Eliana Willis

The mighty Alhambra on the outskirts of Granada in southern Spain is a monument to the possibilities of merging artistic traditions. Its sprawling complex of buildings, accumulated over the centuries according to whoever was in power, belongs to both Islamic and Christian architectural styles. A relatively late addition was the magnificent 16th-century Palace of Charles V, of which the central courtyard is a particularly exquisite example of the achievements of the Italian Renaissance.
In an exciting tribute to the unceasingly generative potential of juxtaposing the past with modern and contemporary art, the palace is currently housing the exhibition “Reflections: Picasso/Koons at the Alhambra” until March 16, 2025. This unusual, one-off installation of just five works—three by Koons and two by Picasso—is the first in a new exhibition series titled “Reflections” that was organized by the Picasso Museum Málaga. It will take place at historically significant sites across the Spanish artist’s native region of Andalusia.
The surprising, even brazen, choice to inaugurate the series by pairing Picasso with ever-divisive celebrity artist Jeff Koons feels like a declaration of intent to go big. It is justified by the fact that both artists were inspired by some of the same ancient motifs, in particular that of the Three Graces.
Installation of Jeff Koons, Three Graces (2016-22) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
And I must admit, being a Koons skeptic, that I left more convinced than I had arrived. This is primarily thanks to the exhibition’s centerpiece: a fantastically gaudy version of the Three Graces based on a Meissen porcelain figurine. It is placed in one of the courtyard’s empty niches by happy accident since it was too hefty to fit through the windows of the unremarkable and confined gallery space for which it was originally intended.
At the show’s opening earlier this month, as he saw the work installed for the first time, Koons said: “It really felt like the courtyard was collecting all the energy of the universe, just bringing everything in, and functioned like a jet engine so that it just comes out so much more powerful.”
This is a classic example of how Koons claims to perceive things. I didn’t feel unusually swept up by cosmic energies, but I did find the interruption of such a refined classical setting of spare ornamentation and orderly harmony by a glistening piece of aggrandized tat to be excitingly perverse. And hard not to love.
I see it all as a part of Koons’s plan to brashly demolish hierarchies that insist one kind of art is more “fine” than another. Over the years, he has certainly succeeded in offending sophisticated sensibilities, if not big wallets, with his infamous balloon animals. In 2019, the $91.9 million Rabbit set a record for the highest-selling work by a living artist.
Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Standing Woman) (2014) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
The second part of the show sees the remaining works exhibited inside the Museum of Fine Arts of Granada’s gallery dedicated to art from the late Gothic to Baroque period. Once again, Koons steals the show.
His Gazing Ball (Standing Woman) (2014) cuts a striking figure against the polychromatic wood statue behind. It was based on a plaster cast of a copy of a Roman sculpture once owned by Picasso but with a sly Koonsian twist: the classical figure balances a blue gazing ball on one shoulder. These kitsch ornaments muddle clear delineations between high and low culture: in medieval Italy they were produced by skilled craftsmen and highly coveted, but nowadays, they typically decorate suburban backyards.
Although, as Koons acknowledged, his practice of playing with copies of existing objects to subvert our expectations is more in the Duchampian tradition, he has also linked the tendency to Picasso’s use of everyday discarded materials like newspaper clippings or a piece of old rope to make collages. He praised “this acceptance of the world around us.”
“I work with things that preexist as a way of practicing acceptance,” he said. “If we look at everything as being perfect in its own being, everything is available to us, absolutely everything. If we segregate, if we make judgments, we limit the opportunities.”
Installation of Pablo Picasso, The Three Graces (1923) and Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Standing Woman) (2014) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
Though unfailingly friendly and polite, Koons is essentially inscrutable. As he gazed into the middle distance and gave a rousing speech about the spiritual or emotional effects of his work, it was not hard to imagine him excelling as a cult leader.
His use of pre-existing objects in art is, apparently, ultimately about “trying to communicate also that people understand that it’s about themselves, that they’re perfect in their own being. Everything’s about this moment, moving forward and transcending. When we learn to accept ourselves, then we’re able to accept other people.”
Hanging nearby, Picasso’s The Three Graces (1923) is not one of his standouts but, with its draped female figures posed in a listless contrapposto, it makes a suitable comparison with Koons’s work. Both artists were inspired by the same Raphael painting of the Three Graces.
“I feel this communal sense of gathering,” said Koons of the Picasso work. “We want to gather around it, not just one viewer, but as a community. You can feel that we’re all invited. It represents coming in.”
The final two works in the exhibition are Koons’s Gazing Ball (David Intervention of the Sabine Women) (2015–16), a copy of French painter Jacques-Louis David’s celebrated 1799 painting but with another blue gazing ball planted in the midst of the main action, and Picasso’s Head of a Warrior (1933). They are paired because the sculpture echoes the painting’s depiction of Romulus’s face in profile wearing a Spartan-style helmet.
Installation of Pablo Picasso, Head of a Warrior (1933) and Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (David Intervention of the Sabine Women) (2015-16) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
Koons has produced many versions of his “Gazing Ball” idea using famous paintings from art history, including the Mona Lisa and one by Picasso. He believes that the reflective balls introduce an infinite new dimension, greatly enhancing the dimensionality already achieved by Renaissance painters, thanks to their adoption of three-point perspective. After all, those Old Masters probably never imagined that one day the viewer could actually enter the picture plane.
“I see the gazing balls as really representing everything,” Koons explained. “At first you look at it and it affirms you, the viewer. But [then] you notice the painting is also affirmed because it’s reflected into the ball.” In this way, you celebrate the artist and “all the things the artist enjoyed, loved, and celebrated. I’m able to give homage to the artist and at the same time Leonardo can be giving it up to [Paolo] Uccello and all the artists that he enjoyed.”
How we are influenced by what we see—and in turn influence others—is brought to the fore by this show, and brings Koons towards some more philosophical musings. “All culture is really a graffiti of some form,” he suggested. “Of us absorbing culture, being changed by whatever that culture is, and experiencing synapses in our brain, developing and becoming a slightly different human being, having some form of transcendence, and then having an effect on the world.”
