Eliana Willis

Jill Magid‘s latest solo show is more than just a gallery show. It’s part of her dealer Esther Kim Varet’s run for Congress. For the exhibition, at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, Magid made a replica of the platform in the White House Press Briefing Room, with its star-spangled carpet, and invited Kim Varet to use the work, titled The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), to deliver stump speeches.
When Kim Varet announced her run for office in January, Magid had already been hard at work on the show. It was originally focused on a deep dive into official books published by U.S. government offices featuring political speeches, as transcribed in stenographers’ notes. There are still elements of Magid’s initial vision present in the final show, but she very much pivoted to respond to Kim Varet’s campaign.
“I’m an artist who makes work about power and accessing power structures, and here the gallerist is running a political campaign for Congress. How can I not do something with that, you know?” she told me.
”For me, it’s important to put myself in an uncomfortable situation.
And make work from that position that provokes or asks questions.”
The exhibition press release consists of Magid’s email to Kim Varet describing the new direction for the show: “You noted that my work is most powerful when it responds to a site or situation. For this reason I am integrating your run for office as a material of the work.”
Jill Magid, The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), 2025. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
Magid is careful to note that the show is not meant to be an endorsement of Kim Varet’s candidacy. (The dealer is running as a Democrat to unseat a Republican incumbent in California’s 40th Congressional District, and has already raised over $1 million, according to Ballotpedia.)
“I’m questioning free speech, and democracy, and how platforms work,” Magid said. “Not everyone is getting on a state-sanctioned platform. People are using other kinds of platforms and building other places to speak from. For me, I would never step on that platform. I would speak from the floor.”
Titled “Heart of a Citizen,” the show is largely staged outside, with only The Platform in the main gallery space, accompanied by a vitrine of documents related to its creation and the complex campaign finance laws that allow its display in a business owned by a political candidate.
Jill Magid, The Rose Garden (2025) and Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
The other two works are displayed outside in the courtyard, with a 15-foot-long neon sign reading Stenographer’s Note: [At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden] hanging on the wall, and 12 cast concrete facsimiles of the artist’s heart, which are titled The Rose Garden. 
To create the sculptures, Magid got an MRI at the Cleveland Clinic, and enlisted the artificial heart lab (officially called the Therapeutic Technology Design and Development Lab) at the department of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to fabricate an accurate replica of the organ.
Jill Magid, The Rose Garden (2025) and Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
“Everyone kept saying, ‘wow, your heart’s really big!’” Magid said.
But if the gallery is the press briefing room, the courtyard has become the White House Rose Garden. Magid was inspired by Trump’s announcement in February that he would pave the historic space to create a patio like the one at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach golf course. (He said it was because women’s high heels were sinking into the grass.)
“At Various Small Fires, you come off the street and there’s a corridor that opens up on this courtyard with tall cinder block walls, painted white, and then it’s this gray, dusty gravel,” Magid said. “It just worked with this kind of lament about the garden as an inquiry of power.”
The White House Rose Garden renovation, tearing out the lawn to create a Mar-a-Lago-style patio, on June 12, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Photo: by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
And even since the exhibition has opened, Trump has begun to make good on that plan, beginning on June 9 to bulldoze the lawn. (Though the rose garden’s origins can be traced to the early 1900s, noted art collector and horticulturalist Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon created the current design for President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.)
Trump had already put his mark on the Rose Garden in his first term, removing the crab apple trees that had lined the space since the 1960s and replacing many of the colorful flowers with more staid greenery and white roses.
Magid pays tribute to those lost trees with the Stenographer’s Note piece, which is taken directly from a transcript of a Rose Garden speech: “[At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.]”
Jill Magid, Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
She was transfixed by the idea that a stenographer, ostensibly tasked with a straightforward transcription, would write such a poetic note, and that it would become part of our historical record, preserved in the presidential papers.
