists captured behind the easel, from Diego Velasquez to Vincent Van Gogh, along with women artists who had claimed their stake such as Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana. A thread of self-portraiture runs through her work, part of which was born of necessity; she was often trying to make do financially and her face was her most affordable model. Still, her own personality emerges.
“Her paintings have these visual breadcrumbs for you to pick up. Sometimes she looks out from the painting and makes bold eye contact and asserts herself as the artist,” said Hughes. “She was unashamed. Not demure. That was never her.”
Critic Martica Sawin described Beck as “one of the few painters of our time to treat grand themes in ambitious multi-figure compositions while satisfying a need both for abstract structure and for an execution that embodies energy without being gratuitous.” This approach has sometimes been linked to the influence of Cézanne. Her 1985 painting Bathers, included in the show, seems a direct response to Cézanne’s 1894 Bathers, only Beck has replaced his standing men with women.
Rosemarie Beck, Untitled (1986). Courtesy of Van Doren Waxter.
Often her paintings include imagery of women who are defiant and powerful. The work Apollo and Daphne (1982) imagines Daphne the moment before she is transformed into a laurel tree, a metaphor for sexual violence. In another work, Diana and Actaeon (1985), she depicts the hunter Actaeon surprising the bathing goddess just before she splashes him with water and turns him into a deer. While Hughes wouldn’t define Beck as a proto-feminist, she added: “As a woman painter, she just painted it as she saw it.”
Theater also emerges as a key theme in her work. In an essay for the exhibition catalogue, art historian Jessica Holmes notes “[Beck’s] penchant for theatrical mise-en-scène.” Her Bathers painting was part of a larger cycle of paintings inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The artist spent a good five years working through a series centered on the play. Her earliest interludes with art came through the lens of theater, in fact. While still in high school, she was given free rein to the school’s backstage, painting stage sets, doing makeup, and acting. In college, she was part of the Oberlin Dramatic Association.
Rosemarie Beck, Study, Two in a Room (1967). Courtesy of Van Doren Waxter.
When it came to The Tempest, Beck identified with Prospero. “It’s clear from her journals that she thought the way Prospero could wield his magic wand was analogous to her as a painter wielding her brush—a brush of wand or the brush of paint that you can use to change reality.”
Throughout decades of her life, Beck struggled with her outsider status. “She could be a bit obstreperous and she wrote a lot in her journals about her private frustrations and feeling overlooked,” said Hughes, “The bottom line is that she needed to paint these paintings.”
For many years, Beck channeled her energies into teaching. Over the decades, she taught at Queens College of New York, Vassar College, Middlebury College, the Vermont Studio Center, and Parsons School of Design. She was on the faculty of New York Studio School until shortly before her death. Even in her last moments, Hughes recalled, students were coming by to show her their work.
“She forged a reality for herself and forged that path and possibility for people afterward, too, through teaching,” said Hughes. In some ways, she is still teaching: the Rosemarie Beck Foundation, which is based in the Lower East Side, hosts an artist residency. “She was Prospero” Hughes added. “She was her own magician.” More

A common and somewhat worn-out refrain from the world of political art is that an artist gives voice to the voiceless. But in the latest work from Icelandic musician and artist Björk, it’s quite literally the case.
Together with editor and photographer Aleph Molinari, Björk has created an immersive sound installation for the Centre Pompidou in Paris that uses A.I. software to produce the calls of endangered and extinct animals.
Coinciding with the latest U.N. Climate Change Conference, Nature Manifesto (2024) will play on a continuous loop as visitors ride the exterior escalators at the Parisian museum from November 20 through December 9. Björk has written and composed the music for the three minutes and 40-second-long piece with Aleph collaborating on the words and the original concept.
The duo’s manifesto reminds the listener of the disastrous state of the climate as well as the natural world’s innate ability to adapt and find new solutions. “It is an emergency, the apocalypse has already happened,” Björk shared in a video via her social media accounts on November 12. “Biology will reassemble in new ways… the web of life will unfold into a world of new solutions.”

Accompanying the recording of Björk reading the manifesto are the sounds of high-pitched wails, sudden pops, deep coos, squeaks, and chirps—sounds that are disconcerting because we know they are the impossible communications of animals we will never see. Björk and Aleph created these in collaboration with IRCAM, the French sound institute, which calls the work a combination of Björk’s voice and the cries of extinct animals all “harmonized with natural soundscapes.”
“We wanted to share their presence in an architecture representing the industrial age, far away from nature,” Björk wrote in a statement announcing the project. “We wanted to remind citizens of the raw vitality of endangered creatures. Even though you are restlessly traveling between floors whilst listening to this soundpiece, the tone of animals’ voices hopefully builds a sonic bridge towards the listeners.”
Art for Biodiversity Forum at Centre Pompidou by Marguerite Bornhauser. Photo: © Marguerite Bornhauser, courtesy of the Centre Pompidou.
