Eliana Willis

“For the writer of fiction,” Flannery O’Connor once reflected, “everything has its testing point in the eye.” Writing, to her, didn’t just call on emotion and thought; it required “sense-impression” on the part of the author—on what and how she sees. It begins with the eye, “an organ,” she said, “that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.”
From O’Connor’s own eye would issue her deeply observed fiction, written from the late 1940s through early ’60s, now a fixture in the Southern Gothic canon. Underpinning it, though, was the writer’s little-known visual art practice—the cartoons, drawings, and paintings that summoned her perceptive powers. For years, scholars only had inklings of these artworks; a rediscovery, however, is changing that.
Flannery O’Connor’s painting of the family home at Andalusia Farm with her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, in the foreground. Photo: Anna Gay Leavitt, courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
For the first time, dozens of artworks by the Southern writer are seeing the light of day at “Hidden Treasures” at Andalusia Farm, O’Connor’s former homestead in Milledgeville, Georgia. Marking the centennial of her birth, the exhibition brings together her childhood drawings, cartoons, paintings on wood, and even a stuffed red-faced doll she had created, complete with plaid shirt and a large cape. At its heart is a 1952 self-portrait, in which O’Connor painted herself gazing out from under a wide sun hat, while flanked by a pheasant.
“The self-portrait was the first painting that arrived in our custody,” Andalusia curator Cassie Munnell told me over a phone call. “I knew that there was one out there, but I’d only ever seen black-and-white photos of it. To see it in person, to see it in color and the vibrancy of it, was just so exciting.”
Flannery O’Connor standing next to her 1952 self portrait. Photo: Alpha Historica / Alamy Stock Photo.
The entire collection had been stowed away for decades until it was recently unearthed—some works came from a storage unit behind a fast-food restaurant, others from the attic of the Milledgeville townhouse of Louise Florencourt, O’Connor’s cousin and co-executor of her estate. It was in the latter 19th-century building where O’Connor spent her teenage years, squirreling herself away in the top story to create art.
(Before she died in 2023, Florencourt bequeathed the property to the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities at Georgia College and State University, the writer’s alma mater, which also preserves her library and the Andalusia compound, now a National Historic Landmark. Some of the artworks have also been gifted to the school by the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust.)
Installation view of “Hidden Treasures” at the Andalusia Interpretive Center. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
Few eyes had seen the extent of the archive, which was fiercely guarded by Florencourt (one rare visitor to the storage unit, author Damian Ference, recalled it packed “wall-to-wall” with O’Connor artifacts). A worry of the early trustees, explained Farrell O’Gorman, who recently joined the trust, was that “the paintings might somehow distract from her achievements as a writer.”
Not so, said Munnell. The artworks “complement and expand” what we know about O’Connor, she noted. “You can see the ways that her ideas and the way she described people carried over. Her fiction is often quite dramatic and her characters are often described in these big, bold ways. This carries over in how she painted.”
Flannery O’Connor, c. 1950s. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, O’Connor came to visual art before fiction writing. At five, she was creating caricatures and sketches, which blossomed into her joyous, witty linoleum prints (compiled in 2012’s Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons). She submitted her illustrations to her high school and college publications; others, she compiled into small books. She paused her visual art when she entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1945.
It was in Iowa that O’Connor began her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), and a run of beguiling short stories shot through with pathos, dark humor, and keen perception. In them are characters wrangling with faith and self in the heart of the American South (which O’Connor, a devout Catholic, deemed “Christ-haunted”), threaded throughout with potent descriptions of desolate farms, of eyes “the color of pecan shells,” of a peacock with a “tail full of suns,” and of forest-lined roads, some leading straight to the sky. One senses the cartoonist in these deft strokes.
Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
In 1952, following a diagnosis of lupus, O’Connor returned to Andalusia Farm to live under her mother’s care. The homestead, purchased by O’Connor’s uncle in 1931, was where she would spend the last years of her life before her death at age 39. Despite her prognosis, she maintained a disciplined writing schedule—completing the now-classic The Violent Bear It Away (1960), for one—when not attending church, giving lectures, and painting her surrounds.
These rural scenes are dotted throughout “Hidden Treasures.” There are images of the farm’s horse barn, pictured amid stark tree branches; of a lake, surrounded by a verdant hill and captured with an Impressionistic hand; and of O’Connor’s beloved peafowl, which she avidly raised in Andalusia. “It’s all very grounded in the Southern farm experience, in this area, and our natural landscapes,” said Munnell.
Flannery O’Connor’s painting of fowl. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
But O’Connor also turned her hand to portraits: the show includes depictions of a green-clad female, believed to be her mother, and an African American woman in mid-crochet, likely a farm worker. There’s, of course, her self-portrait as well.
These later works follow her earlier caricatures—colorful portrayals of a wrinkled woman with a pointed nose and a cross-eyed man in a bowler hat, among others—that offer a highly comic counterpoint to her dramatic fiction. They might be juvenilia, but to Munnell, they hold stylistic hallmarks that carried over into O’Connor’s mature paintings such as “the ways that motion is displayed and details like facial features.”
Installation view of “Hidden Treasures” at the Andalusia Interpretive Center. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
And even in these simple drawings one can read O’Connor’s eye for mining meaning out of gesture and expression, and her knack for drawing from life, if not imagination. Drawing, in fact, might be the best medium to accompany fiction writing, she once stressed. “Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look” is essential, she said. “The writer should never be ashamed of staring.”
“Hidden Treasures” is on view at the Andalusia Interpretive Center, 2628 N. Columbia Street, Milledgeville, Georgia, throughout the summer. More

As the New York art world prepares for another busy art fair week, here’s our list of Frieze must-see shows at museums to galleries across the city. Whether you like emerging artists, rediscovered figures, or famous names from art history, we have you covered. See how many of these you can squeeze into your fair week agenda, and over the coming weeks.