Koons insisted several times that we are transcending and, though he didn’t quite specify what, his work pulls the centuries-long accumulative creative effort that is the Alhambra into the 21st century. The overall effect is, indeed, a little transcendent.
“Reflections: Picasso/Koons at the Alhambra” is on view at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain through March 16. More

Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, has been thinking about that banana recently. You know, the one that was bought from a fruit seller outside Sotheby’s, duct taped to a wall, flogged for $6.2 million, and devoured before the press in Hong Kong.
The last time the eccentricities of the art world grabbed mainstream attention, Beeple was to thank, his Everydays: the First 5000 Days (2021) prompting that tired and essential question: what is art? This hasn’t happened with Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, Winkelmann said. Yes, the work is absurd and grossly expensive, but no one’s saying it’s not art. Nor has it escaped his attention that Justin Sun, the banana’s gleeful owner, was Everydays’s under bidder.
“A hundred years ago, we decided you could turn over a toilet and call it art, but I draw pictures every day on the computer with the sole purpose of them being art and people say it’s not art. How could that possibly be?”
To be clear, this is bafflement, not bitterness, speaking. On the afternoon that we meet via video call to “walk through” his full U.S. debut exhibition at the Gibbes Museum of Art, Winkelmann is expansive and earnest, like a nerdy teacher leading an afterschool robotics program, albeit with spicier vocabulary.
At the Gibbes, he’s on adopted home turf, having moved to Charleston, South Carolina, seven years ago to forever forget Wisconsin winters. The 1905 Beaux Arts building certainly makes for an old-world backdrop, an “extremely compelling juxtaposition,” said Angela Mack, the museum’s president. Two of Winkelmann’s three sculptures are housed inside the rotunda gallery, whose Tiffany-style glass dome and pink and white porcelain tiling seem more accustomed to hosting southern weddings than discussions of social discord and our technological future.
Look past the gawky pop culture characters (Jabba the Hutt, Pepe the Frog, et al.) and the irreverence (phallic humor, gore) and you remember that these are Beeple’s themes. In his vitrine-like cubes, which glow on all sides with screens, Winkelmann seems to have found a medium to carry his concerns into the physical world. Unlike traditional sculpture, however, these are flat and rotate. The reason is simple: Winkelmann dislikes walking, he wants to “sit down and zoom in,” which makes sense for an artist who doesn’t pace and hunch, chisel in hand, but clicks, scans, and squints.
Beeple, S.2122 (2023). Photo: courtesy Mike Winkelmann.
And there’s much to squint at. As with his Everydays, the kinetic sculptures are created using Cinema 4D, a video game and special effects software. You don’t look, you watch. Take S.2122 (2023), which conjures a colony in the ocean a century into the future. It’s a thing of perpetual motion. Drones glide by, workers march across platforms, vegetation sways, the day’s light shifts imperceptibly (spoiler alert: it runs on three one-minute loops).
As with all the sculptures, it’s an editable work-in-progress. Every five years S.2122’s water level will rise, leading the submerged sections and their inhabitants to adapt via new technologies. Is this optimism? No, more a nuanced view of the future based on the present, Winkelmann said. “I don’t think the future is going to necessarily good or bad, but it is going to be very weird.”
Beeple, Exponential Growth (2023). Photo: courtesy Mike Winkelmann.
The work was bought for $9 million at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2023 by the Deji Art Museum, a new institution in Nanjing, China, which boasts Hans Ulrich Obrist as a senior advisor. In November, the museum hosted the world’s first major Beeple show, which opened with Winkelmann executing his 6406th Everyday image live. Deji also commissioned a sculpture that riffed on “Nothing Still About Still Lifes,” a show that brought together three centuries of Chinese and European flower paintings.
The result is Exponential Growth (2023), on loan at the Gibbes, a hyper-dense column of ever-changing flowers. Though they appear drawn from life, Winkelmann played god, inventing some 30 species by selecting for bulb size and petal count. Just as plants bloom and decay, these grow and recede, creating a tableau that never looks the same.
Beeple, Tree of Knowledge (2023). Photo: courtesy Mike Winkelmann.
It’s a state of flux carried on in Tree of Knowledge, the exhibition’s third piece. Here, though, the input isn’t flower dimensions, but our news cycle. Nearby, there’s a control panel featuring a dial and a red button under lock. Turn up the dial and live information (news feeds, stock ticker, crypto price) gradually overwhelms the screens before breaking into fits of glitch. Press the button and it burns to cinders, a violence only Tree’s owner can initiate. Each destruction is registered on the blockchain and after 666 times, it remains forever charred and dystopic.
The control panel from Beeple’s work, Tree of Knowledge. Photo: Gibbes Museum of Art/ MCG Photography.
As a creature of the internet, speed has long been essential to Beeple’s practice. Everydays are spat out in roughly 40 minutes, meaning he stirs debate on the latest spasm of the zeitgeist in real time. Tree recreates something of this experience for the gallery. When Winkelmann turns up the dial during our conversation, Bernie Sanders holds forth, Malibu burns, and Taylor Swift invites Caitlin Clark to a football game. This interactivity is the future of digital art, Winkelmann said, who anticipates humans coming together to watch the machine “do things.”
Tree’s more immediate point is that we can choose how far we want the chaos and stress of media to be our reality. We each have our own dial, Winkelmann noted. Is this a creed the artist lives by? “I could do a better job of putting the phone down,” he said with a smile. “This is an analogy that I need just as much as everybody else.”
“Beeple” is on view at the Gibbes Museum of Art, 135 Meeting St, Charleston, South Carolina, through April 27, 2025. More

At Buckingham Palace’s King’s Gallery, is a show of Italian Renaissance royalty. “Drawing the Italian Renaissance” is filled with masterpieces from the epoch by some of the most famous artists who have ever lived.
The exhibition, containing around 160 works made between 1450 and 1600 (more than 30 of which are making their public exhibition debut), aims to reframe the significance of drawing for Renaissance masters. Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian are on view in a show that exemplifies the exquisite and layered history of drawing during the Italian Renaissance. The artworks all come from the Royal Collection, belonging to the British crown, which has one of the world’s largest collections of Renaissance drawings.
Long believed to simply be part of the drafting process, the curators at the King’s Gallery are now highlighting the importance of drawings as finished artworks in their own right, showcasing their individual beauty.
