Eliana Willis

The traveling circus is, to writer and curator Laura Raicovich’s mind, a great metaphor for exactly the kind of culture we need right now. She and a number of colleagues are organizing a weekend-long festival, the “Circus of Life,” that will bring together artists, writers, theater groups, curators, performers, poets, activists, and others in St. Louis, Missouri this fall. The backdrop is Counterpublic, a triennial “civic exhibition” that was launched in 2019 by founding director James McAnally.
It all goes down October 24–26 at the Big Top circus grounds in the city’s Grand Center Arts District. Free and open to all, the event is organized by Raicovich and a team of four “ringleaders”—Kenneth Bailey of the Design Studio for Social Intervention; historian Galen Gritts; artist Jeanne van Heeswijk; and graphic designer and artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti. Among the other artists in the lineup are Chloë Bass, Hilma’s Ghost (Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder), and Kameelah Janan Rasheed.
“Having worked in many more traditional cultural spaces,” said Raicovich in a phone interview, “I recognize their limits in welcoming people who might not otherwise attend, and I think right now, especially under the current political and social circumstances we find ourselves in globally, we really need to spend more time in person sharing a cultural moment or experience so we can see what we hold in common. The isolation of the pandemic and the screen-centered lives we live have alienated us to even a greater degree than we might otherwise be in terms of having common experiences.”
Raicovich brings a multiplicity of experiences to her new role as circus barker. She had worked at the Guggenheim Museum, the Dia Art Foundation, and public art nonprofit Creative Time before serving for three years director of New York’s Queens Museum; she resigned in 2018 following conflict with the board over her advocacy for progressive causes.
The Big Top. Courtesy Kranzberg Arts Foundation.
She then got straight to work on the book Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, published in 2021 and blurbed as “urgent” by critic Travis Diehl. It was a busy year: she also teamed up with friends to open the Francis Kite Club, a bar and cultural events venue on New York’s Lower East Side. She’s been involved with City University of New York anthropologist David Harvey’s Urban Front as well. 
What’s on the agenda at Counterpublic? A lot! Everything starts on Friday night with performances by the Bread and Puppet Theater troupe spoken word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Saturday will bring events like a conversation between Chloë Bass and author Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist) and a talk by Democracy Now! co-host Nermeen Shaikh. On Sunday, participants will join a parade to the Counterpublic House for a collective meal organized by Van Heeswijk and a number of local collaborators.
Along the way, there will be aerialists, and a local circus school will teach juggling. Creatives will have booths surrounding the big top: Janan Rasheed will play games with visitors and artist Finnegan Shannon will explore disability accommodation. Workshops will be on offer by Hilma’s Ghost and by Prem Krishnamurthy and Sam Rauch of the Department of Transformation. 
Raicovich is aware of the problematic aspects of circuses, like the treatment of animals and classification of some people as freaks, but even so, she is excited for a place for community and exchange by people who may not be initiated into what she calls the “byzantine rites” of arts and cultural spaces. 
“The circus has always been a place where people who are not accepted in mainstream society have gone for refuge, community, and fellowship, and to, frankly, have a life,” she said. “This is another reason we’re doing a circus—it’s a forum that has been accepting of people who are different. That’s an important thing.”
Admission is free and open to all, but spots should be reserved at Counterpublic’s website. More