“Kennedy Yanko: Retro Future” at Salon 94 and “Kennedy Yanko: Epithets” at James CohanApril 5–May 17 and April 5–May 10, 2025
“Kennedy Yanko: Retro Future” at Salon 94. Photo: courtesy of Salon 94, New York.
This duo of shows features Kennedy Yanko’s delightfully contorted abstract sculptures, made from salvaged scraps of metal combined with folded sheets of dried layers of paint. The artist has taken over all three floors of Salon 94’s Upper East Side mansion for her largest show to date—with a bonus group exhibition Kennedy has curated, “Metal and Memory,” featuring abstract works by the likes of John Chamberlain, Leonardo Drew, and Frank Stella. Downtown at James Cohan, Yanko has adopted a more somber palette for wall-mounted works with smaller, intricate details that she has described as inspired by “the dark place within me.”
Salon 94 is located at 3 East 89th Street, New York, New York. James Cohan Gallery is located at 48, 52 Walker Street, 2nd Floor, New York, New York.

“Salman Toor: Wish Maker” at Luhring AugustineMay 2–June 21, 2025
Salman Toor, Oh Father (2025). Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York.
After months of lockdown, one of the first new shows at the Whitney in 2020 was a star-making turn for Salman Toor, the Pakistani artist known for his green-tinted paintings exploring the imagined lives of queer South Asian men living in diaspora. This two-part exhibition—paintings in Chelsea, and drawings down in Tribeca—is Toor’s first solo show in the city since that break out, following an appearance at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Often celebrating private and intimate moments, these are artworks that capture a powerful viewpoint, informed by Toor’s own experiences living in New York City.
Luhring Augustine is located at 531 West 24th Street, and 17 White Street, New York, New York.

“Picasso: Tête-à-tête” at Gagosian and “Pablo Picasso: Still Life” at Almine RechApril 18–July 3, 2025 and May 1–July 18, 2025
Pablo Picasso, Femme au Béret Bleu Assise dans un Fauteuil Gris, Manches Rouges (Marie-Thérèse), 1937. Photo: by Sandra Pointet, courtesy Gagosian ©2025 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Pablo Picasso’s estate provided many of the works in this career-spanning show, with over fifty rarely seen paintings, sculptures, and drawings for this swan song for Gagosian’s Madison Avenue location. And just a block away, Almine Rech has brought together over 40 of Picasso’s still life paintings, an important part of his career that has often taken a backseat to figurative works that illustrate his complicated and increasingly controversial love life. Both shows have a family connection to Picasso. Gagosian’s is presented in partnership with the artist’s daughter Paloma Picasso, while the Almine Rech show is a collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, run by the dealer and her husband, Picasso’s grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.
Gagosian is located at 980 Madison Avenue, New York, New York. Almine Rech is located at 39 East 78th Street, Floor 2, New York, New York.

“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumApril 18, 2025–January 18, 2026
Rashid Johnson, Antoine’s Organ (detail) (2016). Photo: Stefan Altenburger, courtesy of the artist.
Palm trees and other plants are suspended from the ceiling of the Guggenheim, transforming Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda into a verdant greenhouse for Rashid Johnson‘s thought-provoking survey. There are also his ceramic mosaics, works made from African black soap and melted wax, and an installation with more plants and a piano that will be activated for musical performances.
The Guggenheim is located at 1071 Fifth Avenue New York, New York. 

“Mary Heilmann: Long Line” at the Whitney Museum of American ArtApril 9, 2025–January 19, 2026
Installation view of “Mary Heilmann: Long Line” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, On wall: Long Line (2025). On floor: Monochrome Chairs (2015). Photo: by Tiffany Sage/BFA.com. ©BFA 2025.
The Whitney Museum is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Meatpacking flagship with a tribute to perhaps the most memorable show from its opening, “Mary Heilmann: Sunset.” The exhibition’s functional installation of Heilmann’s signature brightly colored chairs on the fifth floor terrace provided the perfect place for visitors to take in the institution’s new downtown digs. This time around, she’s created a new indoor site-specific installation overlooking the Hudson River that again offers a welcoming opportunity for rest and relaxation.
The Whitney is located at 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, New York.

“Hiba Schahbaz: Magical Creatures” at Adler BeattyApril 24–June 20, 2025
Hiba Schahbaz, Book of Magical Creatures (2025). Photo: courtesy of Adler Beatty, New York.
Hiba Schahbaz has brought her delicate watercolors, informed by her training Indo-Persian miniature painting, to Adler Beatty, with a large site-specific wall installation of life-size cut-out paper works of dreamy mermaids and colorful vegetation. But the show also pairs historic European illuminated manuscripts from the 14th to 19th centuries, on loan from private collections and New York’s Les Enluminures, with Schahbaz’s own delicately hand-painted books featuring her feminine take on mythological creatures.
Adler Beatty is located at 34 East 69th Street, New York, New York. 

“Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” at the Museum of Art and DesignApril 12–September 7, 2025
Saya Woolfalk, Lovescape (2004) installed in “Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo: by Jenna Bascom, courtesy the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
It’s the first retrospective for 45-year-old Saya Woolfalk, whose career isn’t just about making beautiful, meaningful artwork. She’s also a masterful world-builder, crafting a dense scientific universe about a hybrid plant people called Empathics who live in sisterhood with the earth. Woolfalk has transformed the museum’s fifth floor into the Empathics’ world, with a dense and colorful installation of animated videos, paper collages, and life-size figurative sculptures wearing her textile works—which also serve as costumes. (If you don’t make it during Frieze Week, save the date September 7 for a live performance from the Alvin Ailey-Fordham dance program featuring the garments.)
MAD is located at 2 Columbus Circle, New York, New York.

