Eliana Willis

British cuisine is often the butt of jokes, but one thing the Brits do so well that it’s spread throughout the world is fish and chips—battered and fried fish, served with deep-fried potatoes. But as the BBC reported in 2009, the number of “chippies,” the shops where Brits buy what is often considered the U.K.’s national dish, had dropped to about 10,000 from a high of about 35,000 in 1929. And by 2023, NPR would report that in the aftermath of the pandemic and high inflation, shops were closing all over the U.K., and “one of Britain’s favorite foods is fast turning from a staple into a luxury.”
So there’s no small dimension of nostalgia to the newest project by British artist Lucy Sparrow, who on August 1 opens Bourdon Street Chippy, a recreation of a fish-and-chips spot, filled to the brim with some 65,000 hand-stitched items, from the fish and chips, to the refrigerators for drinks, to the baskets the cook would use to immerse the food in oil, to tiny paper packets of salt and the photos of celebrity customers hanging on the wall. It all takes place at Lyndsey Ingram, on Bourdon Street in London’s posh Mayfair neighborhood.
In the past, Sparrow has sewn together a McDonald’s restaurant, a New York City bodega, a supermarket, and a famer’s market, the latter featuring English musician Fatboy Slim slinging groceries. This time around, the artist and a handful of studio assistants labored for eight months to lovingly recreate every item in the chippy—down to the 15 distinct chip shapes in five colors.
Items from Lucy Sparrow, The Bourdon St Chippy (2025) at Lyndsey Ingram, London. Photo: Alun Callender for Jo Brooks PR Ltd.
“It’s definitely my favorite takeaway food,” said the artist in a video chat from the shop, decked out in a custom Bourdon Street Chippy apron and baseball cap. In her view, the meal is not as good anywhere else in the world. It’s funny, of course, to put this tiny shop cheek-by-jowl with art galleries like Hauser and Wirth and David Zwirner, and auctioneers Christie’s and Sotheby’s. But then, you can buy the offerings at Bourdon Street Chippy, too. “You’ll pay £5 [about $6] for a salt sachet up to £50,000 [approximately $66,400] for the drinks fridge, and a large fish and chips is £450 [about $600].” 
Sparrow took me on a quick video tour of the store, pointing out the corkboard where people put up flyers advertising services like dog-walking; the celeb photos of a very British bunch including Michael Caine, Judy Dench, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Nigella Lawson, George Michael, Alan Rickman, and Amy Winehouse; the seated section of the shop and the takeaway counter; a whole wall of sauces; and health and safety posters.
Lucy Sparrow at The Bourdon St Chippy at Lyndsey Ingram, London. Photo: Alun Callender for Jo Brooks PR Ltd.
Food has become distinctly personal for the artist in a new way since she revealed this summer that she has struggled with anorexia since her teen years. 
“I never thought there was a connection because I was so deep in it,” said Sparrow, though others saw it right away. “When I first arrived at getting help, people said, ‘You’re an artist and you make things out of food.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s my art! That has nothing to do with my illness!’ And four or five weeks into treatment, the penny dropped. Having an eating disorder is a very obsessive illness. There’s a reason why perfectionists fall victim to it.”
Sparrow was even concerned that if she treated the eating disorder, she might not be able to be the same kind of artist. “I can still make the work,” she said. “But I have to eat to have the energy to make the work and not the other way around.” More

Marking the final flourish of aristocratic splendor before the upheaval of World War I, the Edwardian era is remembered for its opulence, leisure, and devotion to style. A new exhibition at Buckingham Palace’s King’s Gallery, “The Edwardians: Age of Elegance,” captures that gilded moment through more than 300 works drawn from the Royal Collection.
Edward VII, his wife Queen Alexandra, and their successors King George V and Queen Mary, were two of Britain’s all-time most fashionable royal couples. As well as throwing endless parties, concerts, and sporting events, they expressed their elevated tastes through the acquisition of hordes of art, fashion, and jewelry. Each gallery practically glitters with all of the expected treasures, including tiaras and bedazzled opera glasses, sumptuous ball gowns, gilt porcelain, silverware, and adorable Fabergé animals cut from an array of precious stones, like lapis lazuli, sapphire, and ruby. Ceremonial and other handcrafted items from across the globe are included courtesy of king and queen’s international tours to British colonies, including Malta, the Cook Islands, New Zealand, and India.
Portraits of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, installed in “The Edwardians: Age of Elegance,” at King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace in London through November 23, 2025. Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
As well as the expected stately portraits by leading painters like John Singer Sargent and Philip de László, the exhibition reveals the monarchs’ support for a wide range of their era’s leading lights, including Oscar Wilde, Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and important women artists and actors like Rosa Bonheur and Sarah Bernhardt.