And then there was the vision the words conjured, contrasted with the work’s surroundings, Magid said. “The courtyard being this very barren, desert-like
space. The sun just beats down on it, and it’s dusty. And then there’s this quote where you can only imagine the trees and the wind and the roses.”
Jill Magid, Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
Magid’s work has engaged with landscape architecture before. She is perhaps best known for her efforts to secure the return of the archives of Mexican Modernist architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988) to his homeland from Swiss furniture company Vitra in exchange for a diamond ring made from his compressed ashes.
But her interest in the White House Rose Garden actually originated with the flowers, and how they can have a wide variety of associations. For her 2020 project Tender, Magid engraved the edge of 120,000 pennies with the phrase “THE BODY WAS ALREADY SO FRAGILE” and distributed them at bodegas around New York City.
That sparked an interest in cheap bodega flowers and the flower economy. In October, Magid had a floral-themed solo presentation with Mexico City’s Labor Gallery at Art Basel Paris, complete with an installation of blooms from Paris’s open-air flower markets.
Jill Magid, The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), 2025, vitrine documents. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
“Heart of a Citizen” is comparatively spartan. But it had other kinds of complications. Presenting The Platform required a careful study of campaign finance laws, to avoid financial fraud.
Ahead of the show, Magid actually sold the work to collector Michael Young, who donated it as an in-kind contribution to Kim Varet’s campaign. And because she spoke on the platform at the opening, Kim Varet needed to rent our her own space for the occasion, at the rate of $200 an hour. (The plan is to take The Platform on the road for campaign events after the exhibition run.)
“I found it really fascinating and learned a lot about the inner workings of finance and political campaigns,” Magid said.
Jill Magid, The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), 2025, envelope with stamp by the artist. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
The exhibition also includes a stack of paperwork. Magid has provided copies of the official U.S. application to run for Congress, and envelopes to mail them off. On the back, she’s stamped each one with a quote from cultural theorist Robert M. Ochshorn, paraphrasing French writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot, about how one should “only start building platforms once you’ve fully and deeply rejected the notion and premise and promise of platform.”
“I hope,” Magid said, “that The Platform will be a really good place to provoke questions, debate, and dissent.”
“Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” is on view at Various Small Fires, 812 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, California, May 22–June 28, 2025.  More

During her two-decade reign, Marie Antoinette didn’t just preside over France, she reshaped the worlds of 18th-century fashion and design in her image. From her sumptuous pastel gowns and towering wigs to her dazzling jewels and gilded furnishings, the queen embraced a personal style of lavish elegance that bled into her quarters at the Château de Versailles, where striking color, lush tapestries, and rococo touches newly defined royal grandeur.
So revolutionary was Marie Antoinette’s style that centuries on, we’re still talking about it. Artists, designers, and filmmakers—from Alexander McQueen to Sofia Coppola—have been captivated. London’s V&A Museum is not sitting this out either; in September, it’s rolling out a major show dedicated to the regal fashion icon.
Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, Portrait de Marie-Antoinette à la rose (1783). Photo: © Château de Versailles, Dist. Grand Palais RMN / Christophe Fouin.
“Marie Antoinette Style,” the first exhibition in the U.K. centered on the French queen, will unpack her dress and interiors, exploring how her unparalleled style has echoed through the ages. Among the 250 objects going on view are historical artifacts, some traveling from Versailles, as well as contemporary pieces that speak to the monarch’s timeless appeal. The exhibition is sponsored by shoemaker Manolo Blahnik.
“The most fashionable, scrutinized and controversial queen in history, Marie Antoinette’s name summons both visions of excess and objects and interiors of great beauty,” noted the show’s curator, Sarah Grant, in a statement. “This exhibition explores that style and the figure at its center, using a range of exquisite objects belonging to Marie Antoinette, alongside the most beautiful fine and decorative objects that her legacy has inspired.”
Beaded pink silk slipper belonging to Marie Antoinette. Photo: CC0 Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris.