“The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” at the Jewish Museum March 7–August 10, 2025
Rembrandt van Rijn, A Jewish Heroine from the Hebrew Bible (1632–1633). Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
A trio of paintings and six etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn star in this collection of paintings, prints, drawings, and decorative arts all inspired by the Jewish heroine Esther. The queen, whose story is told in the bible’s Book of Esther, is perhaps a surprising source of inspiration for the people of 17th-century Netherlands (although there are also artworks and devotional objects created by and for Amsterdam’s Jewish minority). The exhibition argues that the Dutch people saw a parallel between their fight for independence from Spain and how Esther saved the Jews of Persia by revealing her hidden faith to her husband, the king.
The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.

“Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku” at Jack ShainmanMay 6–July 18, 2025
Toyin Ojih Odutola, Congregation. Courtesy of Jack Shainman, New York.
Toyin Ojih Odutola, who was included in the Nigerian Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, has created a series of paintings honoring her late grandmother and uncle. The works are set inside an imagined Mbari house, a traditional sacred space for the Owerri Igbo people of Nigeria used to celebrate both deities and members of the community. Ojih Odutola, who first became known for her series of portraits of a fictional aristocratic Nigerian family, is here telling a more personal story about processing grief, and of spiritual community.
Jack Shainman is located at 46 Lafayette Street, New York, New York.

“Elizabeth Colomba” at Venus Over ManhattanApril 15–May 17, 2025
Elizabeth Colomba, The Magician (2025). Courtesy of Venus Over Manhattan.
For her first show with Venus Over Manhattan, Elizabeth Colomba is showcasing her take on Old Master paintings. Her flawlessly executed canvases largely depict ornate, familiar-looking period rooms—but these works are starring richly attired Black women who normally would have been excluded from those masterworks. Her figures are regal and powerful, depicted here with symbols of the occult, creating a missing chapter of art history.
Venus Over Manhattan is located at 39 Great Jones Street, New York, New York. 
“Leonor Fini: Small Faces” at NagasApril 7–May 24, 2025
Leonor Fini, Face II. Photo: courtesy of Nagas, New York.
Surrealist painter Leonor Fini (1907–1996) has enjoyed a long-overdue surge of attention in recent years for her sensual, otherworldly paintings of women. But you probably haven’t seen many of her drawings, a selection of which, featuring women’s faces, are the subject of this intimate outing. The artist’s delicate line work captures the simplicity of form in dreamy fashion.
Nagas is located at 47 West 28th Street, Floor 2, New York, New York. 

“Francis Picabia: Eternal Beginning” at Hauser & WirthMay 1–August 1, 2025
Francis Picabia, La terre est ronde (The Earth Is Round), 1951. Photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds, Belgium,and Comité Picabia Geier Family Collection, ©2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
This Francis Picabia show from the Comité Picabia and co-curated by its president, Beverley Calté, and art historian Arnauld Pierre, comes to New York by way of Hauser & Wirth Paris—that’s right, a museum-caliber gallery exhibition so buzzy, it traveled. If you caught the artist’s 2017 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, you’ll be aware that he developed new and totally distinct styles every few years, exploring Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Dadaism. Here, the focus is on the twilight of Picabia’s career, from 1945 to 1952, the year before his death—a period that saw him create yet another new style by seeking to bridge the movements of Surrealism and abstraction.
Hauser & Wirth is located at 47 West 28th Street, Floor 2, New York, New York. 

“Tanya Aguiñiga: Weighted” at Albertz BendaMay 8–June 21, 2025
Tanya Aguiñiga, Seven Sisters. Photo: by Julian Calero, courtesy of the artist and Albertz Benda, New York and Los Angeles.
Raised on the border of Mexico and California, Tanya Aguiñiga creates art inspired by her experiences with communities in both countries. In the Los Angeles artist, activist, and educator’s first New York solo show, Aguiñiga looks to expand on her work using art as a tool to empower her community, and celebrate their physical strength. Drawing on traditional craft practices, she uses cotton, flax, copper, stone, and clay to make abstract woven and braided textile works that represent marginalized bodies. Some of the works use red dye secreted from cochineal insects native to Mexico and the Southeast U.S.—but only the females of the species—that became a valuable trading commodity during colonial times.
Albertz Benda is located at 515 West 26th Street, New York, New York.

“Ching Ho Cheng: Tracing Infinity” at BankMay 1–June 14, 2025
Ching Ho Cheng, Untitled (1982). Photo: Gustavo Murill, courtesy of Bank and the Ching Ho Cheng Estate.
A long-time resident of legendary New York artist haven the Chelsea Hotel, the late Ching Ho Cheng is known for his psychedelic canvases. The second New York show for Shanghai’s Bank gallery will feature archival photographs documenting his place in the downtown scene of the ’60s and ’70s, as well as some of Cheng’s never-before-displayed gouache windows works. Each one is a carefully observed painting of sunlight as it passed through the windows of his apartment and studio, rendered in thin layers of pigment applied with an airbrush in a technique Cheng developed himself. This effort to capture the ever-changing light of the sun ties into the Buddhist principle of impermanence, which is inescapable, and defines our own lives.
Bank is located at 127 Elizabeth Street, New York, New York. 

“Teruko Yokoi: NohTheater” at Hollis TaggartMay 1–June 14, 2025
Teruko Yokoi, Untitled (1987). Courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
Another former denizen of the Chelsea Hotel, the late Japanese artist Teruko Yokoi, is getting a restaurant at the building named in her honor later this month. But first, Hollis Taggart is opening a show of 20 works dating from the 1950s to year 2000. Yokoi trained in traditional Japanese painting before moving to the U.S. in 1953 and studying at the California School of Fine Arts and under Hans Hoffman in New York. Though she was one of the few women in the Abstract Expressionist scene, Yokoi remained deeply influenced by her native country. This show is focusing on her embrace of Japan’s traditional Noh theater in her work and artistic philosophy.
Hollis Taggart is located at 521 West 26th Street, 1st Floor, New York, New York.