Here is the backstory behind five key Renaissance masterpieces now on display at Buckingham Palace.

Raphael, The Three Graces, c. 1517-18
Raphael, The Three Graces, c.1517–18. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.
Raphael created The Three Graces as a preparatory chalk study for a fresco in Rome’s Villa Farnesina, the suburban villa built in 1506 for Agostino Chigi, the banker of Pope Julius II. The study shows one model in three poses, and Raphael was one of very few artists of his day to work directly with a nude female model. The fresco, the Wedding Feast of Cupid and Psyche, shows the marriage festivities of the Roman god of love and goddess of the soul. In attendance are the Graces—three daughters of the king of the gods, Jupiter—Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia. While the fresco (one of two) was executed by the artist’s assistants (the works were met with criticism following their sloppy execution), this preparatory study was done by the artist’s own hand. Offsets, images created by transferring a pre-existing image onto a new canvas or page, were made of many of the drawings Raphael prepared for the Villa Farnesina frescoes, and damage is visible to the upper right-hand corner where damp paper was applied to the chalk.

Michelangelo, The Virgin and Child with the Young St John, c. 1532
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the young Baptist, c.1532. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.
No one is entirely certain about the reason why Michelangelo created this black chalk drawing as it does not directly correlate to another sculpted or painted project completed by the master. This may suggest that the drawing was designed as a completed work in its own right, and it is done in delicate detail. Perhaps it formed part of Michelangelo’s private religious practice. There is pentimenti, evidence of earlier marks which the artist has drawn over and re-shaped, as well as evidence of the time and dedication Michelangelo took to end up with his final design. On the reverse of the drawing is another design, this time of a single figure, but it is not believed to have been created by Michelangelo. It has been speculated that Michelangelo created the drawing for another artist to use it as a model for a sculptural group.

Att. Titian, Ostrich, c.1550
Attributed to Titian, An ostrich, c.1550. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.
Native to Africa, it would have been rare for an Italian to have seen a living ostrich. However, the detail and convincingness of the proportions of this drawing, attributed to Titian, suggest that it was drawn from life, or certainly based on real exposure to the flightless bird. Ostriches had been imported to the Italian port of Venice—one of the most powerful trading cities in the world at that time where Titian spent the majority of his life, dying there in 1576. The drawing was cut down to reduce its borders so that the depiction could be transferred, although the location of the final artwork which was the result of this process—and whether it survives at all—is unknown. The Flemish baroque Anthony van Dyck made a copy of the drawing in his “Italian Sketchbook” which he made while visiting Italy in the 1620s.
Alessandro Allori, Fortitude, Prudence and Vigilance, c. 1578
Alessandro Allori, A design for an overdoor with Virtues, c.1578. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.
Allori, a painter who was born in Florence in 1535, created this study for a commission by Francesco de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The design, painted as a fresco at the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano, shows three of the embodiments of the virtues: Fortitude, defeating a dragon and holding a lion by its head; Prudence, who sits upon a world globe with a mirror and serpent; and Vigilance, who stands on top of a set of military trophies holding a small sun above her head. These motifs were chosen to symbolize the power of the Medici, a powerful banking and military family who ruled Florence for almost 300 years between the 15th and 18th centuries. The fresco for the Salone di Leo X was Allori’s largest secular project, and this drawing was a study for an overdoor. The decoration of the Salone was abandoned in 1521 just a year after it began, after Pope Leo X died unexpectedly from pneumonia, and 57 years later Allori was commissioned to finally complete it.

Leonardo, A Costume Study for a Masque, c. 1580
Leonardo da Vinci, A costume study for a masque, c.1517–18. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.
In 1516 Leonardo moved to France aged 64 to live and work in the French court of King Francis I. While there, one of his duties was to design costumes for festivals and events, and this study shows his skill at intricate design and capturing the effects of draped fabric in his drawings. This study is completed in such detail that it was likely given directly to royal seamstresses to create the final costumes from it. Several costume drawings made by the Renaissance polymath survive from the end of his career. Masques—entertainment popular with the aristocracy in France and England during the 16th century—involved song, dance, and the performance of plays, with party-goers wearing disguises. Not designed to be practical, this young man holds a lance and wears bearly-there breeches.
 “Drawing the Italian Renaissance” is on view at the King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace until March 9, 2025. More

Tucked away on a quiet residential street in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, inside a stately 19th-century townhouse, you can catch the work of Helen Evans Ramsaran, in her solo show of new works at Welancora Gallery.
Chances are, you haven’t heard of Ramsaran, an 81-year-old Black sculptor who casts her bronze sculpture at the Modern Art Factory in Queens—something that gallery owner Ivy Jones is hoping to help change for the New York artist, who has been dedicated to her practice for over five decades.
“At this point in Helen’s career, the focus is to get more institutions interested in acquiring the work, and reinserting her into the narrative about women artists, about sculptors, about women artists of color,” Jones, who began showing Ramsaran’s work in 2016, told me.
When people think of a Black woman sculptor of a certain age, she added, they tend to think of Barbara Chase-Riboud, just four years Ramsaran’s senior and the subject of a current solo show at the Louvre in Paris.
Helen Evans Ramsaran, Elephants and Birds. Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
“It would be great if there were enough room for another woman too,” Jones said.
But bronze sculpture—which few women artists are working in today—is not the easiest medium to live with. It’s heavy and can take up lots of space. And then there’s Ramsaran’s subject matter: graceful organic forms drawn from the world of botanicals, rather than figuration, and imbued with difficult themes of racial violence and the dark realities of the lived African American experience.
“The work is not sexy. It’s not of the body. It’s very cerebral,” Jones added.
The exhibition is titled “Strange Fruit,” an allusion, of course, to Billie Holiday’s haunting song protesting the lynching of African Americans. But it is also a literal description of some of Ramsaran’s sculptures, which often suggest otherworldly plants.
Helen Evans Ramsaran, Smashed and Broken (2024). Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
In the center of the room on a white platform lies Smashed and Broken (2024), a piece inspired by the death of George Floyd. It looks like a fallen branch, with a shattered seed pod lying at an awkward angle, lifeless and sad.