The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago has just unveiled plans for a major mid-career survey of the work of one of the city’s most famous artists, Theaster Gates. Under the working title “Unto Thee,” the show will open this fall (September 23) and run through February of next year.
For an artist who is almost synonymous with his native city, it’s surprising that this exhibition marks Gates’s first solo museum show in Chicago, despite having had a string of high-profile institutional shows in other cities around the world.
“I think this is the first full exhibition of a full idea in Chicago,” Gates told me in a phone interview. “It’s really nice to come home, because in a way, my career started out in the world. I wasn’t really homegrown even though I was already doing more of the social side of my practice at home for years.”
According to the museum website, the show is “rooted in several core collections of objects,” that have been part of the artist’s practice and which he acquired through the university, where he has been a professor of visual arts for nearly two decades.
Smart Museum director Vanja Malloy told me the artist’s lack of a major institutional solo show in the Windy City came up during one of their casual conversations. She got to know Gates better when he chaired the search committee for the director job she eventually landed.
“Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall,” September 5, 2019 through January 12, 2020,Target Gallery. Photo by Bobby Rogers for Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
“The opportunities of doing a show at the Smart Museum are really exciting,” said Malloy. “One, this is not a new institution for him, he’s been really engaged with and committed, for a very long time. Also, it’s the South Side, where he has been working, and has matured and developed as an artist. His practice is in the city.”
The university materials that Gates has mined and consistently used in his practice range from the school’s department of art history, including glass lantern slides and vitrines from the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, to paint-stained concrete from the floors of Midway studios, and wooden pews that were made for the campus’ Bond Chapel. All of the objects were at some point “discarded and identified as no longer needed,” by the school. So Gates took stewardship of them.
“It’s not a retrospective of my practice, but a retrospective of the materials that I’ve gleaned and the way that I had used them over the last 15 years,” Gates told me. Of the title, “Unto Thee,” he said “it’s kind of like returning these materials back to their source.”
Malloy delved into how Gates approaches the materials, transforming not just their use but their meaning. With the glass slides for instance, the art history department was shedding them as part of a modernization effort. “They were super heavy and they didn’t know what to do with them. Theaster used them in his own practice, and he’s also thinking about the way that we have narrated art history over time. There’s a lot of layers and meaning that he mines from these objects, in the way that he positions them and uses them,” she noted.
“Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall,” September 5, 2019 through January 12, 2020,Target Gallery. Photo by Bobby Rogers for Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Gates will also be filling the museum lobby, which hosts rotating displays, with a special large-scale installation that will be up for the rest of the year. He acquired a collection of roughly 350 African masks over time, and will display them with a dramatic installation across the walls, accompanied by music from the collection of famous late DJ Frankie Knuckles whose archive Gates acquired.
The display of the masks ties in to the museum’s larger initiative of provenance and collections research, said Malloy. “Some of the masks are really valuable and have cultural and religious significance, while others are replicas meant for the mass market,” yet they’re all mixed together and given equal space.
As Gates explained to me of the artworks and objects in the show, “they’re not in the same psychological condition that they were given or the same core materials. They’re returning with some ‘stank’ on them. And that ‘stank’ has to do with the fact that they’ve been gussied up. They’ve had a parade around the world and they’re coming home.” More

The late curator Koyo Kouoh’s vision for the 2026 Venice Biennale will go forward as planned, organizers announced Tuesday, just weeks after her unexpected death. Titled “In Minor Keys,” the 61st International Art Exhibition will be realized by the curatorial team Kouoh had assembled, who pledged to carry out the show as she conceived it—down to the artists, theoretical framework, and catalogue she had begun shaping last year.
Held in the Sala delle Colonne at Ca’ Giustinian, the headquarters of La Biennale in San Marco, Venice, the press event opened with a short video of the late Kouoh stating, “I am the artistic director of the Biennale Arte, and I look forward to seeing you in Venice in May 2026,” followed by a round of applause from the crowd.
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, president of La Biennale di Venezia, noted that the organizers decided to persevere with Kouoh’s vision with support from her family and curatorial team.
“We are realizing today her exhibition as she designed it, as she imagined it, and as she gave it to me personally,” he said.
“In Minor Keys” will be the title and theme of the 61st International Art Exhibition, which will run from May 9 to November 22, 2026. Kouoh worked intensively to develop the project’s theoretical framework and design before her untimely death earlier this month. Between her appointment as the edition’s curator in late 2024 and May 2025, she had selected many of the artists and artworks, as well as authors for the catalogue, organizers noted.
The major concepts of next year’s edition were outlined by peers and collaborators that Kouoh had handpicked during the course of the development of the exhibition. They include advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, a London-based art historian and curator; Marie Helene Pereira, a Berlin-based curator with ties to both Dakar, Senegal, and Beirut; Berlin-based writer and curator Rasha Salti; and New York-based journalist Siddhartha Mitter, the editor-in-chief of the exhibition catalogue.
Koyo Kouoh. Photo: ©Mirjam Kluka.
Pereira noted that in music, the minor keys are often associated with strangeness, melancholy, and sorrow. “They hold the cadencies melodies and silences of resonant walls that gather and create together a polyphonous assembly of art, convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the crackle of conflict,” she explained of the exhibition’s title.
The 61st edition of La Biennale is “grounded in a deep belief in artists as the vital interpreters of the social and psychic condition and catalyst of new relations and possibilities,” Pereira added, underscoring that the exhibition will feature the artists who were chosen by Kouoh. These are artists whose practices push the boundaries of form and “seamlessly blend into society.”
Kouoh’s assistant Rory Tsapayi recited the verses composed by the late artistic director in 2022: “We need to be with love again. We need to dance. We need to make and give food. We need to rest and restore. We need to breathe. We need the radicality of joy. The time has come.”
Kouoh was the first African woman tapped to helm the illustrious biannual art extravaganza. The art world was shocked by her sudden death when the news was confirmed on May 10 by the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), her home institution in Cape Town, South Africa, where she served as executive director and chief curator.
Born in 1967 in Cameroon, Kouoh grew up in Zurich, Switzerland. She became the co-founding artistic director of Raw Material Company art center in Dakar in 2009. She was a member of the curatorial teams for documenta 12 and 13 in 2007 and 2012, respectively. Kouoh also served as curator of the artistic program of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair from 2013 to 2017. Her appointment to curate the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale was announced in December.
Additional details about the project—including the list of participating artists and the exhibition design—will be announced on February 25, 2026.
Featuring a central curated exhibition, national pavilions, and independent shows across La Serenissima, the Venice Biennale is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious cultural festivals. Often dubbed the “Olympics of the art world,” nearly 700,000 people—or about 3,321 visitors daily—attended the 60th International Art Exhibition entitled “Foreigners Everywhere,” which was curated by Adriano Pedrosa. More