“Mary Ann Unger: Across the Bering Strait” at Berry CampbellApril 17–May 17, 2025
Mary Ann Unger, Across the Bering Strait (1992–94). Photo: ©the artist courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.
Don’t miss the late sculptor Mary Ann Unger‘s monumental installation of abstract sculpture, Across the Bering Strait, being shown in New York City in its entirety for the first time. A feminist artist and curator—and member of the Guerrilla Girls—Unger suffered from cancer the last 14 years of her life, and is only now gaining more recognition for her work thanks to the efforts of her daughter, artist Eve Biddle, and widower, photographer Geoffrey Biddle. Convinced of Unger’s art historical importance, her family saved her large-scale works, including the most monumental of the all, Across the Bering Strait, a series of 34 large gray modular forms that recall bones and body parts. It’s a piece of great weight, both physically and philosophically, inspired by migration and the bodily suffering it can cause.
Berry Campbell is located at 524 West 26th Street, New York, New York. More

Last week, the artist Tanda Francis walked through a gallery door at the Met and stumbled into a world she helped bring to life. “Suddenly I saw the work I had poured so much thought into, now multiplied several times and dressed in stunning diverse looks… appearing like different people but with that very familiar face,” she recalled. “It was shocking, to the point where I had to look away just to pace or process what I was seeing.”
The sculptor and multimedia artist created the bespoke, distinctive mannequin heads for “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition. “I was so happy to see that this familiar face had developed to appear to take on so many new lives,” Francis added.
Tanda Francis working on the mannequin head for “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.”Photo: Anna Marie Kellen. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Francis’s contributions heighten “Superfine,” which runs from May 10 through October 26. Organized by guest curator Monica L. Miller in collaboration with Andrew Bolton and his team at the Costume Institute, it explores how Black communities across the Atlantic diaspora have wielded fashion—and especially suiting—as a tool of self-definition, resistance, and storytelling from the 18th century to today. The exhibition draws from Miller’s influential 2009 book Slaves to Fashion and includes recent runway looks, historical garments, photographs, ephemera, and newly commissioned works that underscore the depth and range of Black sartorial expression.
Francis, a Brooklyn-based sculptor best known for her large-scale public artworks, doesn’t typically work within the realm of fashion. But the exhibition’s themes resonated with her. “My work is about Africanness in America,” she said. “For this kind of major event from the Met to speak to the diaspora is something that I thought was interesting.” Her art frequently addresses the visibility of diasporic African people in public space, using her practice to explore ancestry, spirituality, and cultural memory.
Tanda Francis, RockIt Black (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
Francis’s outdoor works are often monumental African heads—regal sculptures that command space and attention. “Culturally speaking, [the head] is the important part of the body—the being, the spiritual house of the human.” In her view, “the body becomes secondary… something to hold the head.” She was a natural choice to scale down and replicate that focus in multiples for the Met’s exhibition. She based her mannequin on a historical figure, choosing a face whose story carried layered political meaning: André Matsoua.
Matsoua was a Congolese political thinker and founder of a movement that challenged French rule in the early 20th century. He is widely regarded as the original Sapeur and embodied militant Black dandyism. Sapeur is a term rooted in La Sape—a French abbreviation of the Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People. The Congolese movement celebrates men who express identity and resistance through flamboyant, impeccably styled European fashion. “He was very active politically and, in the community, to fight colonialism, and that was his way—by wearing the clothes of the colonizers,” Francis said. “That idea is just so interesting to me, you are wearing the clothes of the people who are controlling you. How do you do that and take control?”
Ensemble by LaQuan Smith, spring/summer 2025. Courtesy LaQuan Smith. Photo © Tyler Mitchell 2025
Aesthetically, Matsoua’s complex profile lends a nuanced, timeless narrative weight to the contemporary looks he wears in the exhibition. Though he appears only in modern ensembles, his face grounds them with a sense of history—whether styled in a Black Panther–inspired Telfar leather trench and bellbottoms from 2024, or in sharply tailored Louis Vuitton suits designed by both Virgil Abloh and Pharrell Williams.
To begin, Francis sculpted a wax maquette of the head, meticulously shaping it. At the time, she was enmeshed in a flurry of site visits for potential projects. “I knew I had to travel back and forth,” she said. “It’s something that I could put in my backpack and go.” The wax model was eventually scanned and refined digitally, allowing Francis to manipulate the form in a 3D environment. “In between the fiberglass and resin and the wax, it became a fully digital experience,” she explained. “I scanned the wax and worked with it in 3D—moving it around and envisioning how the piece, and the meaning behind it, could present itself.”
Suit by Ev Bravado and Téla D’Amore for Who Decides War, fall/winter 2024–25.Courtesy Who Decides War. Photo © Tyler Mitchell 2025
The experience has shifted Francis’s practice in lasting ways. “I’m doing more digital work now,” she said. “It’s been kind of beautiful. When I started this piece, A.I. hadn’t yet made its presence fully felt, and now it’s everywhere. So much has changed in just a few months. It’s made me want to explore the digital space more—while still keeping one foot in the analog. I like mixing the two, and I think that’s going to be more visible in my work moving forward.”
Though unaccustomed to working within the fashion sphere, Francis came to appreciate its immediacy and power as a medium. “This topic is heavy. It’s about race in America. It’s about Blackness in America,” she said. “And that’s something that’s been made very heavy, because historically, we haven’t dealt with it the way we should. It’s become this thing we have to keep lifting. And the interesting part is, we’re dealing with it here through fashion.” In “Superfine,” her work adds another layer to a complex conversation. More