“It’s about the brokenness of the African American experience, but then also the fruitfulness that has come out of that experience,” Jones said.
in 2021, the New York Times’s Holland Cotter dubbed Ramsaran “unaccountably under-recognized,” something that remains true despite Jones’s best efforts, with showings at major art fairs including Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze Los Angeles, and the Armory Show in New York.
Ramsaran has had several museum solo shows over the years, at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1994; and New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 2002.
But she seems to have “just missed the wave” that has given widespread recognition and market success to other African American artists, Jones said.
On the occasion of the current exhibition, I spoke with Ramsaran about her work, her inspirations, and her hopes for the future after decades of toiling in relative obscurity.
Helen Evans Ramsaran, Fragments in Flames. Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
How did you come to specialize in bronze, which is such a classic medium, but is not very commonly used by today’s artists?
Bronze is challenging to work with.
But I get lots of assistance at the foundry. I became interested in bronze when I was a graduate student, and I learned about the people of Benin in West Africa. They had cast bronze pieces in the 1700s and 1800s.
Even with all the modern technology, bronze is still quite challenging. So
I was really surprised that they were able to do that quality of work back then. They had a whole palace, you know, and they had bronze figures and bronze wall reliefs, and it was just mesmerizing to see all of this.
How did you feel about the recent movement to repatriate the Benin bronzes?
I thought they were mainly there in England. I didn’t realize that they had been scattered all over the place, in private collections too. It’s going to be difficult to get them all back.
But I’m happy that there are young people now who are insisting that those pieces belong in Africa. African children need to know about them. African people need to know about them, and when I go to Africa, I would like to go to museums to see them.
That would be amazing. And what is your process like, working in bronze?
I’ve enjoyed the versatility of bronze. I used to make drawings, then make the work in clay, and then take a plaster mold. That’s a long, long process, so I decided that I would cut out some of those steps. Now I work directly in the wax.
I make a hollow piece,
I take that to the foundry, and get it cast. Or
I do it in solid wax or wax with cardboard inside. The cardboard burns away when you put the wax inside the mold, and put that in a kiln. Then you just pour the hot bronze, between 1,700 and 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s what is called lost wax method.
“Helen Evans Ramsaran: Strange Fruit,” installation view. Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
And how do you come up with your designs?
I have a lot of different interests. I have always been interested in archaeology and evolution and so forth—not only human evolution but also plant and biological evolution and botany. As a young artist, I wanted to try to mold all of that into a single vision.
I wanted my work to be kind of distinct from everyone else’s. And this is why I still continue to work at bronze because bronze is such a versatile material. Sometimes it was difficult to communicate what I was trying to do, but I think over the years I have succeeded.
During the pandemic, there were a lot of shootings of young Black men and also Breonna Taylor. I wanted to do something to remember that.
As I was making this work, I was also remembering the trauma that Black people have always gone through. I was born in Bryan, Texas, and I remember in my neighborhood seeing people on chain gangs.
We lived just inside the city limits,
so our neighborhood was almost like a village in the countryside. And the police would come late at night, just disrupting the neighborhood supposedly looking for criminals. It was terrifying to me as a child.
I also did 30 sculptures for the exhibition, called Seeds of Struggle, as a memorial for all the children who have lost their lives to gun violence. And that’s really a sore spot with me, that we have these guns in our society and laws that allow people to carry them on the streets. They’re so easily available. You can get parts of them through the mail—I think that’s outrageous.
The sculptures are inspired by seeds and I have them on these plaques, these relief forms that are broken. I got the idea from scribes in ancient Egypt and the Middle East who wrote their records on clay tablets. Clay, as you know, is vulnerable to breaking once it’s dried. I got the idea for seeds because seeds are the very beginnings of plant life.
In fact, all of the sculptures in this exhibition have something to do with plants and plant parts, because plants have a certain amount of resiliency. They start from something as small.
But it’s not easy for seeds to take root to grow. They have to find the right conditions to grow in, and sometimes they don’t.
Some of them don’t make it—that’s why I called it Seeds of Struggle. Eventually, there will be fifty of those tablets. That’s what I’m working on now, finishing that memorial.
Helen Evans Ramsaran, Seeds of Struggle No. 6 (2024). Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
Wow, that’s beautiful. I’m wondering if, as a young artist, you were ever discouraged from making work that was influenced by African art history? Because I think you were a bit ahead of your time, looking in that direction.
I went to Ohio State in the ’60s, and I did my master’s there as well. It’s not that they discouraged me.
It’s just that they didn’t teach us anything at all about Africa.
And so when I got to graduate school, I realized that all the things I was interested in with African art, I didn’t know anything about them.
I went to the Anthropology Department, and they didn’t quite know what to do with me. I told them there was one professor who had told us that the human species started in Africa. It was very empowering to hear that.
And so I went back to him as a graduate student.
He said, “I don’t know anything at all about art, but I can tell you more about Africa.” He told me I had to write a paper every month about something in Africa that I was interested in doing with my work.
I was also interested in other indigenous groups like the Native Americans in the northwest and the southwest, and down in Mexico and Central America. And so I did papers on them as well, and also the indigenous people of Japan—lots of people don’t know that there were indigenous people in Japan. So I acquired a portfolio of things that interested me that I could draw on in my sculptures. And so that’s how I molded my unique vision.
I have been all over the place.
I was a college professor for 38 years, teaching sculpture and ceramics. Now
I’m retired.
A sculpture by Helen Evans Ramsaran. Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
Have you found that people have become more receptive to these themes in your work as you’ve gotten older?
Black people always responded quite positively to my work.
But when I tried to present that work to galleries in the ’70s and ’80s, it was quite foreign to them.  They were not used to looking at or listening to these kinds of ideas about Africa.
But I insisted. In fact, I was on a panel once, I think in 1995, at Paul Kasmin Gallery. They asked us what did we think the art world was going to be like
10 to 20 years from now. I said, “Africa is going to become more prominent”—and Africa certainly is more prominent in the art world. So I was way ahead of my time with that too!
Helen Evans Ramsaran, Nightmare (2024). Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
And for you, what do you see as your hopes for your legacy and perhaps more widespread recognition of your work now that the themes you’ve always been engaged with are getting traction more widely?