“What is the perfect home to you? Can such a thing exist?” artist Do Ho Suh asks Sarah Fine, a philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge who is also a collaborator with Suh on his ongoing Bridge Project, which interrogates the idea of “perfect home.” He continues, “Do we need borders? Can we actually dissolve them?”
Standing before Suh’s beautiful, delicate monumental installations—currently on view at “The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House,” the artist’s first solo show at London’s Tate Modern in two decades—these loaded questions like much more than personal reflections or academic thought experiments.
Do Ho Suh, Nest/s (2024) (detail). Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su. © Do Ho Suh.
The exhibition opens at a time when immigration has been dominating the U.K. news headlines. The Labour government has proposed a major policy overhaul to control borders and reduce the number of migrants in the country, sparking controversy and claims that it amounts to anti-immigration. In London where the exhibition is staged, about 41 percent of its population was born abroad, including the Korean conceptualist who has called the city home since 2016. Given the current context, is it possible to mute the noises of current affairs while appreciating Suh’s art for its own sake?
Probably not. Suh’s decades-long exploration of the concept of home, memories, and cyclicality of time draws from his experiences of moving across the world—from Seoul to New York and later London. He admits that he did not think much about home until he left his native Seoul in 1991. His colorful, scintillating fabric architectural sculptures have captivated audiences not only for their aesthetic beauty. The works are deeply personal, and yet universally relatable.
Do Ho Suh, Nest/s (2024). Installation view, “The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House.” Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Creation supported by Genesis. © Do Ho Suh. Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania)
The exhibition’s title, “Walk the House,” comes from a Korean phrase the 62-year-old heard when he was young. It describes the process of transporting hanok, or a traditional Korean house, from one place to another by taking it down and reassembling it. While most of us do not carry a physical home when we relocate, the idea of a transportable home speaks to more than architecture—it refers to “an intangible, metaphorical, and psychological one,” Suh noted in a statement. His oeuvre physically manifests the impalpable emotional baggage we carry, but can find difficult to articulate. He is asking the important questions held by many, on our behalf.
An example is Nest/s (2024), an enthralling installation newly created for this landmark show. Resonating with his signature fabric mesh architectural sculptures, this colossal piece is a collection of 1:1 scale replicas of the spaces where Suh had lived and worked— from bathrooms to kitchen and corridors—across Seoul and New York, to London and Berlin. Stitched together into one interconnected passage, Nest/s invites viewers to walk through.
Though walking through the translucent Nest/s guarantees striking photo ops for social media junkies, ultimately it is a poignant journey through Suh’s memory that inspires viewers to reflect on their own personal trajectories.
Do Ho Suh, Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024). Installation view, “The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House.” Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Creation supported by Genesis. © Do Ho Suh. Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania)
Another new work, Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), offers a similar experience. In this semi-transparent room that draws from the artist’s current home, replicas of mundane objects like doorknobs, telephones and light switches—made from the same materials in a variety of colors with assistance from traditional seamstresses—are affixed all over the interiors.
Suh employs the technique of rubbing—placing paper on surfaces and transferring their textures with graphite—in his Rubbing/Loving series (the writing of “rubbing” and “loving” in Korean is the same, according to the artist). Standing next to Nest/s is Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home 2013-22, shown for the second time since it was debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Australia in 2022. Suh began working on this project in 2013, covering the exterior of the hanok—his childhood home that his family built in the 1970s—with hundreds of pieces of Mulberry paper, and then painstakingly rubbing every single inch of the surface of the house with graphite pencil, as documented in an accompanying video.
Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home, (2013-2022), installation view, “The GenesisExhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House.” Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Repurposing supported by Genesis. © Do Ho Suh. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)
Another work, Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater 2012, reflecting on the aftermath of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, which marks its 45th anniversary this year. The emotionally charged creations born out of such laborious process are fragile, and yet their ghostly presence lingers like memory itself.
While these eye-catching installations take center stage, the exhibition also features a number of smaller walled works, including many fascinating works on paper that Suh created between 1999 and 2025. Among the highlights are the curious threads drawings and the stunning Staircase 2016, which magically transforms a red staircase model from three-dimensional, to a two-dimensional existence on a flat surface.
Two of Suh’s mesmerizing video works, Robin Hood Gardens (2018) and Dong In Apartments (2022), are also on display, projected on a towering screen at one end of the gallery. These visually compelling titles exploring the insulated worlds of these soon-to-be demolished housing blocks in London and Daegu. They were also featured at the artist’s solo exhibition at Art Sonje Center in Seoul last year.
Do Ho Suh, Bridge Project (1999-ongoing), installation view, “The Genesis Exhibition: Do HoSuh: Walk the House.” Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Creation supported by Genesis. © Do Ho Suh. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)
While some critics have complained about the presentation’s lack of balance, as these quieter works are easily overshadowed by the larger-than-life installations in a single open gallery, their inclusion surmises the breadth of Suh’s practice.
The exhibition concludes with a darkened space dedicated to the Bridge Project, an interdisciplinary research experiment that Suh has been working on since 1999. Comprised of videos, drawings, and installations, it is born from the artist’s search for the perfect home. In his imagination, that home sits in the Arctic Ocean, an equidistant point between Seoul, New York, and London—the three cities he has called home. He has thought of various scenarios and circumstances that would allow him to reach that “perfect home” and survive the challenging living conditions: building an impossible bridge, creating an inflatable structure containing necessities for survival including dumplings, and donning an inflatable suit known as Perfect Home S.O.S. (Smallest Occupiable Shelter) (2024).
Do Ho Suh, Staircase 2016, installation view, “TheGenesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House.” Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London, Victoria Miro, and STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore. © Do Ho Suh. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)
Suh’s imagination may be wild, but he is loyal and truthful to his premise, as seen in his conversation with philosophy professor Fine, documented in the project’s newspaper available at the exhibition. In response to Suh’s questions, Fine maintains that no one should be denied access to home, and “[m]ovement shouldn’t be seen as abnormal. It is what we do. We need to find ways to exist and coexist, and accommodate the realities of mobility.”
“The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House” is on view at Tate Modern in London until October 19, 2025. More