Installation view of “The Edwardians: Age of Elegance,” at King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace in London through November 23, 2025. Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
On account of being housed in Buckingham Palace and drawn from the U.K.’s Royal Collection, the exhibition centers heavily on the the Edwardian royals, telling a story about the early 20th century that stops short at old-school splendor and excludes any mention of the avant-garde. It also evades any responsibility to apply a critical lens on Britain’s colonial past. However, visitors seeking to be dazzled by opulence need look no further.
Here are five highlights that are sure to impress.
John Singer Sargent, Louise, Duchess of Connaught (1908)
John Singer Sargent, Louise, Duchess of Connaught (1908). Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
One hundred years after Sargent’s death in 1925, he remains a firm favorite among art lovers, as evidenced by one celebratory blockbuster show currently on view at the Met and set to travel to the Musée d’Orsay this fall. King Edward VII was certainly a fan, describing Sargent as “the most distinguished portrait painter in England.” His brush was so coveted and his list of commissions so exhausting that, in around 1907, Sargent retired from painting large-scale portraits. This 1908 image of the King’s sister-in-law, Louise, Duchess of Connaught, was one of his very last. Its sense of character and richly opulent fabrics are hallmarks of the Sargent’s style.
After 1910, Sargent occasionally accepted commissions for charcoal sketches that could be easily completed during one two-hour sitting. An example of Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, from 1920 is also included in the exhibition.

Rosa Bonheur, A Lion’s Head (c.1870-91)
Rosa Bonheur, A Lion’s Head (c.1870-91). Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
In the years before their coronation, when Edward and Alexandra were still Prince and Princess of Wales, the couple had plenty of time to develop their artist interests. The keen collectors sought to fill the walls of their two residences, Marlborough House in London and Sandringham House in Norfolk. One of their particular passions was paintings of animals, so they leapt at the chance to acquire a work from the celebrated French artist Rosa Bonheur’s estate sale in 1900.
This painting of a lion seen in profile is suitably majestic and calls to mind the dignity usually afforded important human subjects. Bonheur is one of the most famous women artists of the 19th century and her works were exhibited in the Paris’s most prestigious venues, including the Musée d’Orsay and the Salon of 1848.

Frederic Leighton, Nanna (Pavonia) (1859)
Frederic Leighton, Nanna (Pavonia) (1859). Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
Edward and Alexandra collected several paintings by the English painter Frederic Leighton, of which Nanna (Pavonia), featuring his preferred model Anna Risi, is the standout. The future king wrote about the experience of encountering the work at Leighton’s studio in Rome in 1859, when he was just 17 years old, recalling how he “admired three beautiful portraits of a Roman woman.” He hung the painting in his college rooms in Frewin Hall while studying at the University of Oxford.
The Prince of Wales later paired the work with another Leighton painting in the exhibition, Bianca (1862). Though it is equally elegant and classicizing, this work is much lighter and less brooding. Leighton’s academic style was highly sought after in his lifetime and in 1878 he became president of London’s Royal Academy for nearly two decades.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, God Speed (c.1893)
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, God Speed (c. 1893). Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
The London-based Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema was another royal favorite who was also Edward and Alexandra’s friend and artistic advisor. He even assisted with the with decorations for the king’s coronation in 1902 and later, in 1908, recalled how “the golden hours I had the honor of passing at [the royal residence of] Sandringham cannot be forgotten.”
This painting, in which a woman scatters roses like confetti in an imagined Mediterranean setting, was a gift celebrating the wedding of the future King George V to Queen Mary in 1893. Alma-Tadema was hugely popular in Victorian Britain for gracefully decadent scenes that were heavily inspired by the classical world,

Fabergé, Norfolk Sow (1907-9)
Fabergé, Norfolk Sow (1907-9). Photo: © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
Edward and Alexandra’s strong links with European royalty also influenced the breadth of their collection. Alexandra had been born a Danish princess in Copenhagen and after her sister, Dagmar, married Alexander III, Emperor of Russia, she introduced the couple to the Russian jeweller Fabergé. Their patronage hugely boosted the firm’s popularity in Britain. Several exceptional pieces are on display, including an Art Nouveau cigarette case decorated with a diamond snake biting its tail, lavish photo frames, and a group of animal figurines, including a pigeon, a Norfolk Black turkey, and this Norfolk sow. It was made in 1907-9 from aventurine quartz and rose diamond.
“The Edwardians: Age of Elegance” is on view through November 23 at the King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London. More

How apt that an exhibition exploring Bob Dylan’s engagement with political and social justice should land in New York’s Greenwich Village. It was here, after all, where the musician lived and worked in the 1960s, and where he emerged with his first politically charged folk songs. They were numbers that aligned him—then and forever—with the era’s burgeoning civil rights and anti-war movements. “I’m just writing it,” he said in 1962, “as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.”
Opening in August at New York University’s Gallatin Galleries, “How Many Roads: Bob Dylan and His Changing Times, 1961–1964” revisits how the winds of change and protest intersected with (and inspired) Dylan’s early career. The show, which originates from the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, brings together a host of archival material and nine newly created documentary films that explore the songwriter’s response to current events.