In 1868, Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny, in a letter to his fellow journalist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, coined the term “homosexual” to describe same-sex attraction. He was writing to argue against the criminalization of private sexual acts—a cause he somewhat shared with Ulrichs, best known as the first gay man to openly defend homosexuality. But Kertbeny’s coinage, which publicly debuted in an 1869 pamphlet, would ironically create thorny issues of its own as it echoed through the ages.
For one, queer art historian Jonathan David Katz, who has spent the better part of six years unpacking the significance of the term, has found it often limited rather than liberated identity. “Essentially, the nomenclature helped to inaugurate a gulf between forms of desire that had previously been unified,” he told me over the phone. “What I began to think about was: how did we enter a world in which sexuality not only became bifurcated, but in some sense, became a defining trait of characters?”
Marie Laurencin, Le bal élégant (The Elegant Ball) or La danse à la campagne (The Country Dance) (1913). Musée Marie Laurencin, Tokyo.
But where the terminology has constricted (not helped by its cooptation by the psychology field), Katz discovered a sphere where queer desire remained far from circumscribed.
“Art,” he said, “picked up the slack as the possibilities of language became attenuated.”
That revelation is at the center of “The First Homosexuals,” an exhibition that just opened at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago. Across more than 300 artworks, Katz and associate curator Johnny Willis, leading an international team of 22 scholars, will trace how the birth of the term “homosexual” reframed artistic expressions of identity and sexuality. (The first part of the show, a smaller presentation, ran in 2022.)
Tomioka Eisen, kuchi-e (frontispiece) with artist’s seal Shisen (c. 1906). Tirey-van Lohuizen Collection.
While the show takes 1869 as its watershed moment, it fittingly opens with a section called Beyond the Binary, which arrays early 19th-century works that make no distinction between same-sex and different-sex desires. Erotic Japanese prints by the likes of Hokusai and Utamaro make a showing, as does sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s 1823–24 relief on the mythical relationship between Anacreon and Cupid.
Also key here is George Catlin’s Dance to the Berdash (1835–37), which depicts Sac and Fox tribe members dancing in tribute to a Two-Spirit leader, an individual born male who lived as a female.
George Catlin, Dance to the Berdash (1835–37). Smithsonian American Art Museum.
“The Classical past is widely recognized in terms of same-sex desire. This was fairly ubiquitous and unproblematic,” Katz noted. What changed, he argued, is the arrival of colonialism, which “carried that delimited binary across the globe and took what were often extremely accepting indigenous cultures and essentially turned them homophobic.”
Proof is in a later portion, titled Colonialism and Resistance, which explores how Europeans imagined foreign territories and cultures as overrun by what they deemed deviant sexual relations. Artists resisted. Mexican painter Saturnino Herrán, in 1916, produced Nuestros dioses antiguos, which celebrates a pre-colonial indigenous sexuality by depicting ancient gods posing, in Katz’s words, “like camp queens”; while Richmond Barthé, in his 1935 masterpiece Feral Benga, deployed European sculpture traditions to capture a Black sensuality.
Saturnino Herrán, Nuestros dioses antiguos (1916). Colección Andrés Blaisten, México.
In between, in sections including Portraits, Relationships, and History, the exhibition gathers a host of queer art icons. There are paintings of Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde, as well as self-portraits by Romaine Brooks and Florine Stettheimer. There’s a 1923 female nude by Tamara de Lempicka that shatters gender norms, and illustrator Gerda Wegener’s drawings of her partner Lili Elbe, who was born male (and immortalized in the 2015 film The Danish Girl).
Félix Vallotton, Gertrude Stein (1907). Photo: Mitro Hood.
Other queer relationships come to life in Alice Austen’s 1891 photographs and Marie Laurencin’s paintings of young women mid-dance. Just as intimate are Thomas Eakins’s 1887 painting of his partner Walt Whitman, and Rosa Bonheur’s sketch of her lover Anna Klumpke, which is making a rare outing.
In another unique showing, eight paintings by controversial German artist Elisàr von Kupffer will be making their U.S. debut at “The First Homosexuals.” These works once hung in the Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion, a compound established by Von Kupffer in Switzerland in 1900 as a haven for Clarism, his neo-religious movement that opposed divisions by gender. Their styles bear out the artist’s Renaissance influences, but their subject matter, noted Katz, “illustrated his ideals.” One painting apparently portrays the first same-sex wedding in art history.
Elisàr von Kupffer, La danza (1918). © Municipality of Minusio – Centro Elisarion. Photo: Claudio Berger.
Bringing together these many artworks from across the globe was not without its challenges. Katz rued the lack of artifacts from India (which balked at the show’s title), Russia (loans from which were canceled due to the ongoing war), and Slovakia (whose new populist government scrapped all loans). A Columbian collector, Katz added, also pulled their loans, feeling the works wouldn’t be safe in the U.S. under the Trump administration. “We’ve really fallen,” he reflected.
The last is unsurprising, though, considering the president’s crusade against so-called “gender ideology extremism”—in short, his bid to erase transgender people. In its way, the show offers a fine, resonant riposte that “queer and trans are inseparable,” Katz said, “that the literal first definition of queerness was of a kind of third sex.” He added: “Most other countries beyond the West fully understood that there’s a range of positions within one’s acceptance or refusal of gender.”
Tamara de Lempicka, Nu assis de profil (1923). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
That latitude may have been first restricted by the emergence of the term “homosexual,” but to Katz, it doesn’t have to remain that way.
“The notion of homosexuality is an historical notion, and as with all things historical, is subject to change. My first hope is that we will come to understand that the definition of sexuality is not a natural definition, but an historical one,” he said. “In the final analysis for me, that is a position of liberation, because it means that we recognize that other possibilities exist.”
“The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939” is on view at Wrightwood 659, 659 W Wrightwood Ave, Chicago, Illinois, May 2–July 26, 2025. More