The sound installation is part of “Biodiversity: What Culture for What Future?” a four-day forum that the Centre Pompidou is hosting from November 20 to 24. The event sees the museum partner with French Office for Biodiversity to address climactic threats facing the earth through a series of panel discussions, installations, and performances. Among the names involved are Anohni, the songwriter and visual artist, and Cyril Dion, a French filmmaker and environmental activist.
“If museums are schools of attention, we believe that this attention can raise awareness of the crisis facing species and ecosystems today,” Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, the museum’s director of culture and creation, said in a statement.
Björk has long used her position of influence to highlight environmental causes. In 2008, she released “Náttúra” with Thom Yorke to promote the protection of the Icelandic environment, a move she replicated with last year’s duet with Rosalía, “Oral.” Most recently, Björk has announced the release of Cornucopia, a film that shows the singer’s climate activism on her most recent tour. More

Three decades ago, British artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean burst onto the scene as part of the Young British Artists. She’s since enjoyed long and successful career—but never, until now, a major U.S. museum show. That changed last month in Houston, where the Menil Collection opened “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly,” a striking new exhibition highlighting her impressive, if lesser-known, drawing practice.
“The way Tacita thinks about drawing is as a way of making and an analogy for her belief in and love of all things analog, which ties to film and the preservation of film, which is what she’s primarily known for,” Michelle White, the Menil’s senior curator, told me during a tour of the show. (The Menil, of course, has its own Drawing Institute celebrating the medium.)
“It’s very nice to do a show about the drawings,” Dean told me in a phone interview, calling from her studio in Berlin, noting that the two halves of her practice, film and drawing, have always coexisted. “Generally the museum shows I’ve done always have included drawings.
But of course, the films sort of become more prevalent, or dominate the spaces, because they take up so much room.”
At the Menil, however, the drawings have plenty of space to breathe, with four spacious galleries, compared to a single darkened theater down the hall where four different films will screen, rotating roughly every month and a half. The show’s opening room features a trio of monumental photographs of trees that the artist has painstakingly drawn on in colored pencil, lending them a painterly feel.
Tacita Dean, Beauty (2006). Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; purchase through a gift of Raoul Kennedy in memory of Patricia A. Kennedy. Photo by Tenari Tuatagaloa, ©Tacita Dean.
Dean began this body of work “a long time ago,” she said, first working in a much smaller scale on found postcards of trees with unusual shapes that she would isolate by painting around them. (A selection is also in the show.)
That led her to find the oldest oak tree in the U.K., which is in Kent’s Fredville Park, and nicknamed Majesty. Beauty, the 2006 work that opens the Menil show, features and is named after Majesty’s also-venerable neighbor.
Installation view of “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” at the Menil Collection, Houston with Sakura (Totsube). Photo by Paul Hester.
The other two trees are a purple jacaranda tree from Los Angeles, titled Purgatory (3rd Cornice) and printed in negative so that its vibrant flowers appear green, and an ancient cherry tree from Japan, its blooming branches carefully propped up by crutches, titled Sakura (Totsube). The latter is a black-and-white photograph taken for the Menil show, the background painstakingly colored a pale pink, like the blossoms would have been.
“It’s this idea of human mark-making on the surface of time,” White said. “And she’s so interested in aging surfaces, surfaces with history, surfaces that bear this beauty of something that’s dying, something that’s ephemeral, something that will go away.”
Installation view of “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” at the Menil Collection, Houston with Purgatory (3rd Cornice). Photo by Paul Hester.
But the works are also imbued with a certain sense of optimism, depicting these towering living beings that endure despite war, climate change, and all the other issues that plague our modern world.
“Hopeful is a good word. When this blossom comes out each year, that’s something that’s reliable in an unreliable world,” Dean said.
”The fact that they are so old and cared for
is a beautiful thing.”
But then again, at the same time she was working on Sakura, Dean was also making The Wreck of Hope, an even larger, 12-by-24-foot chalk-on-blackboard drawing in the next gallery that depicts a glacier collapsing.
Installation view of “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” at the Menil Collection, Houston with Beauty and the artist’s monumental blackboard drawings seen through the doors in the next gallery. Photo by Paul Hester.
“It’s just the opposite—how this ice that had been accumulating for millennia was disappearing in an afternoon,” she said of the work, which is named after Caspar David Friedrich’s famed painting of an icy shipwreck.
The work itself is actually at risk of disappearing. To maintain the naturally dustiness of the surface, the artist has chosen not to apply any fixative to the delicately rendered landscape, one of four absolutely massive works in the space created in the medium. (Dean had to retouch the drawings, two of which are on loan from the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, for the installation.)
Tacita Dean, The Wreck of Hope (2022). Courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, NewYork/Paris/Los Angeles. ©Tacita Dean. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
“It’s this idea of the form and content coming together,” White said. “All the works are as precarious and fragile as what they depict. A fleeting celestial phenomenon. A melting iceberg. The clouds.”