Town Hall flyer, 1963. Courtesy of American Song Archives.
“The exhibit centers on Dylan’s music as a lens through which to view some of the most defining events of the 20th century,” curator Mark Davidson said in a statement. “The early ’60s were a time of rapid change for America, and Dylan paced alongside, documenting.”
These changes were spurred on by campaigns for desegregation, organizations around fair housing and voter registration, student protests, and marches demanding meaningful civil rights laws. Dylan registered these events in piercing compositions that, as he wrote in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One, “didn’t come gently to the shore.”
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform at a rally during the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Photo: Rowland Scherman / National Archive / Newsmakers.
“Paths of Victory” was a paean to civil rights marchers, and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” mused on the nuclear threat, while “Masters of War” hit out at war profiteers. Other songs chronicled the racially motivated killings of Emmett Till, Hattie Carroll, and Medgar Evers. His most enduring folk songs arrived in the form of 1962’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and 1964’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which were less topical but universal in meaning.
The exhibition weaves the decade’s upheavals with Dylan’s music. Among the objects on view is rare footage of the 1963 voter registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the historic March on Washington (where Dylan and Joan Baez performed), along with photographs and ephemera from the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, during Dylan’s first visit to the event (where he arrived, curiously, with a bullwhip).
Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, Newport Folk Festival, July 28, 1963. Photo: Daryl Matthews. Courtesy of American Song Archives.
Fellow musicians who figured in Dylan’s early career—including Baez, Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, and Len Chandler—will also be spotlit, as well as publications centered on topical songs and the protest movement, such as Broadsheet.
“The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s is an important part of our national consciousness,” Davidson told Tulsa World when the exhibition opened at the Bob Dylan Center, “and we have a unique ability to talk about that story through the songs that Dylan was inspired to write during those years.”
Carnegie Hall flyer, 1961. Courtesy of American Song Archives.
This phase of the music icon’s trajectory was recently adapted for the big screen in A Complete Unknown (2024), which starred Timothée Chalamet as a young Dylan. The film dramatized the songwriter’s time within New York’s folk circles as he rose through and then outgrew the protest movement and the traditional folk genre. Chalamet clinched a Golden Globe award for his work on the film.
The NYU show, part of the school’s new Arts and Impact initiative, is complemented by a guided walk through Greenwich Village on September 20. The route will take participants through the neighborhood’s sites and locations that are central to Dylan lore—Great Jones Street, Washington Square Park, the Chelsea Hotel—before concluding at iconic folk haunt the Bitter End.
“How Many Roads: Bob Dylan and His Changing Times, 1961-1964” is on view at the Gallatin Galleries, 1 Washington Place, New York, August 25–October 15. More

Tucked in the northern reaches of the Bronx is an art garden oasis that many New Yorkers don’t even know about.
Wave Hill, a 28-acre 19th-century estate in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, crowns an overlook on the Hudson River with views onto the Palisades cliffs in New Jersey. Home to a resplendent botanical garden and two houses, the estate, which was gifted to the City of New York in 1960, today serves as both a garden and a cultural art center. Temporary exhibitions are hosted in the Glyndor House Gallery, a 1927 home turned contemporary art venue; Wave Hill is also home to an artist residency.
Sara Jimenez , Folding Field (detail) (2025) commissioned by Wave Hill for the exhibition Trees, we breathe , 2025, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Stefan Hagen.
This year marks Wave Hill’s 60th anniversary as a green space open to the public, and this hidden art gem is marking its diamond anniversary with four contemporary art exhibitions that explore the rich interconnectedness of nature and creativity.
Wave Hill’s History
Wave Hill is a New York City hidden gem with vivid history. Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and even Arturo Toscanini have stayed on its grounds.
Wave Hill, as it exists today, is the outcome of the changing tides of New York history. The first Wave Hill House was a 1843 mansion built for lawyer William Lewis Morris and his wife Mary Elizabeth Babcock, and their seven children, as a rural escape from the city. It is thought that Babcock may have given Wave Hill its name. After Babcock’s death in 1851, the family returned to the city, and by 1866, the property was owned by the publisher William Henry Appleton, who expanded the house in several stages and established gardens on the property.
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, What we hold in time’s tender keeping  (2025). Installationview. Commissioned for the Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill. Courtesy of the artist.Photo: Stefan Hagen.
He brought some of the most famed guests to his summer property.  Theodore Roosevelt’s family rented Wave Hill during the summers of 1870 and 1871, when he was still a child. Mark Twain leased it from 1901 to 1903 and wrote to his daughter of the property, “This dining-room is a paradise, with the flooding sunshine, the fire of big logs, the white expanse of cushioned snow and the incomparable river… And how the stormy winds do blow, as the sailor ballad says.”
Sarah Ahmad, Fractured Alchemy (2024) (Triptych) (walls) and Carlie Trosclair, Woodland Terrains (2022) (floor), on view in “Trees, we breathe at Wave Hill, 2025. All works courtesy of the artists. Photo: Stefan Hagen. Courtesy of Wave Hill.