London has been hit by a heatwave this week and the temperature at Marble Arch rose even higher on Thursday night as British pop star-turned-artist Robbie Williams opened a solo exhibition on his home turf to a crowd of hundreds.
“Radical Honesty” at Moco Museum London, features nearly two dozen canvas works and sculptures by Williams revolving around the themes of modern-day anxiety and emotional vulnerability inspired by his personal experience. The show is Williams’s third collaboration with the museum, which has been presenting solo shows of his works at its spaces in Barcelona and Amsterdam.
Robbie Williams posing with this canvas work Radical Honesty II at the launch of his solo exhibition at Moco Museum London on May 1, 2025. © Photography by Rob Jones for Khroma Collective.
Unlike most art exhibition openings, this one at the pink-themed three-story complex carried a pop concert flavor. Dozens of fans waited outside the venue for hours, including a group that flew in from Germany and arrived at the barricaded entrance at 9 a.m. in the hope of meeting the 51-year-old celebrity. Invited guests arriving from 8 p.m had to occupy themselves with the works on show on the ground floor and the basement level, while waiting for the star’s speech before they could be allowed to climb up the stairs to the first floor, where the exhibition is held.
At about 9 p.m., Williams made his appearance in a denim outfit and greeted the 200-strong crowd. Among them were British TV personalities Leigh Francis and Andy Goldstein, as well as British artists Chris Levine and Philip Colbert.
“There is a lot of negativities when it comes to celebrity doing art. They shouldn’t do it,” Williams said in his speech, addressing the criticisms he has received about his art-making. The star long been an art collector and has been exhibiting his work, including a showcase at Sotheby’s in 2022 and the launch of a ceramics series last year. But he continues to be questioned about the intentions behind his work.
A general view of the atmosphere at the opening of Robbie Williams’s new solo art exhibition ‘Radical Honesty’ at Moco Museum on May 1, 2025 in London, England. Photo by Dave Benett.
“The question is always why. It’s always with a dismissive term,” he continued. “If I listened to what the critics say, I wouldn’t do anything. I wouldn’t be anyone. I wouldn’t go anyone. And yet, I stand here before you with complete humility.”
Lionel Logchines, who co-founded Moco Museum with Kim Logchines-Prins, his wife and the museum’s curator, said the couple began collecting Williams’s works three years ago. The couple first discovered Williams’s iPad drawings on Instagram, noting that the “Angels” singer-songwriter had already been drawing for nearly two decades while on tour. The pair now has five works including paintings and sculptures, he noted. He likes the humor and discussions about mental health issues in Williams’s works and how they resonate with viewers’ lives and inner selves.
“It makes you feel good, that you are not alone,” Logchines told me at the opening. “For example, at a party, there’s so much anxiety for me, and he’s honest about it. That’s what I love. His work is really strong, with powerful messages. I think he will be the next Banksy.”
While most of the attendees of the opening reception did not seem to be the typical art crowd (some were busy posing for selfies with the art or trying to snap a picture of the star), there was no lack of audience members trying to take a serious look at the works featured at the show. Williams’s creations hang alongside other works by the likes of Takashi Murakami, Banksy, George Condo, Daniel Arsham, and KAWS, on loan from various private collections.
Robbie Williams sits on his “introvert chair” at his solo exhibition ‘Radical Honesty’ at Moco Museum London. © Photography by Rob Jones for Khroma Collective.
The colorful works are approachable, with reflective statements spelled across canvas that can easily resonate with a general audience. It is not hard to link with them with Williams’s other recent screen offerings such as his eponymous Netflix documentary and biopic Better Man, as the works are distilled from his personal journey to fame and battle with dyslexia and ADHD.
For example, his large-scale canvas depicting hilarious morning mirror pep talks and the candid thoughts of introverts struggling in social situations drew the most attention. In one painting of a red cassette tape, he penned: “Just because you’re dyslexic doesnt mean Youre not stupid.” He dedicates a cozy off-white one-seater in one room to introverts, calling it an “introvert chair” with a canvas work on the wall behind the chair that spells out the “rules of engagement,” instructing people not to engage with the introvert sitting on the chair.
Prescribed Identity is a large-scale sculpture in the shape of a hoodie with many small pockets, in which Williams lays out his history with addiction and self-medication. Like & Subscribe is an installation of a marble headstone with “I’m dead now please life & subscribe” inscribed on the surface, mocking social media culture.
“In a world obsessed with keeping it together, embracing the chaos might just be the most radical thing you can do,” Williams noted in a statement.
“Robbie Williams: Radical Honesty” is on view at Moco Museum, 1-4 Marble Arch, London, for a limited time. More

The unmistakeable, eccentrically stylized world of Wes Anderson has long been admired by the more artistically inclined of film buffs. It even inspired an Instagram account, book, and series of international exhibitions dedicated to that rare moment when the carefully curated look somehow comes about unplanned.
Now, the American film director’s unique vision is getting its institutional debut with a dedicated exhibition at the Design Museum in London opening this fall. With access to Anderson’s personal archives, the show’s curators have picked out more than 600 items—including costumes, props, personal notes, and paintings—that offer an unprecedented, behind the scenes glimpse into his creative process.
Vending machines from Atelier Simon Weisse for the film Asteroid City. Photo: Richard Round-Turner, © the Design Museum.
“Each Wes Anderson picture plunges the viewer into a world with its own codes, motifs, references, and with sumptuous and instantly recognizable sets and costumes,” explained Lucia Savi, the Design Museum’s head of curatorial and interpretation. “Every single object in a Wes Anderson film is very personal to him—they are not simply props, they are fully formed pieces of art and design that make his inventive worlds come to life.”
Millions of Anderson fans the world over have marveled over his greatest hits like The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and Moonrise Kingdom (2012), and are now waiting with bated breath for the release of The Phoenician Scheme (2025) at the end of this month. But where did it all begin?
Model of The Grand Budapest Hotel. Photo: © Thierry Stefanopoulos – La Cinémathèque Française.
The Design Museum will take visitors on a journey back in time with its full screening of Anderson’s first 14-minute short film Bottle Rocket from 1993, starring Owen Wilson, which went on to inspire his 1996 feature film debut of the same name. From there, the story of Anderson’s varied filmography unfolds in roughly chronological order, ending with the 2023 short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
Among the highlights that were announced today, on the wacky director’s 56th birthday, is the very same model of the Grand Budapest Hotel that was used to capture its entire lengthy pink facade in the beloved 2014 film.
Michael Taylor, Boy with Apple by Johannes Van Hoytl the Younger for the film The Grand Budapest Hotel. Image courtesy the artist.
Eagle-eyed art lovers will immediately recognize the painting Boy with Apple, which was memorably billed as a “priceless Renaissance” portrait in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The composition by British artist Micheal Taylor was commissioned by Anderson as a prop for the film.
A whole cast of characters can be found in the puppets used for stop motion films like Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) and Isle of Dogs (2018), which appear alongside their meticulously crafted miniature sets. Interpretative material will further elaborate on the director’s preference for traditional filmmaking techniques like stop motion animation, while sketches and early maquettes will provide some insight into how Anderson’s now well-known personalities first came to life.
Rat puppet by Arch Model Studio for Fantastic Mr. Fox. Photo: Richard Round-Turner, © the Design Museum.
Elsewhere, amid sketches and storyboards, museum-goers can get up close to the costumes worn by Hollywood stars like Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, and Ben Stiller. These include the Fendi fur coat that Gwyneth Paltrow wore as Margot Tenenbaum in the 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums and the outfit worn by Tilda Swinton when she played Madam D in The Grand Budapest Hotel.
“It is an absolute gift that even as a young filmmaker Wes Anderson had the vision and foresight to save all his props and beautifully crafted objects for his own archive,” said the Design Museum’s chief curator Johanna Agerman Ross. “We are thrilled to be the first to fully dive into the archive’s full riches.”
“Wes Anderson: The Archives” is on view at the Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High St, London, November 21, 2025–July 26, 2026. Tickets are now on sale. A slimmed down version of the same retrospective is currently on view at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris through July 27.  More

