Eliana Willis

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

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

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

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

Recent far-right riots in the U.K., fueled by misinformation and culminating in large anti-fascist marches this summer, have underscored the critical role of art in confronting narratives around immigration.
This fall, London hosts a powerful series of exhibitions that delve into the immigrant experience, countering the mainstream media’s often dehumanizing portrayal of refugees. These shows illuminate diverse stories and, collectively, offer a poignant, universal message—a stark contrast to the climate of hostility seen on the streets.
Last month, the Migration Museum inaugurated its new London location in Lewisham with “All Our Stories” (until December 2025), a survey of artworks like the sculpture Waiting II by Shorsh Saleh, a row of chairs sinking into the ground that evokes the uncertainty of sitting by while impersonal bureaucratic processes determine your future. Other educational installations include a tent inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the sounds and sights of a refugee camp in Calais, a major port connecting France with the U.K.
Lucky Star installation by Angela Hui at “All Our Stories” exhibition at the Migration Muesum in London. Photo: Elzbieta Piekacz.
Another installation by writer Angela Hui is modeled on Lucky Star, the Chinese takeaway restaurant that her parents ran after settling in Wales in 1988. When Hui was growing up she and her brothers helped out behind the counter, which has been faithfully recreated, taking orders over the phone in between finishing their homework. A T.V. in the corner plays a video of Hui’s mother making spring rolls while recounting her journey from China through Hong Kong to the U.K. By picking up the phone and dialling different numbers, visitors can also hear more stories from other second-generation immigrants who grew up in family-owned businesses.
“It was a surreal experience,” Hui said of installing the work, which she describes as “a love letter” to Chinese takeaways. “I would never have thought to see my story in a museum. I just wanted to document the almost thankless job of working in an immigrant-owned hospitality business.” These beloved local restaurants in rural white areas are “often people’s introduction to a different cuisine, the building blocks for their palates to explore new things,” Hui added. Yet, “we don’t often get to see them as having any cultural importance.”
Swedish artist Lap-See Lam grew up in her family’s restaurant Bamboo Garden in Stockholm, and the Chinese restaurant’s position in the Western imagination has long been a subject of interest to her. For her current show at Studio Voltaire in Clapham (until December 15), she presents a film inspired by the Sea Palace, a three-story floating Chinese restaurant that was eventually abandoned and became a spooky attraction at a Swedish amusement park, where it was known as “a ship from the Orient with a thousand year curse”. For Lam, who is representing Sweden at the 60th Venice Biennale, it is a site to explore displacement and loss as well as well as to imagine new Cantonese mythologies.
Installation view of Lap-See Lam, Floating Sea Palace at Studio Voltaire in London, 2024. Photo: Andy Keate, courtesy of the artist and Studio Voltaire.
Inaugurating the new Reflections Room at the London Museum Docklands is Exodus, a sculpture by British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové, launching November 29 (until May 2025). A wooden table top crammed with toy figurines of cars, trucks, humans, and wild animals all apparently in gridlock rests on Castrol oil drums. Nearby walls will be covered in maps documenting historic networks of trade, tourism, and migration between 1500 and 2005, leaving the viewer to infer how these sweeping global movements relate to each other.
“The history of mankind demonstrates a knowledge of humans walking freely around the Earth, often leaving in large numbers,” said Ové in a press statement. He added that this work is “about the movement of people from African countries, which is symbolic of all people who find themselves in exodus. All vehicles and dolls face the same way as there is only one way out, one way to leave, and only one hope of a future elsewhere.”