Wide-ranging interest in the work and life of Matisse is clear from the spate of museum exhibitions held around the world in recent years. From side-by-side presentations with Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Joan Miró, in Philadelphia and Nice respectively, to a deep dive into The Red Studio (Fondation Louis Vuitton and MoMA), and his wildly popular “cut-outs” in 2015, fans and historians can’t seem to get enough.
Now, a recently opened show, Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes, running at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris through August 24, delves into fresh but no less important territory: his love for his eldest daughter. The show explores their lifelong bond and the many ways it inspired him—including dozens of portraits of his daughter. The show includes paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and ceramics.
The works also serve as a window into history, with chronologically presented images ranging from her childhood to the end of World War II. More than 100 works are on view, many of which have rarely—if ever—been exhibited. Institutions in the United States, Switzerland, and Japan have loaned significant pieces. Photographs and archival materials provide an immersive look at their bond.
Family and Foundation
Marguerite Duthuit-Matisse was born in 1894. Her mother was the model Caroline Joblau, with whom Matisse was in a relationship before marrying Amélie Noellie Parayre, when Marguerite was four. She was raised by Matisse and Amélie alongside her two half-brothers, Jean and Pierre. Marguerite later wrote of their close-knit household: “We are like the five fingers of one hand.”
Marguerite circa 1915. Photographic archives of Henri Matisse. Credit: Henri Matisse archives
Meeting Marguerite Again
Isabelle Monod Fontaine, who has studied Matisse’s oeuvre for decades, co-curated the show with Hélène de Talhouët. Speaking by phone from Paris, Fontaine recalled meeting Marguerite in the mid-1970s, roughly seven years before her death.
“She impressed me very much, asking questions about paintings for the museum where I was working at the time,” Fontaine said. She described Marguerite as having “a very strong personality,” and likened the exhibition to “meeting” her again.
The show reveals the immense mutual trust and respect between Matisse and his daughter—and offers insight into the fascinating destiny of a singular woman who played a pivotal role in her father’s career.
Marguerite lisant Collioure, Summer 1906
Henri Matisse, Marguerite lisant Collioure, Summer 1906 Musée de Grenoble. Legs Agutte-Sembat, (1923). Credit: Ville de Grenoble / Musée de Grenoble-J.L. Lacroix
Matisse had already painted Marguerite in 1905’s Intérieur à la fillette, now at MoMA, when he made her the focus of several works executed in Collioure the following summer. In the Marguerite lisant Collioure, Summer 1906, Marguerite sits absorbed in a book, wearing a bright red dress and white collar, her bow matching her outfit as she leans thoughtfully on one hand.
Painted during a pivotal Fauvist phase, the portrait is notable for its intense palette and unmodeled brushwork. The composition’s calm intimacy balances the vibrant tones. It was shown at the 1906 Salon d’Automne and was admired by Marcel Sembat, who compared its luminosity to Velázquez.