When she ascended the throne in 1774, the royal’s style choices swiftly caused a stir. Against the dreary palette of the French court, Marie Antoinette’s light, cascading gowns stood out for their silhouettes as much as for their bright color and intricate detailing—lace, ribbons, ruffles. She would popularize comfort-first styles including the Robe à la Polonaise, recognizable for its fitted bodice and a skirt gathered into three distinct puffs, and Robe à L’anglaise, where the fitted bodice flows into a wide skirt with an opening that reveals an underskirt.
That look was immortalized by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun in her 1783 portrait of the ornately dressed queen lightly clutching a rose, which is making an appearance at “Marie Antoinette Style.” Also going on view are fragments of court dresses, silk slippers, jewels, and a bottle of eau de cologne from her personal collection. The museum is even recreating the aromas of the court and the queen’s favorite perfume for an immersive scent experience.
Crystal flask with label “Eau de Cologne” from the “Nécessaire de voyage,” belonging to Marie Antoinette. Photo: © Grand Palais RMN (musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado.
Visitors will also get a sense of how Marie Antoinette decorated her private chamber at Versailles, known as the Petit Trianon. Here, in her private sanctuary, the royal indulged her love for rococo, fitting the space with painted wallpaper, objects and furniture with floral forms, and her famous mirrored shutters. Her exquisite dinner service is making a rare outing at the V&A, as are her chair sets and other decorative objects.
‘Lettre’, 1921 from Fêtes Galantes. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The exhibition will also delve into how the sovereign’s fashion footprint has outlived her, fueling the cultural imagination from the 19th century to today. Where Art Deco illustrators Erté and George Barbier sought to capture the fantasy of Marie Antoinette’s style, modern-day couture designs from the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Moschino, Dior, Chanel, and Valentino have attempted to match her extravagance.
Moschino show, Runway, Fall Winter 2020, Milan Fashion Week, Italy. Photo: PIXELFORMULA / SIPA / Shutterstock, courtesy of the V&A Museum.
Of course, due space will be given to Sofia Coppola’s beloved 2006 film Marie Antoinette, which won an Academy Award for costume design. Looks and Manolo Blahnik shoes designed for the movie will be featured, alongside other costumes, film stills, and music videos that highlight the doomed queen’s broader legacy on screen and stage.
“This is the design legacy of an early modern celebrity and the story of a woman whose power to fascinate has never ebbed,” Grant added. “Marie Antoinette’s story has been re-told and re-purposed by each successive generation to suit its own ends. The rare combination of glamour, spectacle and tragedy she presents remains as intoxicating today as it was in the 18th century.”
“Marie Antoinette Style” is on view at the V&A Museum, Cromwell Road, London, September 20, 2025 – March 22, 2026. More

Most Americans know Harriet Tubman as the fearless conductor of the Underground Railroad—but few know she led the largest liberation of enslaved people in U.S. military history.
A new exhibition at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., “Picturing Freedom,” uncovers this little-known chapter. During the Combahee River Raid of 1863, Tubman guided Union troops behind Confederate lines and freed 756 people in a single night—10 times as many people than she helped escape than all her years on the Underground Railroad.
Featuring works by Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, and Faith Ringgold (1930–2024), among others, the show brings fresh attention to one of the most daring and underrecognized moments of the Civil War. Underscoring Tubman’s enduring ability to inspire, there are also pieces by contemporary artists.
“Harriet’s story has been told visually over and over and over again,” Angela Mack, the museum’s director, said in an interview. “Just pulling all these works together around the Combahee River Raid is very, very powerful.”
Aaron Douglas, Harriet Tubman (1931). Collection of the Bennett College for Women Collection,Greensboro, N.C.
A Daring Feat
The exhibition, guest curated by Vanessa Thaxton-Ward of Virginia’s Hampton University Museum, is based on the new book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for history. Author Edda L. Fields-Black, a descendant of one of the raid’s participants, conducted years of archival research to identify those freed that night, and tell their stories, as well as Tubman’s. Fields-Black first reached out to the Gibbes Museum while she was working on the book in 2022.