I would love to have my work at least shown in museums because I have done this work for more than five decades. Unfortunately, I still have a lot of it, so I would like for this work to get more widely known and shown in museums.
When I left graduate school, one of the things that I wanted was to have my sculpture in parks, in outdoor spaces where children could climb on them and enjoy them, and so forth. Only now are young people getting those kinds of opportunities—those were not available to me, even though I tried.
I was really quite disappointed that I was not given opportunities to make large-scale sculptures and put them outside. That was my big dream.
I think of those Greek bronzes that were shipwrecked and have been in the sea for so many years. They were dropped to the bottom of the sea, and they brought them back up and cleaned them up, and they’re still beautiful. Bronze can withstand almost anything, you know. The wind, the rain, tornadoes—everything. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to be able to put my pieces outside and never have to worry about them.
There were just not many opportunities out there for you if you were Black, and if you were a woman.
That’s just been the story over and over again. But things have been changing, and I hope that you’ll get to see some of that change for yourself as well.
Right, I hope so. But it’s still hard. You know, I’m 81 years old now, so nobody takes my work seriously that much anymore.
Well, you’re right on track for what the Guerrilla Girls said, that for women artists “your career might pick up after you’re 80.”
Right, right. And that’s that’s terrible because it gives you what, four to five years to enjoy being an artist, to be recognized as an artist?
Otherwise, it’s a real struggle.
“Helen Evans Ramsaran: Strange Fruit,” installation view, with Stranglehold. Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
I’m sure. How did you keep going and keep working on these beautiful works for all these years without more widespread recognition?
You have to be an artist. You have to be single-minded about everything.
And so I was single-minded about things.
I just wanted to do art and that was it. I wanted my whole life to be about art and in that much, I succeeded.
Also, I succeeded in traveling around the world to finish my education. I was grateful to the anthropology professor who gave me so much, but I felt like I needed more. So I traveled everywhere. I went to China. I spent the summer in Japan just making handmade paper. I’ve been to Africa about seven or eight times. I spent a year in Ghana and a year in Zimbabwe, and traveled all over, South Africa and other places.
I had to do a lot of the traveling on my own. I had to pay for it.
I tried to get the Fulbright and all kinds of fellowships. And you know, I didn’t get those, but that didn’t stop me. I went anyway. And it was thrilling.
And now, in Ivy, you have a dealer who’s really advocating for you.
Yes, she’s been taking my work all over the place. And I’m really impressed with all she’s done.
But it’s been difficult for me to exhibit outside of the gallery. My work is not included in these big museum shows about women and Black women.
It’s just not.
I don’t know why.
“Strange Fruit: Helen Evans Ramsaran” is on view at Welancora Gallery, 33 Herkimer Street, Brooklyn, New York, October 10, 2024–January 4, 2025.   More

Suddenly, museums are in a rush to canonize the beginnings of digital art.
This has resulted in a welcome fleet of survey shows and hefty catalogs; each expounds on aspects of highly experimental practices that took place at the very margins of an art world that was, at that time, much more interested in abstraction or conceptualism. Among these is “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” at Tate Modern in London, currently on view through June 1, 2025. It focuses on the decades between the 1950s and the dawn of the internet in the 1990s.
Plenty of the earliest pioneers of this then-unfashionable new media have recalled how their efforts were once met with ridicule or hostility. Hungarian-French artist Vera Molnár became one of the inventors of generative art in the late 1960s when she began making algorithmic, geometric compositions using a mainframe computer and mechanical plotter held at the Sorbonne. In 2022, when she was 98, the now-late artist spoke of how these works left her peers “scandalized” and that she “had dehumanized art.”
Two decades later, Palestinian-American painter Samia Halaby also struggled to find much of a willing audience for her first forays into computer-generated, animated compositions, this time made on an Amiga, one of the earliest personal computers. The pieces were considered to be something of a fun novelty.
“I showed them to a friend and we both giggled at them,” she said earlier this year. “I still giggle sometimes. It was so surprising then to see this computer suddenly show us a whole world of color and shapes that were dinging and zinging about and then close [the window] and [it] go back to its dull existence.”
“Electric Dreams” is one of the most important shows to re-evaluate the significance of works like Molnar’s and Halaby’s. While much mainstream art during this period remained inward-looking and self-referential, early digital artists realized instead that the fast-paced electronic and digital advancements being embraced by wider society were, far from being irrelevant, a highly fertile ground for artistic innovation.
Differing considerably from the organic world, these new systems had innate characteristics that provided previously unexplored avenues for creativity. As “Electric Dreams” shows, this led to very wide-ranging discoveries.
Here are our picks for the five most important breakthroughs, organized according to the technology that enabled them.
Lighting
Photograph by Kiyoji Otsuji of artist Atsuko Tanaka wearing her Electric Dress at the 2nd Gutai Exhibition in 1956. Photo: © Tetsuo Otsuji, Musashino Art University Museum & Library, courtesy of YOK.
One of the most basic technological advancements to be adopted by artists is that of artificial lighting, and “Electric Dreams” both begins and ends by focusing on seminal light pieces by Japanese artist Atsuko Tanaka and American artist Liliane Lijn, respectively. At the entrance, visitors are shown archival photographs that document Tanaka’s Electric Dress (1956), a wearable costume made of colorfully painted Edison and tubular incandescent bulbs that could flash on cue thanks to a switching device invented by the artist. She had been inspired by the captivating dazzle of city lights in Osaka, Japan, and, being an amateur electrician, willingly took on considerable risks to recreate these effects on her own body. That the dress is both menacing and mesmerizing seems to reflect an uneasy relationship with the rapidly modernizing effects of postwar globalization.
Kineticism
David Medalla, Sand Machine Bahag-Hari Trance 1 (1963-2015). Photo: © David Medalla, © Tate.
Though Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely is rightly the name that springs to mind when thinking of kinetic art, a charming piece by Filipino, London-based artist David Medalla steals the show at “Electric Dreams.” The rather janky-looking contraption from 1964 uses a central rotating post to drag a beaded wire around the sandpit at its base, creating endless circular patterns. Its makeshift quality means the dangling beads create imperfect and unpredictable rings each time, inviting an element of randomness that allows the work to take on a life of its own, separate from the predetermined wishes of its creator.