Marguerite Collioure, hiver 1906-1907  (Spring  1907)
Henri Matisse, Marguerite (winter 1906-1907 or spring 1907). Musée national Picasso-Paris. Donation Picasso, 1978. Collection personnelle Pablo Picasso Credit: Grand palais RMN (musée national Picasso-Paris) / René-Gabriel Ojeda
As she transitioned into adolescence, Marguerite is depicted “proudly confronting the viewer,” according to the exhibition catalogue. A childhood bout of diphtheria left her requiring two tracheotomies. The resulting scar, often hidden by high collars or a black ribbon, became a defining motif. Her health kept her out of school, making her even more of a “studio kid.”
The stylized rendering—teal blouse, greenish-black hair, ochre background—reflects Matisse’s embrace of flat planes and expressive color. This particular painting was exchanged with Picasso in 1907, a gesture of mutual admiration during their early rivalry.

Marguerite au chat noir Issy-les-Moulineaux, (début 1910)
Henri Matisse, Marguerite au chat noir Issy-les-Moulineaux, early 1910. Paris, Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre de Création Industrielle. Gift of Madame Barbara Duthuit in memory of Claude Duthuit, 2013. Credit: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Georges Meguerditchian.
Seated formally in a blue dress, Marguerite cradles a black cat and gazes directly outward, her expression more “defiant” than in earlier portraits. The high collar reappears, with the vibrant green and pink background accentuating her poised presence.
This stylized composition was exhibited in Berlin and at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where it startled American audiences. Matisse kept the work until his death, signaling its personal importance. It was posthumously gifted by Barbara Duthuit, Marguerite’s daughter-in-law.

Tête blanche et rose Paris, quai Saint-Michel, (été 1914–début 1915)
Henri Matisse, Tête blanche et rose, Paris, Quai Saint-Michel, summer 1914 – early 1915. Paris, Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre de Création Industrielle. Acquired in 1976. Credit: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat.
In October 1912, Marguerite went to live with her aunt, Berthe Paraye, who ran a teachers’ training college in Ajaccio, Corsica. She had hoped to complete a degree, but the experience proved too challenging. In 1915, she returned to live with her parents and began painting.
This portrait, executed around 1915, shows her as an elegant young woman with a Cubist-inspired twist—her features simplified and stylized beneath an elaborate hat. It is part of a series of portraits that, according to the exhibition materials, “culminated in a highly geometric, austere, and unsettling painting: White and Pink Head.”
Created during the wartime years, the painting exemplifies a period when Matisse developed a radical, uncompromising style. Marguerite, with her characteristic strength, went along with him in that “new adventure, lending her face to a number of experiments” in painting, drawing, engraving, and sculpture.