The artist’s rarely exhibited snapshots of London’s Black communities will also be included in Tate Modern’s “The 80s: Photographing Britain,” opening November 21 through May 5, 2025.
Over at the Wellcome Collection in Euston, the survey show “Hard Graft” (until April 27, 2025) examines how different forms of labor impact our physical and mental health. A newly commissioned sonic work, Care Chains, by Vietnamese artist Moi Tran, was produced in collaboration with The Voice of Domestic Workers. This U.K.-based support group advocates for the thousands of migrants, predominantly women, who arrive each year from countries like Kenya and the Philippines to work for private households. The artwork uses percussive movements like claps, stomps, and clicks, in an expressive, joyous choreography that centers the body as an instrument—one that feels the toll of providing urgent, arduous, and often invisible care work.
Installation view of Moi Tran, Care Chains (2024) in the exhibition “Hard Graft” at the Wellcome Collection in London. Photo: Wellcome Collection/ Steven Pocock, 2024.
Some institutions in London are preserving untold histories of migration that reveal how its influence on Britain is nothing new. 19 Princelet Street, a house in Spitalfields, was built in the early 18th century for a Huguenot silk merchant who had emigrated from France due to religious persecution. It later became a synagogue, with a basement used for antifascist meetings in the 1930s. Following conservation work, 19 Princelet Street is set to open to the public as a record of the ways in which so many waves of immigration have shaped the East End.
A singular story is spotlighted in “Belongings” (until November 8) by Susan Aldworth at The Arcade, Bush House in the West End. “What does it feel like to leave your home forever?” the exhibition asks, considering the case of Aldworth’s Italian grandmother Luigia Berni who, at the age of just 23 in 1924, moved to London with her young baby. The artist has imagined the contents of the small suitcase in which she carried essentials and vestiges of her old life, embroidering family photographs and stories onto 35 pieces of antique clothing.
Just a stone’s throw away from Bush House, at St Mary le Strand church, renowned stage designer Es Devlin presented Congregation from October 4-9, in partnership with the U.N. Refugee Agency, The Courtauld, and King’s College. The animated installation emerged from a months-long project that saw Devlin welcome 50 Londoners into her studio, all of whom have at some time in their lives been refugees. Each is the subject of a chalk and charcoal portrait.
Installation view of Es Devlin, Congregation at St Mary le Strand church in London in October 2024. Photo: Daniel Devlin.
Participants came from all over the world, including Myanmar, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ukraine, and some chose to recount their stories (their voices filled the cosy chapel). Maya Ghazal, for example, sought asylum in the U.K. from the Syrian civil war and is now training to become a commercial pilot. Dame Stephanie Shirley arrived to the U.K. via the Kindertransport in the late 1930s and, discovering in herself a great love of computers, became a leading businesswoman in the I.T. sector.
Speaking to Artnet News while in the midst of the project in May, Devlin said the portraits are mainly about “porosity between ourselves and others.” She revealed that she is working with The Policy Institute at King’s College in the hope of supporting “systemic change” that might reduce the great peril that refugees subject themselves to, for example when journeying across the English Channel on small boats. “That [mission] is ambitious, but that’s what the work has got to be about.”
For those who missed the brief window to see “Congregation”, Devlin is presenting the same installation and new works from the project as part of “Face to Face: 50 Encounters with Strangers,” a free exhibition opening at Somerset House on November 23 until January 12, 2025. Concurrently, The Policy Institute will hold public discussions with leading researchers on asylum and migration policy as part of its season “Lost & Found: Stories of sanctuary and belonging.” More