Randomness
Hiroshi Kawano, KD 29 – Artificial Mondrian (1969). Photo: ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, © Hiroshi Kawano.
The use of randomness became a staple element of creative programming, allowing artists to create systems from a mix of rules and planned randomness that would generate endless variations on their chosen composition. Some of the best-known practitioners are Molnar, A. Michael Noll, Frieder Nake, and Georg Nees, but “Electric Dreams” also spotlights contributions to the field of computer art made by Japanese philosopher Hiroshi Kawano. Like many of his peers, he worked with “pseudo-random” number generators to create abstract designs from geometric shapes. Their characteristics and arrangement were decided according to parameters specifying a range of possible numbers, dimensions, or orientations, but the rest was left to chance. In 1964, some of these works were published in the Japanese IBM Review.
Telecommunication
Eduardo Kac, Horny (1985). Photo: © Eduardo Kac, lent by the Tate Americas Foundation.
The Brazilian-American artist Eduardo Kac is best known for his work with biotechnology, but in the 1980s he experimented with interactive holography, robotics, and telecommunications. Three works from this latter category are included in “Electric Dreams.” They make use of the Minitel system, a precursor to the internet, that allowed users to communicate and share information via phone lines that could be accessed by remote terminals. Kac used them to create animated poems and these works play with moving compositions and shifting typographies to reveal new meaning in the words. They are displayed at Tate Modern on restored vintage hardware and software.
“This network existed before the web and does not exist any longer,” Kac said in 2022. “And that idea alone is interesting: the idea of the birth and death of networks. And what it means to artworks that are made in and for these networks that no longer exist.”
Interactivity
Installation view of Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss, Liquid Views (1992) in “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” at Tate Modern. Photo: Lucy Green, © Tate, © Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss.
Though V.R. headsets are not a surprising sight in galleries these days, that was certainly not the case in the early 1990s when German artist Monika Fleischmann began working with architect Wolfgang Strauss and computer scientist Christian-A. Bohn to produce some impressively advanced works using nascent technologies. These include the virtual reality installation Home of the Brain (1989-90), which was staggeringly ahead of its time, and Liquid Views – Narcissus’ Digital Reflections (1992), a touch screen interactive game included in “Electric Dreams.” Visitors hovering over the screen can see their reflection distorted by a digital pool of water that responds to their touch by rippling.
“It depicts the encounter of the self with a shadowy virtual doppelganger as a metaphor for the internet and predicts the emergence of the second self as a selfie data body,” the artists explained in the exhibition catalog.
“Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” is at Tate Modern in London until June 1, 2025. More

Any way you slice it, Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was exceptional. She forged a career as a librarian in the early 20th century, putting together a world-class collection of books, manuscripts, and art for millionaire banker J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) and his son Jack that became New York’s Morgan Library and Museum. But her achievements are even more remarkable given that Greene was actually a Black woman, passing for white in a segregated society.
Now, the Morgan is telling her incredible story in “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy,” part of the 100th anniversary celebrations marking the institution’s opening to the public in 1924. Greene is an integral part of the museum’s history, serving as its first director until 1948, and bringing to life the vision of its founders.
“It was incredible what she accomplished,” Erica Ciallela, who curated the exhibition with Philip Palmer, the Morgan’s curator of literary and historical manuscripts, told me. “It’s not just that she passed [as white]. She was also a woman at the turn of the century. When she started here, she signed her own paycheck before women had the right to vote.”
That paycheck, it’s worth noting, was nothing short of impressive, making headlines in its own right. A 1921 news item in the Asbury Park Evening Press listed Greene as number eight in a list of “Women Who Earn Big Wages,” with a $25,000 annual salary.
Ernest Walter Histed, Belle da Costa Greene (1910). Collection of the Morgan Library and Museum, New York.
She had gotten a job with Morgan in 1905, after three years working at the Princeton University Library in New Jersey, where she met his nephew Junius Spencer Morgan II. That meaningful connection set her on a path to acquiring some of the world’s rarest and most important documents for the museum library, including a 1485 printing of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.
“Belle Greene really pioneered the idea of a blockbuster manuscripts exhibition, not just artwork,” Palmer said. “That’s something I think the Morgan is known for.”
Born in Washington, D.C., to a prominent free Black family, Greene was the daughter of Genevieve Ida Fleet Greener (1849–1941) and Richard T. Greener (1844–1922). Her birth name was Belle Marion Greener, and her father was the first Black graduate of Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur, Westminster: William Caxton, (1485). Collection of the Morgan Library and Museum, purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan, 1911. Photo by Graham S. Haber.
The show delves into this early history, including the story of the 2013 rediscovery of Richard Greener’s lost Harvard diploma in an abandoned Chicago home, and the only surviving photograph of Genevieve Greener, who began passing as white, along with her children, after separating from her husband in the 1890s.
In adulthood, Greene obscured these origins, claiming that her complexion was due to Portuguese ancestry. She did her best to take the secret of her race to her grave, even going as far as destroying her personal papers. The truth remained a secret until 1999, when Jean Strouse published the biography Morgan: American Financier.
Mrs. Greene, Belle da Costa Green’s mother, on an outing in the Hudson River Valley near Bear Mountain State Park, New York (ca. 1930s). Collection of the Morgan Library and Museum, New York.
More recently, Greene’s life was the subject of a 2021 novel, The Personal Librarian, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. Unlike that fictional story, the exhibition doesn’t try to imagine her inner thoughts and feelings (and no, there’s no reason to believe there was any romantic encounter between Morgan and his librarian—although she did have a long-term romance with famed art historian Bernard Berenson).
“I would say the voice presented in that book is not quite Belle Greene’s voice,” Palmer said. “You really see in her letters how much her personality comes through in her writing.”
Gospels of Judith of Flanders (1051–64). Collection of the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, purchased by J. P. Morgan Jr., 1926.
The curators are hopeful not only that the show captures that personality, but that it is also a celebration of Greene’s profession.
“Librarians are under attack in our country right now, and we really wanted to honor that work,” Palmer said.
“Maybe we can start getting librarians to become celebrities again,” Ciallela added.