Marguerite endormie Étretat, (été 1920)
Henri Matisse, Marguerite endormie Etretat, (Summer 1920). Private Collection. Credit: Private collection / © Martin Parsekian
After Marguerite underwent a second surgery in the summer of 1920, Matisse took her to Étretat in Normandy. The trip was intended both to help her regain strength in the invigorating seaside setting and to give him a chance to work on new subjects and portraits.
Amid her ongoing recovery, she often appeared exhausted, and this portrait captures her asleep—resting in a moment of vulnerability and peace. It is also the first image in which she does not wear a ribbon or high collar to hide the scar on her throat. “Her eyes closed and her throat finally liberated—a sweet and precious picture that shows a tenderness Matisse hardly ever expressed in paint, and reserved for his daughter,” the catalogue notes.
The artworks created during this sojourn mark a quiet turning point—a return to life, both for Marguerite and for their creative connection.

Marguerite Vence, (janvier 1945)
Henri Matisse, Marguerite Vence, January 1945 Private collection. Credit: Private collection / © Jean-Louis Losi
Though Marguerite married writer Georges Duthuit in 1923 and no longer appeared in her father’s work, she remained his trusted confidante and intermediary.
This 1945 drawing, created after a 20-year absence from his canvases, followed her harrowing experience in the French Resistance. Marguerite had joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans in January 1944 and was later arrested and deported—only to be liberated on August 26, 1944, just before crossing into Germany.
Matisse, who was frail and weakened by that point and staying in Vence was oblivious to his daughter’s clandestine activities.  However, after months of silence, they were finally reunited in January 1945. “I identified so greatly with your memories that I was absolutely devastated,” Matisse stated. Along with several lithographs he made a few months later, this drawing marked the last time Marguerite appeared in her father’s oeuvre. More

If you’ve recently visited a biennial or attended an art fair, museum, or gallery show, you’ve probably noticed that textiles are showing up everywhere amid a surge of interest in the medium.
At MoMA, you will find the last stop for an acclaimed show dedicated to the medium that has been touring the U.S. and Canada. “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” which recently opened at the New York institution, is a wide-ranging survey of the medium across the 20th and 21st century and includes artists Sonia Delaunay, Paul Klee, and Agnes Martin, as well as more contemporary names like Jeffrey Gibson. The show presents textiles in a myriad of ways, incorporating other mediums like video or photography in some instances.
It has special meaning at the MoMA, too. Curator Lynne Cooke, who installed the show at each of its touring venues, said in a phone interview that, at each location, the show “has changed in ways that reflect the different locations and the amount of space available.” However, at MoMA, the museum’s “own history plays into it because, of course, MoMA is the founding museum of Modernism,” says Cooke. MoMA is where “the histories of Modern art and abstraction, in particular, were first written, and where textiles were collected from the get-go, as one of multiple departments that were non-hierarchally orchestrated.”
Installation view of “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from April 20 through September 13, 2025. Photo: Jonathan Dorado
For Cooke, the starting point for the exhibition was more than five years ago, when she says she started noticing “the efflorescence in contemporary art practice that utilized textiles. It was from this contemporary perspective that I started to look back and see these moments of exchange across the 20th century, in which textiles galvanized a re-thinking of Modernism, and particularly abstraction. . . Another way of thinking about it is in relation to our digital world and this need, craving, and appreciation for materiality and hand-making.”
The thoughtful show has been drawing attention and acclaim from many corners of the art world. It represents “a global selection of artists that realize abstraction through a different medium-a woven brushstroke so to speak, among other forms of textiles, instead of paint,” said advisor Naomi Baigell, principal of BFA Fine Art Services. “While not, at the surface, political, there are undercurrents of inequities. The materials, textures, and volumes bring a new breadth to abstraction and artistic expression. A welcomed break from seeing fiber and other materials depicted or adhered to on canvas,” Baigell added.
Here are some of the highlights of this exhibition, with insights from Cooke and Baigell about what makes them fascinating.

Anni Albers, Tapestry (1948)
Anni Albers. Tapestry, (1948). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. Purchase Fund. © 2024 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“One cannot talk about textiles and their effect on the history of modern art without thinking about Anni Albers,” said Cooke. Albers and her colleagues fled Germany after the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933. Eventually, Albers settled in North Carolina where she taught at Black Mountain College in the 1940s—that is also where she delved into textile and tapestry.
Of the work Tapestry, she told me: “It’s a work made in 1948 at a time when Albers was still designing for mass production and industrial fabrication, but simultaneously had a career in which she was making works of fine art in her estimation.”
Albers called them “pictorial weavings,” said Cooke, adding that they were these very experimental innovative weavings. The artist made them on a hand loom, because that’s where innovation and experimentation took place in textile making for her. Then, the artist stitched them onto a fabric backing and framed them. “They are commensurate with paintings by Sophie Tauber Arp or Paul Klee. She anticipated that they would take their place in galleries of modern art in museums. But they never did at the time. They were seen as textile art and she couldn’t break that glass ceiling. Today we see them differently.”