Gerard Malanga spent most of the 1960s working with Andy Warhol at his New York Factory. He worked together with the Pop artist on his silkscreens, shot and starred in his films, and danced with the Velvet Underground, undertaking both administrative and Superstar duties. As a photographer, Malanga also kept his camera running, capturing the creative and at times playful scene that surrounded Warhol.
“I just felt it was important to at least document the milieu that I was a part of,” he recalled in 2009, “because what was happening was important.”
Gerard Malanga. Photo: © Gerard Malanga. Courtesy The Waverly Press.
Now, three films by Malanga, some long unseen, have been revisited and restored under the auspices of Waverly Press. The project coincides with the making of a forthcoming monograph, Gerard Malanga: Secret Cinema, authored by the Trust’s director of galleries and public art, Anastasia James. In a presentation by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust on December 14, the 16mm works, newly transferred to 4K, will have their world premiere at the Harris Theater in Pittsburgh, Warhol’s birthplace.
Collaborating with Malanga for more than a decade, James told me over email, “has underscored the urgency of preserving these films, which capture the raw energy and complexity of the 1960s avant-garde. I can’t understate how integral Gerard’s films are to a fuller understanding of Warhol’s legacy and restoring them and presenting them ensures that they are accessible to both scholars and a new generation of viewers.”
Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol. Photo: © Gerard Malanga. Courtesy The Waverly Press.
Malanga joined Warhol’s studio in 1963, where he would become instrumental as the artist developed works including Triple Elvis (1963), his “Flowers” series (1964), and his collection of Screen Tests, which featured famous names and faces. Though often remembered as Warhol’s “assistant,” his actual role in the Factory bled beyond that. “His influence,” James stressed, “was indispensable in shaping the Factory’s aesthetic and intellectual ethos.”
Evidence is in the three newly restored films, which chronicle Malanga’s work at the studio. Among them, Film Notebooks, 1964–1970, previously presented at the 2005 Vienna International Film Festival, compiles a trove of footage that offers a behind-the-scenes peek at the Factory goings-on. It includes views of a performance by the Velvet Underground at Paraphernalia, Edie Sedgwick applying makeup, Warhol filming Sedgwick applying said makeup, and Bob Dylan and Salvador Dalí sitting for their Screen Tests.
Gerard Malanga, Film Notebooks, 1964–1970. Photo: © Gerard Malanga. Courtesy The Waverly Press.
The Filmmaker Records a Portion of His Life in the Month of August, 1968 taps that same vein of documentary. As it says on the tin, the 15-minute film serves as Malanga’s visual diary, which he recorded using an 8mm Keystone camera gifted to him by artist and filmmaker Marie Menken. Warhol shows up, as do New York avant-gardists including Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young.
Perhaps the most remarkable of the trio of films is Andy Warhol: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man (1964), in which the Pop artist himself becomes subject of a Screen Test. Over 20 minutes, Warhol is filmed in close-up, under various lighting experiments, with and without his trademark sunglasses, his vulnerability on rare display.
“I made this series of film portraits of Andy Warhol at the Silver Factory in 1964 and 1965 as seven individual three-minute sequences, on different days,” Malanga said in a statement about Portraits. “It’s basically mimicking the Screen Tests that we were doing at the time.”
To James, this particular film is unique for its unprecedented view of a famously elusive character: “Here, Warhol slips in and out of a constructed persona, revealing the delicate dance between presence and image, artist and icon.” She describes it as “among the most revealing and intimate documents of the artist I have ever seen.”
Gerard Malanga. Photo: © Gerard Malanga. Courtesy The Waverly Press.
According to James, Malanga’s films are scattered across personal and institutional collections, with some of them remaining in his own archive. Yet more reels were unearthed during the research process for the Malanga monograph.
Over many months, experts from “one of the best film labs in the U.S.,” said James, worked to preserve the films, making sure to retain their original textures and material aspects. The entire process was further supervised by analog film specialists, who were on hand to tackle issues from degradation to color correction.
Gerard Malanga, The Filmmaker Records a Portion of His Life in the Month of August, 1968. Photo: © Gerard Malanga. Courtesy The Waverly Press.
Malanga’s films will be presented at the theater in conjunction with “Roger Jacoby: Pittsburgh Stories,” an exhibition and film program highlighting the late experimental filmmaker. Beginning in the 1970s, Jacoby’s work evidenced both inventive techniques and personal themes; he also ran in similar circles to Malanga, who introduced him to the Factory (Jacoby’s long-time partner was Warhol Superstar Ondine). Jacoby produced eight films before his untimely death at 41 in 1985.
James’s research has uncovered further and deeper ties between Jacoby and Malanga. For her, their connection bears out the Factory as a lively place of artistic production and experimentation as much as “social and creative exchange”—a moment that Malanga duly captured.
“They are a testament to Malanga’s role as a connector and collaborator,” she added of his films, “highlighting his influence on the artists who would define the era, while also showcasing the social dynamics that Warhol’s camera, often focused on the artist himself, might otherwise have missed.”
“Gerard Malanga: Secret Cinema” is on view at the Harris Theater, 803 Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, on December 14. More