Naturally, I had to ask Dean if the works were at all related to the famous blackboard paintings of Cy Twombly, who has been a major touchstone in her career and inspired a new suite of works at the Menil.
The answer was a resounding “no.”
Dean made her first chalk-on-blackboard works during her master’s studies at London’s Slade School of Fine Art from 1990 to ’92. She bought some Masonite because she was having difficulty hanging her drawings on the school’s Hessian weave walls, painted it black with paint she found at home and began drawing on it with white chalk.
Tacita Dean, Delfern Tondo (2024). Photo by Lauren Marek.
When she applied for “New Contemporaries,” the annual U.K. exhibition for emerging art students, in 1992, it was with her makeshift blackboard, with the idea of remaking the drawing for each of the show’s five venues.
“They weren’t actually related to Twombly at all.
And they’re not even very Twombly-like,” Dean said, noting that Twombly’s famed series doesn’t actually use chalk or blackboard, but wax crayon. “[My] blackboards came from a different place.”
But her connection to Twombly has been a touchstone since she first encountered his work at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1987, and decided to write her undergraduate thesis on him.
Tacita Dean, Edwin Parker (2011). Film still courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/Los Angeles. ©Tacita Dean.
“He’s a hugely important artist in my life and I have filmed him,” Dean said. (Her 2011 piece Edwin Parker, taken from the artist’s given name—Cy was a family nickname—documents him at work in his studio, and will be the third film screened at the Menil.)
When she began working with White to organize the current show, Dean immediately knew she wanted to make some work in response to the Menil’s dedicated Cy Twombly Gallery, installed to the artist’s specifications and celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2025.
“What always interested me was where your mind wanders when you’re sitting in front of somebody else’s artwork. It would be great to note those wanderings down and see where it takes you,” Dean said. “I went and I sat in there, but I
made myself too self-conscious. I was too aware of trying to trap those thoughts and therefore the thoughts weren’t real.”
Tacita Dean, Blind and dusty (2024). Courtesy of the artist. ©Tacita Dean.Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
The solution, she decided, was to stage an artist residency in the gallery, staying overnight in the space. The Menil had never done anything like it, but the museum was game.
“They sort of locked me in for security,” Dean said.
”I didn’t sleep.
I was awake the whole time, just really experiencing the work and starting to be a bit more playful and trippy in a way,”
Photographs Dean took that night are being made into a new artist’s book, Why Cy, due out next year.
Tacita Dean, Found Cy, Houston (2024). Collection of the Menil Collection, Houston, gift of the artist. ©Tacita Dean.
And Twombly’s spirit is felt in the show in more ways than one. In preparation for the show, White accompanied Dean on a trip to a junk shop, where there was a folder of vintage postcards. Dean reached in, and out came a photo documenting the aftermath of a natural disaster. In the center, in handwriting remarkably like the artist’s own, was the word “Cyclone.”
“Twombly’s father was a Major League Baseball pitcher who had a very fierce pitch, so he was nicknamed Cy Twombly after Cy Young,” White said. “Cy Young was named Cy because his pitch was so forceful it was as fast as the cyclone—so, in fact, Twombly’s name derives from the word cyclone.”
The serendipitous postcard became a work in the show, Found Cy, Houston, that Dean has donated to the Menil.
Tacita Dean, Blind Folly (2024). Courtesy of the artist. ©Tacita Dean.Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
And in the hallway outside the exhibition are new works that Dean made in response to her gallery residence. The paintings are done on found slates that were painted green for use in classrooms, with Dean’s gestural mark-making adding richness to their aged surfaces.
“These became a way of conversing with Cy Twombly,” White said. “You get these kind of trailing passages. She’s using primarily her finger to smudge into the surface.”
The show’s title comes from one of these works. “Blind Folly” is a Britishism for foolishness, but here it’s a reference to how Dean listens to the medium as she works, leaving the results to chance rather than struggling to realize a predetermined vision.
Tacita Dean, The Sublunaries: Last Quarter (2024). Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/Los Angeles; and Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo by Studio Tacita Dean/Simon Hanzer, ©Tacita Dean.
“Tacita often uses the term blind to describe how she begins a work of art without knowing where she’s going and letting the journey of the process lead her,” White said. “And that’s also about the materials themselves guiding how she approached the works.”
This interest in experimentation and unexpected material outcomes is why Dean is so committed to analogue film, rather than digital, with its predictable results. It’s also why she doesn’t like starting from scratch from a pristine, blank sheet of paper.
“It gives me performance anxiety sometimes. I’m really bad with any art paper, so I started to just work on things that were already dirty,” Dean said. “I seem to find more pleasure in surfaces that have a history.”
“Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” is on view at the Menil Collection, 1533 Sul Ross Street, Houston, Texas, October 11, 2024–April 19, 2025. More