In 1903, George Walbridge Perkins, a businessman and politician, purchased the property and gave Wave Hill much of the shape and mission it holds today. He expanded Wave Hill, purchasing an adjacent property, home to the house today known as Glyndor (it was rebuilt in 1927 following a fire). Perkins added extensive landscaping and made major additions, including a three-story subterranean building that housed a bowling alley and recreation hall, and is today the grounds Ecology building. Perkins was a progressive who devoted himself in retirement to a long list of causes.  After his death, his wife, Evelina Ball, continued this legacy, ultimately deeding the property and its extensive grounds to the City of New York. Today, Wave Hill is a New York City designated landmark. It opened to the public in 1965 after extensive conservation.
Wave Hill Today 
In the 60 years since its opening, Wave Hill has become at once an oasis in the city, a case-study in urban conservation, horticulture, and biodiversity, and a platform for artists exploring the intersection of art, science, community, and nature. Currently, Wave Hill hosts a circulating roster of artist residencies as well as curated exhibitions.
Andrea Bowers, Don’t Let Our Children Inherit Tree Stumps Coffee Table Library (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery. Photo: Stefan Hagen. Courtesy of Wave Hill.
On view now is the group exhibition “Trees, we breathe,” which brings together works by artists including Sarah Ahmad, Andrea Bowers, Sara Jimenez, Yoko Ono, and Rose B. Simpson, among many others. The exhibition spans both galleries in the Glyndor House and expands onto the grounds of the property. The exhibition examines trees’ unique communication systems and ancient histories; trees emerge here as more than objects of majesty and beauty but as wise beings who bear witness to human history and folly, deserving of honor.
Sonja John, Floral Larceny (2025). installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Stefan Hagen.
In the sunroom of the Glyndor House, the work of two of the garden’s artist residents is on view. Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya presents “What we hold in time’s tender keeping”,  which centers on a suspended, spirit-house-inspired canopy that includes crowd-sourced objects in a vivid depiction of community storytelling. On view beside this is Sonja John’s dazzling ‘Floral Larceny’ an installation that blends botanical imagery and imagery from the artist’s family archives, to create stained glass-like mylar panels mimicking breeze block motifs—linking ecology, diaspora, and personal memory. Lastly, Wave Hill invites visitors to soak in views of the grounds by making use of ‘You’re Soaking in It!’, an interactive sculpture by SuRan Song and William M. Weis III. The work unfolds into a hybrid bed-stage and asks ethical questions surrounding sleeping in public and the dreams each of us possesses.
There’s much more in store, too, as this summer, Wave Hill will also be hosting a range of other public programming that celebrate its unique history as an oasis of art and nature in New York City. More

Earlier this year, a woman in Pennsylvania bought a nude charcoal sketch for $12 at a local art auction. Something about the depicted woman’s downward gaze, the hang of flesh around her waist seemed familiar, and so she got in touch with an appraiser. “Congratulations,” they responded—she’d snagged a Pierre-Auguste Renoir drawing. It may now be worth six figures.
The story of work by a celebrated artist being unwittingly rediscovered is hardly uncommon, but in the case of a Renoir drawing, it’s somewhat telling: it’s a part of his practice that’s been largely overlooked by collectors and curators alike. In fact, the last time a show dedicated to Renoir’s works on paper was staged, it was 1921 and the one-time Impressionist was only two years dead.
This fall, the Morgan Museum and Library is breaking the dry spell with “Renoir Drawings,” which as advertised will bring together more than 100 drawings, pastels, watercolors, and prints by the 19th- and 20th-century artist.
Auguste Renoir, View of a Park (1885 to 1890). Photo: Morgan Library and Museum.
One reason for the lack of attention paid to Renoir’s drawings may simply be the preponderance of his paintings. Renoir lived long and worked continuously; conservative estimates suggest he produced around 4,000 paintings, spanning his Impressionist forays alongside Monet et al, before enjoying various stints channeling Classicism, Rubens, Titian, florid 18th-century French art, and his own kind of modernism in later life experiments. There is, in short, much to pick through. A premise of the Morgan show is that the drawings can help us understand these phases—except, perhaps, that fabled decade when Renoir painted boats and bathers en plein air and without preliminary sketches.
“Unlike Degas or Cezanne, Renoir’s use of drawing was episodic and only quite recently has his corpus of works on paper been catalogued,” Colin Bailey, the show’s curator, said over email, noting that there may be as many of 1,000 works on paper, some of which have not yet been located. Renoir’s early innovation may have been to throw sense and intuition directly onto the canvas, but he would return to drawing in more measured times. “Having trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in the early 1860s, he always regarded drawing as foundational and we see this particularly in his return to drawing in the late 1870s and 1880s.”