“She was kind enough to send us a very early manuscript of the book, and we knew right away this was a story that we wanted to try and tell through an exhibition,” Mack said. The project became her swan song, as she is retiring this year after 44 years at the museum, where she has been director since 2008.
J. Henry Fair, Alligator in rice field (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
The result is a multimedia display combining Modern and contemporary art inspired by Tubman with audio from interviews with descendants of those liberated during the raid. There is also a video reenactment of the daring mission and archival photos of enslaved plantation workers toiling in the fields. Setting the scene are gorgeous landscape photographs of the region—with its tidal rice swamps and dangerous wildlife, including alligators and venomous snakes—by local artist J Henry Fair.
“What is remarkable about what Edda and Henry have done is actually experiencing the site, walking through the pluff mud, understanding the perils that these individuals experienced, knowing perfectly well that if they were captured, their lives would be over,” Mack said. “The daring of it is really unbelievable.”
J Henry Fair, Fields Point and Combahee River Wetlands (2015). Courtesy of the artist.
“You almost feel immersed in the Combahee River as you’re walking through the gallery spaces,” she added, “and you’re understanding Harriet’s presence there.”
The representations of Tubman include a Catlett linocut of her pointing the way to freedom, an inspiring light green canvas by Douglas of the silhouette of a woman in the center of a crowd breaking chains over her head, and a moving quilt by contemporary artist Stephen Towns of Tubman and two escaped plantation laborers slipping away on a small boat on the river by the light of the moon.
Terry Plater, Harriet (née Araminta Ross), 2021. Courtesy of the Cayuga Museum of History an Art in Auburn, N.Y.
The exhibition also includes work by William H. Johnson, who created the cover artwork for Fields-Black’s book. An early 20th-century South Carolina artist, he is the subject of a traveling retrospective from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., that opened at the Gibbes in 2022 and goes to Ohio’s Dayton Art Institute later this month. He’s represented here by Three Freedom Fighters, depicting Tubman hand-in-hand with John Brown and Frederick Douglass, on loan from Hampton.
Preserving a Legacy
“Combahee River Raid” opens at a time when Tubman’s legacy is more important than ever, and in danger of being lost. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed national institutions to present a sanitized version of U.S. history that glosses over the evils of colonialism and slavery, and a photograph of Tubman and one of her quotes was briefly removed from the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad website earlier this year. Though it has since been restored, the U.S. Navy recently included the USNS Harriet Tubman on list of vessels honoring Civil Rights leaders that it recommends renaming.
William H. Johnson, Three Freedom Fighters (ca. 1945). Collection of Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia. Gift of the Harmon Foundation.
The change is meant to ensure that all military installations “are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement.
But Tubman, as the first African American woman to serve in the U.S. military, certainly embodied the spirit of a warrior. She was a spy for the Union Army, scouting ahead of the Combahee River Raid and heading a ring of others working secretly behind Confederate lines.
J Henry Fair, Cypress Swamp, Yamasee. Courtesy of the artist.
The raid made her the first woman in American history to lead an armed military engagement, leading troops of 150, including the Second South Carolina Volunteers and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first all-Black regiments in the Union Army. The mission’s three gunboats hit plantations along the Combahee River, destroying Confederate crops and storehouses, liberating as they went.
The enslaved people working the rice plantations in the area endured backbreaking labor. The very next day after Tubman helped free them, 150 of those men joined the Second South Carolina Volunteers, joining the Union cause.
Stephen Towns, Wade in the Water (2020).
“These individuals achieved their freedom and then turned right around and joined the Union Army to come back and fight for others to be freed is pretty remarkable,” Mack said. “It’s extremely important for institutions across the country—whether they are art museums, historical societies, or libraries—to tell these important stories about our history.”
“Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid” is on view through October 5 at the Gibbes Museum of Art, 135 Meeting Street, Charleston, S.C. More

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

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

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