North Seymour is a scrubby patch of land in the Pacific Ocean inhabited solely by the sea lions and iguanas that are endemic to the Galápagos. In 2009, the then-Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall stopped off on the island, which is roughly three times the size of Windsor Castle and its grounds, and gazed out at the endless blue beyond.
The moment was captured by the painter Richard Foster, who had joined the royal visit around Chile, Brazil, and Ecuador as its official tour artist. Foster depicts the couple standing before an outcrop of lava rocks with their backs turned to the viewer. The Duchess clutches a little white parasol, which, together with the work’s sketchy quality, is reminiscent of those Impressionist forays into the French countryside in the late 19th century.
Richard Foster, Their Royal Highnesses on North Seymour Island (2009). Photo: courtesy Royal Collection Trust.
Their Royal Highnesses on North Seymour Island (2009) is set to be exhibited at Buckingham Palace along with more than 70 works created by artists who have accompanied King Charles on international tours over the past four decades. “The King’s Tour Artists” will be on display in the ballroom from July 10 as the palace opens up its state rooms for summer visitors. The exhibition includes the work of 42 artists, with many of the works being shown to the public for the first time.
The tradition was born in 1985 when the then-Prince of Wales invited John Ward, a longtime royal favorite who had recently painted the christenings of Prince William and Prince Harry, to join his tour of Italy as its official artist. Ward’s brief was to draw or paint whatever he found inspiring, a duty, the Royal Collection Trust is keen to note, that was funded at the Prince’s own expense.
Ward boarded HMY Britannia in Catania as the yacht was en route to Venice and produced a simple sketch from the stern of the vessel. It’s a tranquil scene, one organizers said captures a rare moment of rest, with the afterdeck cleared of people, the Royal Navy flag fluttering in the breeze, and seagulls hanging overhead.
John Ward, From the Afterdeck of HMY Britannia (1985). Photo: courtesy Royal Collection Trust.
“The freedom given to each artist to capture a personal impression of the countries visited has led to the formation of a rich and varied collection,” the show’s curator Kate Heard said in a statement. “Encompassing landscapes, figure studies, and still life subjects, these works are testament to His Majesty’s deep engagement with and encouragement of artists over the past four decades.”
King Charles views the role of official tour artist as providing valuable opportunities for both established and emerging artists to create a unique and concentrated body of work. Several have witnessed historic royal engagements. Susannah Fiennes, for instance, was present for the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. It was the last tour for the Britannia and Fiennes depicted the symbolic image of a pair of sailors lowering and raising the flag.
Susannah Fiennes, Two Yachtsmen on HMY Britannia (1997). Photo: courtesy Royal Collection Trust.
Other highlights include Mary Anne Aytoun Ellis’s towering painting of Kaieteur Falls in Guyana; Colin Watson’s Impressionist depiction of an abbot in Todaiji Temple in Nara, Japan; and Phillip Butah’s portrayal of a Kenyan elephant sanctuary that King Charles visited in 2023. Butah recently provided a portrait of King Charles and Queen Camilla for British magazine Tatler.
Colin Watson, The Abbot, Todaiji Temple, Nara (2008). Photo: courtesy Royal Collection Trust.
The exhibition is accompanied by the publication, The Art of Royal Travel: Journeys with the King. It features more than 100 illustrations and details the stories behind the works.
“By inviting an artist to join a royal tour in 1985, King Charles started a tradition that has continued unbroken to the current day,” the book’s editor the Earl of Rosslyn said in a statement. “[The artists knew] they were working for someone in sympathy with the artistic craft, a patron of the arts and a passionate advocate for cultural life.”
“The King’s Tour Artists” is on view at Buckingham Palace, London, July 10–September 28. More