Bailey, who is enjoying his tenth year as the Morgan’s director, has been working on Renoir for three decades and has seen the institution add to its collection of Renoir works on paper. Nonetheless, the show has necessitated major loans, including from the MFA Boston, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Vienna’s Albertina Museum, and most numerously from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which has been a collaborative partner on the exhibition and will go on to stage “Renoir Drawings” from March to July in 2026.
Auguste Renoir, Study for The Judgement of Paris (1908). Photo: The Phillips Collection.
Auguste Renoir and Richard Guino, The Judgment of Paris (1914). Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
Organized thematically, the show will cover Renoir’s academic studies, sketches of modern life, and portraits, both formal and casual. At its most literal, the exhibition will reunite Renoir’s finished works with their preparatory drawings; here, the Musée d’Orsay provides two key works: Dance in the Country (1883) and The Judgment of Paris (1914). In the first, we see Renoir tiptoeing away from Impressionism in a style of greater clarity. The painting is accompanied by studies that see him testing out background details and just how joyful his female dancer should be. The second belongs to the sculptural works Renoir made alongside Richard Guino in the early 20th century. Accompanying chalk drawings show Renoir working over the choreography of the classical scene.
Auguste Renoir, Dancers (1883). Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
Auguste Renoir, Study for Dancers (1883). Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.
One highlight promises to be the presentation of The Great Bathers (1884–87), on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and placed alongside seven preparatory drawings. The work was a slog and saw Renoir trying to assimilate elements of sculpture, 18th-century French painting, and the modern treatment of water and greenery he was well-versed in. It was broadly panned by critics upon its unveiling and Renoir never again spent so long on a single painting.
Auguste Renoir, Study for The Great Bathers (1884 to 1887). Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum.
The painting is making its first appearance in New York and it was the accession of the large red-and-white chalk preparatory drawing in 2018 that provided the first spark for the exhibition. There’s the sense that Renoir’s drawings haven’t been given a chance, something Bailey explains by way of an anecdote.
“In 1886, Berthe Morisot was treated to a private viewing of Renoir’s drawings. She was most impressed and noted in her diary that it would be most desirable for the public, who thought the Impressionists worked with the greatest casualness, to see such drawings,” Bailey said. “In some ways, our exhibition is a response to her insight.” More

A decade after their debut, Paul Rucker’s Klan robes remain as shocking as ever, their pointed hoods reimagined in an array of bold and colorful fabrics with striking prints. A circle of nine of these menacing figures, surrounding three tiny toddler Klansmen, greet visitors to “Rewind Resurrection” in New York, the 10-year anniversary restaging of the artist’s traveling exhibition delving into the long history of racism in the U.S.
“They each symbolize some things. The pink robe is about how the Ku Klux Klan did not like gay people, just like the Nazis did not like gay people. The Kente cloth is about the Dutch wax fabric, which is a product of African colonization by the Dutch, and also about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Klan, who was also a millionaire slave trader, connecting Africa and the Ku Klux Klan,” Rucker told me.
“The signature piece of the show is the camouflage robe, which is about the stealth aspect of racism, how it hides in plain sight,” he added. “You don’t have to be in an outfit.”
It was the robes that led to the censoring of “Rewind” at York College of Pennsylvania in 2017, after a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that year. The college closed the show to the public, only allowing students and faculty to visit. The show had traveled without issue before that. It debuted at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore and then the Baltimore Museum of Art before appearing in Seattle; Ellensburg, Wash.; and Ferguson, Mo. But this is its first outing since.
A case of KKK memorabilia collected by Paul Rucker on view in “Rewind Resurrection.” Photo: by Nehemiah A Prince, courtesy of the artist.
“I’ve gone where people have asked me to come and bring the work,” Rucker said. “I went to Eastern Washington because someone there was recruiting for the Klan, and the community invited me. I went to Ferguson
after Mike Brown’s killing because the community reached out.”
This is the artist’s first show in New York, and it’s entirely self-funded, in a rented Chelsea gallery. Rucker is hoping that an institution will acquire the exhibition, which he considers a collective installation, in its entirety.
The show may seem especially timely now, as President Donald Trump looks to ban museums and schools from acknowledging the destructive legacy of enslavement and racism as an underpinning of our society. But Rucker warns that his show is bigger than any single administration, and that Democrats are far from blameless.
“It’s about the general culture of our country, which went seamlessly from enslavement to incarceration,” he said.
Paul Rucker in 2015. Photo: by Mike Morgan, courtesy of the artist.
Part of the display is of shocking artifacts that Rucker has spent years collecting, such as racist books, Nazi armbands, a real KKK hood, and the physical restraints that kept enslaved people in bondage. (He is also building an art space, called Cary Forward, in Richmond, Virginia, to showcase similar objects.)
And then there are his own artworks, such as blankets he ordered online to reproduce historic lynching postcards and other found images on woven tapestries. (Despite the disturbing nature of the images, none of the business owners ever questioned these orders.) There are videos visualizing data of the shocking proliferation of prison facilities, and gorgeous wooden relief sculptures recalling the silhouette of string instruments, with f-holes, each paying tribute to a different victim of racial violence.