A 1911 article in the World Magazine about Belle da Costa Greene bidding $50,000 to win a 1485 printing of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur at the Robert Hoe collection auction.
A fabulous news clipping from the World Magazine on display in the exhibition recaps a 1911 auction in which the librarian fearlessly bid $50,000 for the Mallory manuscript on behalf of Morgan. It identifies Greene as “the bachelor girl, still in her twenties, who as J. Pierpont Morgan’s librarian has charge of the finest private collection of costly volumes in the world.”
But Greene wasn’t just buying for Morgan. A section of the exhibition is dedicated to her sumptuous apartment, home to her own collection, including a stunning Lavinia Fontana painting, Marriage Portrait of a Bolognese Noblewoman, dating to about 1580.
Lavinia Fontana, Marriage Portrait of a Bolognese Noblewoman (ca. 1580). Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. The painting was once owned by Belle da Costa Greene, J. Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian and the first director of the Morgan Museum and Library in New York.
The work is now owned by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., which has an incredible collection of work by women artists—but didn’t realize the painting’s ties to Greene.
“The Morgan had acquired it after Belle Greene’s death, so it wasn’t well-known and -documented that it was actually from her estate,” Ciallela said. “And I knew that she had this status and wealth and this amazing apartment, but unboxing that piece, seeing it in person, I was just like, ‘OK, I want that in my apartment.’ It’s just incredible and beautiful.”
Clarence H. White, Belle da Costa Greene (1911). Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
The Morgan had always been proud of Greene’s foundational role at the institution, but has been working in recent years to better honor her legacy as a Black woman. In addition to the exhibition, the museum has awarded the two-year Belle da Costa Greene Curatorial Fellowships to two “promising scholars from communities historically underrepresented in the curatorial and special collections fields” since 2019.
“So many young people starting out in medieval studies, or librarianship or museum studies, they see Belle Greene really working against all odds to rise to the top of her field. And to do it at a time when that was extremely difficult for a woman, let alone a Black woman?” Palmer said. “She is so inspiring to so many people.”
“Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy” is on view at the Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, October 25, 2024–May 4, 2025. More

Larry Fink, the late photojournalist and art photographer whose work often depicted the glamour of the rich and famous, will have his photographs shown alongside the sculptures and paintings of his wife, Martha Posner, for the first time.
Fink, who died in November 2023 at the age of 82, had been in talks to have a solo show of his work at the Sarasota Art Museum. As his health continued to deteriorate, the exhibition evolved into one, guest-curated by Peter Barberie, that would put Fink’s and Posner’s work in conversation with each other.
“Larry was really hoping to be able to participate in the event itself,” Posner said in an interview. “But clearly that wasn’t going to happen. I don’t know how Peter Barberie did this. He made my work have this wonderful communication and interaction with Larry’s work that made perfect sense.”
Barberie, a Philadelphia Museum of Art curator, admitted in an essay that their art “seems utterly different,” contrasting Fink’s glossy photos of human behavior and desires to Posner’s waxy, rough and hairy sculptures.
Larry Fink, Lilith, Sculpture by Martha Posner (1993). Courtesy Larry Fink/MUUS Collection.
But Barberie wrote that Posner and Fink share “core artistic themes” including desire, vulnerability, and brutality, which were often shaped by life on their Pennsylvania farm.
Virginia Shearer, the director of the museum, said in an interview that the couple “really admired each other,” with their mutual influence highlighted by Barberie’s curation.
“Larry could get into a pond and really embed himself with a group of frogs,” Shearer said. “The beginning of the exhibition pairs those photographs with Martha’s beautiful watercolor drawings of animals and insects.”
Posner is best known for large sculptural works using raw materials, like figures made from honeysuckle retrieved from the woods around their farm in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, on walks with her dog, Grizzly, who would carry back vines to use. She’s also used fleece from the sheep and llamas they raised, and feathers clipped from the wings of dead peacocks.
Larry Fink. A Sabatine Christmas, Martins Creek, Pennsylvania (1983). Photo courtesy of Larry Fink/MUUS Collection.
Posner said that even the way she and Fink thought about their work was quite different. Fink, primarily a photojournalist, was given assignments. His artistic work would then be inspired by the assignments he had been given. Most of it was taken on a “tiny Sony point-and-shoot camera” that he “did just about everything with.”
“It bothered Larry that I didn’t work every day,” she said. “He called me an inspirational artist, and that’s true. I work when I feel like I don’t have any other choice but to start working. I know many of my artist friends have a much better daily practice than me, but also I have this enormous property to take care of, too.”
Larry Fink, Pigs at Stacia’s, Pennsylvania (2019). Courtesy Larry Fink/MUUS Collection.
The major convergence between the practices of the two artists, Shearer pointed out, is in the photographs Fink took of Posner’s work, and sometimes of her process. “There’s some fabulous photographs like one of her performing in the woods with a mask which is really very evocative of the myths and legends that come up in her work,” she said.
Posner said Fink was the only person she trusted to shoot her work because he could make her sculptures feel dynamic, true to how they look in person. “They had a presence,” she said. “I wouldn’t know who else to do it. I mean, a painting, I could ask any good photographer. But the sculptures, they became too static if anyone else photographed them.”
Posner met the already successful Fink in 1992 and joined him at his farm soon after. Fink built her a studio in their barn, and she took care of the homestead when he traveled for photo shoots.
“Larry was incredibly well-known and successful and worked for every major magazine,” Posner said. “So, he cast a big shadow. Having said that, he was always very supportive of my work. But Larry was away a lot working, and we had this farm.”
Installation view of “Larry Fink / Martha Posner: Flesh and Bone” at Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, Florida, 2024. Photo: Ryan Gamma.
She said they often helped each other with their work, but she didn’t see their artistic relationship until Barberie assembled the show.
“Larry could come in and talk and help if I was working on a painting or a large drawing. He could see where those things were going. His first wife is the great painter Joan Snyder, and I think that they had a firm collaborative relationship,” Posner said. “But my being a sculptor was more difficult for Larry to see.”
She recounted an instance when Fink invaded her studio and described something she was working on as a “complete disaster.”
“You are not allowed in here anymore unless you’re invited,” Posner shot back. But when he saw the piece finished, he said, “Fucking great, Posner.”