Gego, Square Reticularea 71/11 (1971)
GEGO (Gertrud Goldschmidt) Square Reticularea 71/11 (1971) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund in honor of Alexis Lowry.
This work is made with small strands of wire, organized in four-way fixtures pieced together to make a net that hangs suspended in front of the wall. “It bends and shifts as what appears to be a very heavy fiber material,” said Cooke.
GEGO, which was the artistic name for Gertrud Goldschmidt, “really dismissed the idea that the work was sculpture. She talked about it as nets and textile-adjacent. What you see here is a way of shaping space, and thinking about defining space and articulating space in three dimensions.”

Sheila Hicks, Peluca verde (Green Wig) (1960-61)
Sheila Hicks, Peluca verde (Green Wig) (1960-61). Photo by Eileen Kinsella
This may have been my favorite work in the show, for the simple reason that this vibrantly colored, green pile of interwined knots and tightly wrapped ropes, stopped me in my tracks and the title is just plain fun. Hicks is a pioneer in textile art. She taught at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City in the early 1960s. During that time, she immersed herself in the cultural landscape, as she had done on earlier sojourns to Chile and Peru. Her engagement with Latin American textile making is “deeply rooted” as this work reflects. Peluca verde was made by binding together strands of emerald-green wool with brilliantly hued silk thread. The rope became a signature element in her oeuvre.

Lenore Tawney, Vespers (1961)
Lenore Tawney, Vespers (1961) at “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” at MoMA. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
“Leonore Tawney keeps a dialogue between fine art and craft,” said Naomi Baigell, Principal BFA Fine Art Services. Vespers ”hangs majestically, offering variations in color, density, and mood offering the viewer a form more flexible than canvas, commanding its space and our attention,” she added. “Tawney wove beyond tradition, turning fiber into poetry with the vision and courage of a true pioneer,” said Loretta Howard, a founding member of On This Spot NYC.Org, a nonprofit that studies and promotes feminist art history,

Rosemarie Trockel  Passion (2013)
Rosemarie Trockel, Passion (2013) at “Woven History: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” at MoMA. Photo by Eileen Kinsella
This work, made by securing strands of white yarn across a stretcher, succeeded in making a painting or a painting-adjacent work and it hangs beside an Agnes Martin painting. “Of course for Trockel, Martin has been a mentor and an artist she admired immensely,” notes Cooke. “Trockel’s status as a contemporary artist is unquestioned.” According to the wall text, Trockel was “paying tribute to painter Agnes Martin. . . whom she has long revered.”

Andrea Zittel A-Z Personal Uniform, 2nd Decade: Winter 2007/2008 (2007)
Andrea Zittel, A-Z Personal Uniform, 2nd Decade: Winter 2007/2008 (2007) in “Woven Histories” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Eileen Kinsella
Andrea Zittel’s personal “uniforms” are made and worn for an entire season. The second decade of this project, which started in 2003,  produced clothing that is both attractive and functional, while questioning the connection between freedom and personal liberation with the market demand for constant variety. The Uniform Project proposes that “liberation may be possible through the creation of a set of personal restrictions or limitations,” according to an artist statement.
Cooke points out another poignant fact about textiles which we can apply to Zittel’s piece: “Textiles and cloth, and clothing…are the things closest to our bodies and closest to our histories in a way.”
“Woven Histories” is on view until September 13, 2025. More