“These are people who may not be well known as the civil rights leaders that we talk about all the time Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. These are lesser-known people like the Scottsboro Boys, or Jesse Washington, who was burned alive in 1916, or James Bird Jr., who was killed in Jasper, Texas, in 1998.”
Paul Rucker, Proliferation, an animation of new facilities being built for the U.S. prison system. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
Rucker carries the weight of history on his shoulders, uncovering the tragic stories of all-but forgotten individuals and events, such as the Red Summer race massacres of 1919. And while art is a tool to keep the evils of the past of being forgotten—even as some are now seemingly being repeated—he is aware that it is not enough.
“Art by itself will inherently fail to get people to move. It will help bring awareness to these atrocities of the past, and it will make people feel something, but to have real action beyond that takes another step beyond art,” Rucker said. “Hitting a like button on Instagram is not enough. We have got to move beyond following the algorithms that make us feel good because we have someone that validates our feelings with a post.
It’s very dangerous right now to feel that we’re making progress by hitting a like button.”
“Rewind Resurrection” is on view at 545 West 23rd Street, New York, New York, July 1–23, 2025. More

Two major New York museums are celebrating the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg’s (1925–2008) birth this fall with exhibitions that spotlight lesser-known chapters of his wildly inventive career.
At the Guggenheim New York, the artist’s monumental silkscreen painting Barge (1962–63) is returning to New York in October for the first time in nearly a quarter century for a show highlighting the museum’s deep Rauschenberg holdings. Just a few blocks uptown, the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) will showcase his undersung work in photography, particularly how Rauschenberg turned his lens on New York City.
Interestingly, neither exhibition will showcase Rauschenberg’s “Combines,” the series of works incorporating everyday objects and taxidermy animals for which he is perhaps best known, focusing instead on other aspects of his wide-ranging practice.
“His career was so long and varied, and he was so prolific,” Joan Young, the Guggenheim’s senior director of curatorial affairs, told me. She has worked at the museum since Rauschenberg’s last major exhibition there, a 1997 exhibition so massive it filled not only the Fifth Avenue flagship, but two satellite spaces. “It was the largest, biggest exhibition that I’ve ever done.”
Robert Rauschenberg, Barge (1962–63). Collection of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The Guggenheim’s new show, announced today, will take up just one gallery. Titled “Life Can’t Be Stopped,” it’s part of a major moment for both Rauschenberg and the Guggenheim, which was one of the first institutions to exhibit his work. The celebrations for the artist’s 100th birthday are being overseen by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which is loaning several works to the Guggenheim and helping present a slew of other exhibitions around the world paying tribute to the centennial. The show is part of the museum’s new “Focus” series, launched last November, which aims to highlight its vast the collection.
Why ‘Barge’ Is Significant
Among the Guggenheim’s impressive holdings of Rauschenberg’s work is Barge, a striking black-and-white painting measuring 32 feet wide.
“It has this really panoramic and almost cinematic quality,” Young said. “You really have to move across the painting to be able to see it. You can’t absorb it all at once. And you really get a sense of Rauschenberg’s movement as he created paintings.” It was created in the early 1960s, when the artist was also engaged in performance, making sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham as well as his own performance work.”
Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at the Venice Biennale, 1964. Photo: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute.
The Guggenheim acquired Barge in 1997, to be owned jointly by the New York museum and its then-fledgling Bilbao outpost in Spain. But it hasn’t been on view in Manhattan since 2001, spending its time either in Bilbao or traveling to other exhibitions. The New York Guggenheim normally reserves its famed spiraling rotunda—and thus, the bulk of its galleries—for temporary exhibitions, leaving limited floor space to showcase its impressive holdings, especially one of such epic proportions. The Bilbao location, in contrast, has for years given over the entirety of its third floor to works from its collection, allowing Barge to take pride of place.
It is the largest example of the 79 silkscreen works Rauschenberg made between 1963 and ’65. His exploration of the medium—which he picked up around the same time as its most famous practitioner, Andy Warhol (1928–1987)—is at the heart of the Guggenheim presentation.
Art historians debate which of the two artists actually used silkscreen first. Young said it was probably Warhol, but he may have been inspired by Rauschenberg’s process of transfer drawing, which incorporated images from newspapers and magazines by a transfer process rather than collage.
“There’s a story of how Bob [Rauschenberg] visits Andy’s studio and they decide they want to make a trade,” Young said. “He asks Andy to share the source of who made his silkscreens, which are commercially produced. And in return, Warhol asked Bob for photographs that he could use in his paintings. And he actually did go on to create a number of works using these photographs that Bob had shared!”
Robert Rauschenberg, New York (1983). ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
How Rauschenberg Used Photography
As Rauschenberg’s practice developed, he moved from using found imagery to incorporating photos he took himself into the works. And those photos were also works unto themselves, as the MCNY exhibition aims to tease out.