Last week, the artist Oscar Yi Hou was admiring a 3D self-portrait by Juliana Huxtable. The piece hadn’t yet been hung—it rested on the floor, still wrapped in plastic—but Huxtable’s figure was already commanding: thigh-high crimson boots, reptilian skin, and outstretched bat wings.
“It’s about power and hybridization,” Yi Hou said. “It’s kind of furrycore, but it specifically looks at the idea of the cyborg—the breakdown of boundaries between animal and human.” He paused and asked, “And what does that show about contingencies around race and gender as well?”
Juliana Huxtable, Bat 2 (2019). Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York, and Los Angeles.
Yi Hou was at the Tribeca gallery James Fuentes. Though closed to the public, it was buzzing with activity as a squad of art handlers unpacked and installed the works for the new group show “Deviations.” Known as a breakout star on the gallery’s roster, the 26-year-old Yi Hou takes on a new role here—as curator. It followed his first exhibition with the gallery in 2021, shortly after he graduated. There, nearly 70 percent of the works in that first exhibition were acquired by institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Historical Society, and Grinnell College. “Most artists wait a lifetime for that level of institutional support,” said James Fuentes, the gallery’s namesake founder.
His solo show “The Beat of Life,” held this past November, was a runaway success. “We could have sold the show out 20 times over,” Fuentes said. Its centerpiece—Birds of a Feather (Chinatown Gangsters), a triptych featuring himself and his friends the artists Amanda Ba (a classmate at Columbia) and Sasha Gordon—was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum.
The current exhibition, curated by the artist, brings together 12 artists—all of whom identify as queer or trans. “It wasn’t intentional,” Yi Hou said. “They’re just my friends.” Fittingly, the exhibition feels like a natural extension of his practice: Yi Hou’s specialty is portraits of intimates and those in his expanded social orbit. His paintings often layer this contemporary closeness with historic and symbolic depth, incorporating East Asian motifs—dragons, flaming pearls, Chinese characters, and other symbology. On view through May 7, the show features artists like James Bantone, Nash Glynn, recent Guggenheim fellow Martine Gutierrez, Sam Penn, and Yi Hou himself.
Cameron Patricia Downey, 0_o (2025). Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York and Los Angeles.
We walk by Cameron Patricia Downey’s absurdist wicker-back chair sculpture. Its steel base is elongated so dramatically that it must lean against the wall like a ladder. It is a standout piece. “The seats in the show are unusable,” Yi Hou said. “It’s about the idea that a body could be there, but it very much could not. It’s the illusion of function.”
He motioned to Ser Serpas’s looming sculpture that melds a weightlifting bench, a cracked rear windshield, and a hulking, dilapidated 1980s treadmill. Sometimes, Serpas’s sculptures can present an initial strangeness that borders on comical, but the kitsch of outdated detritus quickly gives way to something more apocalyptic. (Serpas’s largest solo show to date, “Of my life,” opens at Kunsthalle Basel in June.) “It was fun to assemble,” Yi Hou said. “Just seeing the typeface and design, all this residue… It’s seen better days. Although actually, I’d say now, it’s in its best days—as an assemblage.”
An installation view of “Deviations” Photo: New Document. Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York, and Los Angeles.
The painter Michael Stamm layered a still life of a vessel with a Fire Island Pines sunset vignette in Dosing (FIP). It might seem a quaint juxtaposition, but hints of pharmacological excess are overlaid as well. “The ones who get it will get it,” Yi Hou said. “This is about our island. It’s alluding to chemical pleasure in a queer context. I’ve become friends with a lot of the artists here in places of pleasure, like parties or raves.”
There is a distinct native nightlife element to the assembled artists—all roads seem to lead to Basement. I’ve crossed paths with most of them at the Ridgewood techno club; Huxtable is also a highly skilled DJ and sometimes plays there. Langberg showed a selection of nightclub paintings at Victoria Miro in London last year—including the work Basement (2023), which captures a scene on the dancefloor. Yi Hou makes a cameo appearance in that painting and the club’s cofounder, Téa Abashidze and a swath of regulars were at the vernissage. “It’s an important space,” Yi Hou said, “socially and culturally. A lot of people converge there.”
“There’s a blurred boundary between one’s professional artistic life and their hedonistic life—or the life they lead outside their career,” Yi Hou said. “For me, it’s one and the same. I don’t differentiate between my professional life and my personal life. The people I’m friends with are consistent across these different worlds. There’s a kind of correspondence between how people are in a club setting or a rave and how they are outside of that.”
Oscar Yi Hou, The Perfect Initiate, aka: At the Preki (2025). Courtesy of James Fuentes.
Fuentes said it felt “intuitively right” to offer him to curate an exhibition. “Oscar is the artist who most consistently brings other artists to my attention,” he added.
We stand in front of Yi Hou’s piece, which is a portrait of the artist Emilio Tamez; this isn’t the first time he’s depicted her. “She’s a muse in many ways,” Yi Hou said. “She’s very beautiful. I find it hard not to paint her.” Tamez is rendered in a fur coat and pensively looks away from the viewer, her expression hard to gauge.
This show is threaded with codes—insider references, unknown connections and histories, and hidden signals shared among friends. Across the room, Tamez—glamorous in a camisole and jeans—was assembling her piece Surrender. “There’s the let-go of surrender—but also a white-knuckle kind of grip that comes right before it,” she explained. The color-saturated photograph shows her standing before a dying tree, her face obscured by flowing white garments, arms outstretched as if summoning some invisible force.
Emilio Tamez, Surrender (2024–2025). Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, New York and Los Angeles.
“Everyone was keeling over,” she said of the ten-hour, overnight shoot in London’s Primrose Hill, “but I kept waiting for the wind. Finally, it came—and that was the last frame I shot.” Mounted on birch, the piece holds more secrets. Tamez pressed her own blood onto the wood, leaving faintly visible handprints around the edges. “I went to Catholic school—maybe you can tell from the nature of my work,” she said. “I have a lot of prayers I use while I’m working, and one of them is: ‘I wish to see the innocent and forgiven world. Amen.’” The line is scratched into the wood, hidden beneath the print.
The artist Oscar Yi Hou. Photo: Clifton Mooney. Courtesy of the artist.
“Oscar’s post-academic community is encapsulated in this show,” said Fuentes. “The conceptualization and what it’s putting out there, is feeding into the development of the work he’s doing in the studio now—it’ll culminate in his next show.” Yi Hou offers a hint of his next steps. “I’m working toward a new series,” he said. “I think it’s going to be called ‘Night Crawling.’ You can deduce what you will from that.” More