Barberie’s first instinct for Fink’s solo show, Posner said, was to have it reflect the contents of a book of the photographer’s work that they had planned to publish. But when Barberie visited Posner’s studio, the idea of the joint show struck him.
Installation view of “Larry Fink / Martha Posner: Flesh and Bone” at Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, Florida, 2024. Photo: Ryan Gamma.
“I was cranky [at the idea] because I had all my work wrapped up in a loft and boxed up, and my main concern, as I said, was caring for my husband,” she said. “But I schlepped up and unwrapped everything and pulled things out. But Peter’s a friend of ours. So, you know, it was very easy working with him.”
As she sorted through her work, she found pieces of hers she had forgotten about and some that had never been shown. Barberie would pick things out as she pulled them down, selecting what she described as “very personal pieces” like watercolors of animals directly from her sketchbook.
“I had no idea how it was going to work because I was so overwhelmed with Larry. And then, after Larry’s death, I was overwhelmed with everything you go through with an estate of a loved one who’s passed,” Posner added. “I just sort of released everything.”
Martha Posner, #MeToo (detail) (2018). Courtesy of Martha Posner.
And the show does include new work by Fink, made during 2020 as he spent more time at the farm. Fink was shooting as recently as six months before his death, while Posner’s latest work includes 2024 watercolors, painted after her husband’s passing.
“My studio is cold now. So, I’m just doing some small pieces in the house. But come the spring, I will do some more,” Posner said. She said her next work is inspired by the writings of Natalie Haynes, whose bestselling books examine the female characters of Greek mythology and how they were depicted.
“She’s recovering the stories of women. So, I’ve been doing a bunch of small watercolors based on Greek mythology and I’m very excited about retelling these stories,” she said.
Martha Posner, Mercy (2011-2016). Photo courtesy of Martha Posner
As for her life on the farm, Posner said it remains indistinguishable from her practice.
“I don’t separate myself from this place. And, the first time I came here, I think I fell in love with this place equally to Larry,” she said. “There are gardens all over the place which I planted slowly over 30 years and it’s just very hard for me to separate what my art practice is from who I am and where I live.
Larry Fink, Praying Mantis, Martins Creek, Pennsylvania (1978). Courtesy of Larry Fink/MUUS Collection.
“I don’t see a big difference,” she added, “between flooding a field with 500 tulips every year for the past 25 years and making something in the studio.”
“Larry Fink / Martha Posner: Flesh and Bone” is on view at the Sarasota Art Museum, 1001 South Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Florida, through April 13, 2025. More

The Jigoku-zoshi (“Handscrolls of Buddhist Hell”) is a Japanese scroll from the late 12th century that graphically depicts naked, horrified monks running away from bands of vicious, animal-headed demons engulfed in flames.
Someone with limited knowledge of art history and the Buddhist religion might assume that the animalistic demons are the antagonists of this story, but it’s actually the monks who are at fault. That’s because the Jigoku-zoshi depicts the principle of treating all beings with respect and kindness—a principle these monks have failed to uphold, hence their being sent to hell.
Unknown, Shiva in the Form of Sharabha, Tantric Painting of Garuda (1830). Photo: Gift of Herbert Gordon Zahn, 1978.
The Jigoku-zoshi exemplifies the varied roles that animals and animal-related imagery play in Asian art, from Indian statues to Japanese scrolls. Those who wish to know more about this topic should consider paying a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s ongoing exhibition, “Mythical, Divine, Demonic: Animal Imagery in South Asian Art,” open until February 9, 2026.
“Animals,” the museum’s website explains, “appear everywhere in the art of South Asia,” a part of the globe that includes India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Unlike medieval Christian art from Europe, the animals seen in South Asian art rarely represent themselves. More often than not, they are the incarnations of gods, their adversaries, or their trusty companions, bringing either bounty or destruction to the mortal realm.
“Mythical, Divine, Demonic” takes specific animals—notably the lion, serpent, man-eagle, and chimera—and looks at the different meanings and identities that artists from various South Asian cultures and time periods have ascribed to them.
Unknown, Dancing Six-Armed Ganesha (9th century). Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / The Luther W. Brady Collection.
The exhibition was curated by Neeraja Poddar, the Philadelphia Museum of Art Ira Brind and Stacey Spector Associate Curator of South Asian Art, and a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Her interests range from ancient Hindu manuscripts to Nepalese painting traditions.
The first thing visitors will learn as they explore the exhibition is that South Asian cultures regard animals rather differently than the Christian, materialist West, which maintains a clear separation between the human world and the animal, which the former must conquer, control, and cultivate.
Unknown, The Goddess Varahi (c. late 5th – early 6th century). Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1977.
Conversely, Hindu and Buddhist cultures tend to see the human and animal world as part of a unified whole. Both religions believe in the idea of reincarnation, including humans reincarnating into animals and vice versa. Given this connection, it should come as no surprise that many Hindu gods and goddesses like Vishnu frequently assume animal or part-human, part-animal forms.
“Mythical, Divine, Demonic” features many paintings and statues depicting such manifestations. For example, a clay statue from the late 5th or early 6th century represents the Goddess Varahi, the female counterpart of Vishnu’s boar avatar, Varaha. Varahi also has the face of a boar or sow, but the body of a human.
Unknown, Ceremonial Cover (Rumal): Vishnu on the Cosmic Ocean (1700-1800). Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Stella Kramrisch Collection, 1994.
Many scholars regard Hinduism as one of the world’s oldest religions, so it is difficult to ascertain what specific animals were originally meant to represent. That said, boars are generally associated with wildness and overcoming challenges. This is fitting, considering Vishnu is said to have turned into Varaha to defeat a powerful demon named Hiranyaksha.
Also featured in “Mythical, Divine, Demonic” is a painting of Shiva in the form of Sharabha, produced around 1830. In Hindu iconography, this chimera is an amalgamation of different animals, and is arguably the most powerful of Shiva’s many incarnations. In this case, it is a part-bird, part-lion hybrid with eight legs, thus demonstrating just how complex and varied the coded animal motifs within South Asian art can be.
“Mythical, Divine, Demonic: Animal Imagery in South Asian Art” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, through February 9, 2026. More