“By incorporating photographs and everyday objects into his artworks, Robert Rauschenberg placed the realities of life at the center of his art, blurring traditionally held boundaries between the two and compelling us to look more closely at the world around us,” Sean Corcoran, the MCNY’s senior curator of prints and photographs, said in an email. “His work continues to resonate in an increasingly image-saturated world.”
“Even pre-internet, Rauschenberg was really responding to—and he talked about this too—the oversaturation of visual stimulation within mass media, television and film and advertising and such,” Young agreed. “It’ll be nice—the photographic image is going to have a very strong presence in our exhibition, and then just up the street, people will be able to go and see and appreciate his photographs as photographic medium and as a photographic practice too.”
Together, the two shows are the first Rauschenberg museum exhibitions in New York since the 2017 retrospective organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern in London.
“Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped” will be on view October 10, 2025–April 5, 2026 at the Guggenheim New York, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 
“Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World” will be on view September 12, 2025–March 22, 2026 at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. More

After decades on the margins, fiber and textile art is finally receiving the critical and institutional attention it deserves. Museums are mounting major shows that reconsider the medium’s history and contemporary potential, while the market is beginning to take it seriously. When future art historians and critics reflect on this shift, the contributions of artists like American artist Liz Collins will stand out. Collins, who has long pushed the boundaries of textile practice, is now having a major moment of recognition.
In Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, the sweeping survey “Liz Collins: Motherlode” traces the artist’s multi-decade career, the first dedicated to the artist in the United States. Curated by Kate Irvin of the RISD Museum’s Costume and Textiles Department, the show brings together an unparalleled range of work from across Collins’ career.
Collins’s landmark survey marks a pivotal moment in the rising institutional and critical recognition of fiber and textile art, tracing her multifaceted career from fashion to fine art and recent cross disciplinary experimentation. As the medium gains renewed interest, Collins emerges as a vital figure whose experimental, boundary-defying practice challenges conventional divisions between design, craft, and contemporary art—offering a model of possibility and evolution for the field at large.
Liz Collins. Photo: Joe Kramm.
Institutional Recognition
“Motherlode” coincides with Collins’ inclusion in the groundbreaking traveling group show “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” in its final stop at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, solidifying her place within the canon of medium. The show premiered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in late 2023 and was subsequently shown at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, making it one of the largest and most attended exhibitions dedicated to medium.
“’Woven Histories’ has really helped establish my contributions to a particular lineage of making and working that I feel very happy about now because it took a while,” Collins said.
Liz Collins, Cosmic Explosion (2008–18). Photo: 4 Scotts Photography. Courtesy of Tyler and Stacey Smith.
With “Motherlode,” however, visitors are offered a deep dive into Collins’ work and practice to date as it brings to light the comprehensive arc of Collins’ career, and offers a glimpse at what’s to come. Collins, who lives and works in Brooklyn, is a double RISD graduate, receiving her BFA from the school in 1991 and MFA in 1999—with her MFA thesis project being a knitwear clothing line that launched her fashion label, which she ran through 2004.
As well as studying at RISD, between 2003 and 2013, she was a professor of textiles at RISD and has intermittently worked with the school or museum on various bases since. Collins’s longstanding and formative relationship with both institutions makes the present exhibition feel like a homecoming—perhaps even a triumph
“This survey show came out of my connection to these two institutions, the museum and the school,” Collins described on a video call. “I think it would be a different show somewhere else. The reason it’s called ‘Mother Lode’ is because these two institutions were part of what formed me as a creative person. I didn’t become the creative person I am now in a vacuum—I had a lot of influences, I was exposed to a lot, and while not all of it came from RISD, some very important moments of epiphanies and mentorship came from this place.”

Selections from knit-focused collections (1993–2003) by Liz Collins. Courtesy of the artist.
Broad Strokes
Curating an exhibition on such a diverse career was no easy feat, with Collins describing initially approaching the project in “broad strokes,” matching the spaces of the museum with largely categorical bodies of work. Plans for the show began roughly three years ago, but already there was an organizing element, one that balanced creative trajectory with medium or project. “It’s a lot of different categories coming together to represent the breadth of my work,” Collins said.
One such category is dedicated to the artist’s early work in fashion—which, despite it being the reason she initially found a place on many people’s radar, is largely unknown to those who discovered her work through more traditional art-centric spaces. Despite looming large in her career history and creative development, now that roughly two decades have passed, the period Collins devoted to fashion is comparatively dwarfed by her subsequent pursuit of visual art.
Liz Collins, Illuminated Vein Dress (2006). Courtesy of the artist.
Collins described looking back at this time in her career as both generative and revelatory. “It was over 20 years ago that I was doing my fashion label,” said Collins. “It stands out to me as this time when I was doing some amazing work. I’m looking at it with fresh eyes as something really incredible. It was a very special time, but it was not a long period of time.”