The American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU) took a stand for trans rights last weekend, debuting a massive art installation in front of the U.S. Capitol on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The 9,000-square-foot piece, titled the Freedom to Be Monument, featured 258 six-foot-square quilts made by members of the trans community and their allies across the country.
“This is a monument where joy and resistance are stitched into every thread,” Abdool Corlette, the ALCU’s head of brand and creator of this “Freedom to Be” campaign, told me. “We want the message to be loud and clear:
Trans people have always been here, and we always will be.”
The quilts’ unveiling on Saturday coincided with the start of WorldPride, the international LGBTQ pride event that is holding its ninth edition this year, in D.C. The event, which runs through June 8, marks 50 years of pride celebrations in the nation’s capital.
But it also comes amid an effort by President Donald Trump and conservative lawmakers to roll back trans rights. The ALCU staged the project to help drum up support for the trans community ahead of the forthcoming Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti, which will decide if state bans on gender affirming care for minors violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Artists painting quilts for the Freedom to Be Monument. Photo: courtesy of the ACLU.
“This case is not just about gender affirming care. It is about bodily autonomy.
And we can expect to see other attempts to restrict people’s rights,” Corlette said.
”We also believe that the government should not be in the doctor’s office with you when you’re making extremely sensitive personal decisions, whether that’s gender affirming care or reproductive rights.”
Trump has also issued an executive order recognizing only two sexes, and banned use of federal funds to “promote gender ideology.” In a separate executive order looking to control programming at the Smithsonian Institution, he has specifically complained about’s forthcoming American Women’s History Museum featuring the accomplishments of trans women athletes at Smithsonian museums.
The American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom to Be Monument of quilts celebrating the trans community on display in front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Photo: courtesy of the ACLU.
“The idea of being part of something larger and collaborative amongst 250 other trans artists was equally as exciting as [it was] heartbreaking for me!” Courn Ahn, a graphic designer from Portland, Ore., who made one of the quilts, told me. “It’s still an incredibly scary time to be a trans person in this country right now, and any organizing around our community and especially our joy, is incredibly needed.”
The Freedom to Be Monument was conceived of as a way for trans people to visualize a life freed of marginalization and persecution, where the government is not limiting trans rights or trying to prohibit gender expression. It’s meant to celebrate the diversity of the trans community, with 1,000 artists banding together to create the colorful display and a safe space.
People view sections of the Freedom to Be quilt laid out on the grass on the National Mall at the launch of World Pride on May 17, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Photo: by Samuel Corum/Getty Images.
“It feels like every trans community across this country sent a panel to memorialize their story and to make sure that their joy, their resilience, their fight, will not be erased,” Corlette said. “Even as President Trump continues to target trans people and try to erase them from public life, the Freedom to Be campaign is all about resisting that erasure and reclaiming the power for trans people to tell their own stories.”
The project, of course, is building on the legacy of the famed NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which debuted on the National Mall in 1987 as a tribute to the LGBTQ community during the height of the AIDS epidemic. The world’s largest piece of community folk art, it has since grown to include 50,000 panels together weighing over 350 tons.
The American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom to Be Monument of quilts celebrating the trans community on display in front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Photo: courtesy of the ACLU.
“I feel that every generation has a personal responsibility to continue the work of the AIDS Memorial Quilt,” Corlette said. “Those pieces of art were there to remember those who have passed, but they were also a celebration of the rich, diverse lives that those folks lived.
That’s the through line that connects to the Freedom to Be project. Folks who are transphobic,
their goal is to remove all of the joy and the beauty in trans lives, and there are moments like this where we have to fight that.”
The new quilt project is small by comparison, but still made a large impact on the mall, spelling out “Freedom to Be” in giant letters for a display about the length of a city block.
“Any kind of advocacy with quilting, I think is incredibly
cool, because historically that’s what it’s been used for as well,” participating artist Theo Randall, a self-taught quilter from Grand Rapids, Mich., told me. “The quilting circles are where women’s rights started up… naturally born out of these activities that are bringing marginalized groups together.”
Courn Ahn’s quilt for the Freedom to Be Monument. Photo: courtesy of the ACLU.
The individual quilts contain messages of love and acceptance, like Ahn’s quilt with the words “Trans Folks Belong Everywhere” surrounded by blue flowers that represent blossoming into one’s identity.
“The use of the word ‘belong’ is especially crucial to me,” they said. “I don’t want to be tolerated anywhere—I want to be celebrated everywhere, to feel part of a larger community without question. I want to belong.”
Theo Randall’s Pride House quilt for the Freedom to Be Monument. Photo: courtesy of the ACLU.
Randall’s contribution to the quilt is based on a quilting pattern called Pride House, featuring a pride flag hanging on a single family home they created in 2021 to sell as a fundraiser for the Grand Rapids Trans Foundation.
They think that acceptance of the trans community can only grow as people actually meet and get to know trans people for themselves.
“Exposure, I think, is really important,” Randall added. “One by one, a person’s mind is changed, and then they can take it back to their communities and be like, ‘hey, you know being trans isn’t so scary.
They’re just people!’” More