Situated within the context of her greater oeuvre, the show highlights less a break from fashion so much as an evolution. Fashion, of course, leverages the vocabulary of textiles, fibers, and other materials in many of the same ways as visual art. Looking at pieces like the otherworldly Illuminated Vein Dress (2006), created for an exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design, visual and textural parallels can be seen with works such as Veins-Darkness (2022); her fashion practice did not cease so much as transform, while retaining much of the same lexicon.
Liz Collins, Veins-Darkness (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
A Collaborative Gesture
At both the physical and metaphoric heart of the show, in the RISD Museum’s Skylight Gallery (perennially underused as it also houses a stairwell), is a facet of the exhibition collaboratively conceived of and curated by a class taught by Collins during the 2025 spring semester for the occasion. Here, the gallery was devised as a moment of respite, “a queer social space” in the tradition Collins has established with other earlier installations she’s created.
A show within a show, the title of this gallery space is entitled “Homecoming,” a reference to both individual returns made to home, family, or community, but also an invitation to those who may not be able to return home based on their identity. Featured are dozens of works made by queer-identifying RISD students, staff, faculty, and alumni, which are complemented by a selection of works drawn from the RISD Museum collection.
The class that undertook “Homecoming” was comprised of six students, who when Collins first proposed the idea had no way of knowing who they would be, necessitating a lack of expectation and a focus on collaboration. The group that ultimately came together—Callie Coccia, Farnaz Dastranj, Xiao Guo, Cindy Li, Kati Lowe, and Mary Mitchell—brought with them a diverse range of skills and interests; all Collins described as being driven, dynamic, and dedicated to the project.

“To have this space that is a gesture that students got to create with me … That makes me feel incredibly happy,” said Collins. “I wouldn’t have wanted to do the show without it, to be honest. I love all the textile work that I make and can keep making, but an important and meaningful part of my practice that I can’t abandon is creating social space. I need this to be part of my work.”
On the walls is a wallpaper designed by Collins with a pattern that has undergone several iterations. Made by a Zurich-based company that the artist has collaborated with for years, the first version was created in 2018 inspired in part by the natural landscape of Saratoga Springs where she undertook a residency at Yaddo coupled with a pattern drawn from a chart published by The New York Times that illustrated the change in temperature of the Earth over the course of a century. Originally titled Acid Rain Floral (later going by a different manufacturer’s name when it was put on the market), the evolving pattern has become a type of throughline in Collins’s practice, with various iterations being used in other solo shows such as her retrospective “Mischief” at Touchstones Rochdale in England in 2022.
Liz Collins, Zagreb Mountain Rug (2022). Courtesy of Liz Collins Studio.
Career in High Gear
The largest gallery space, rightfully, focuses on Collins’ diverse work with textiles and simultaneously her ability to deftly move from one style and methodology of work to another. On the gallery floor is the hand-knotted Zagreb Mountain Rug (2022). Behind it hangs the multimedia tapestry Cosmic Explosion (2008/2018), composed of mohair, acrylic, lurex, glass, crystal, and wood. Nearby are the opulent embroidery work Pressure (2024) and the monumental woven textile Rainbow Mountain Weather (2024).
Liz Collins, Rainbow Mountain: Weather (2024). Courtesy of Liz Collins Studio and Candice Madey, New York.

The shifts between material and format in her work speak to an unburdened experimentalism, and disregard for traditional classifications of art-making. To fully grasp Collins’s practice, one must let go of fixed boundaries—between design, art, and craft, as well as between materials and methods. Whether she’s working with weaving or embroidery, wool, or crystals, Collins treats them all as part of a unified visual language.
Despite “Motherlode” heralding a career highpoint and reflecting decades of prodigious output, it by no means indicates Collins is slowing down, and she could still very much be described as explosive an artist as she was in her early days as a fashion designer keeping up with the onslaught of new seasons. What has become apparent is a sleekening of her process, allowing her to undertake more ambitious projects.
Liz Collins, Pressure (2024). Photo: Kunning Huang. Courtesy of the artist and Candice Madey, New York.
“I just love to make work and find ways to do it and to keep working as much as possible,” she noted, “but also some of the means that I use now don’t mirror what I was doing then.”
For instance, Collins now regularly works with industrial textile mills as fabricators, allowing for her to achieve larger scales efficiently. It also offers her the ability to more quickly revisit, revise, or experiment with myriad patterns and designs, resulting in new work that pushes the farthest boundaries of abstraction.
Considered holistically, “Motherlode” not only delves into Collins’s past and recent bodies of work but offers an invaluable idea: possibility. “A takeaway for other creative people is the realm of the possible, and the evolution of work over time … there’s something of the interconnectivity of a creative person through different contexts. For people who already understand textiles, they can discern differences and methodologies. And it exposes those who don’t to a huge assortment of ways of making things that are different but can be interrelated.”
Liz Collins ‘Motherlode’ is on view until January 11, 2026 More