Eliana Willis

A trip to New York’s Storm King Art Center this autumn will include an installation quite unlike the monumental sculptures and sweeping land art that is most closely associated with the venue. American artist Taryn Simon has created a machine, Kleroterion (2024), now situated a short walk down a path from the central museum building.
The outer shell of the work is made of cast resin, as are the variously colored rectangular tiles, or “chips,” that protrude from its front—five stacked vertically and five horizontally just beneath. Upon closer inspection, a small window at the top of the square monolith reveals a row of four small balls.
And if the quality of the machine’s finish and colors seem familiar, it’s because they likely are. The colors of the slotted chips are based on those of billiard balls used in a game of pool, matched exactly, with the main body of the Kleroterion drawn from the cue ball. A short, polished pathway leading to the piece is black, like the eight-ball. With all of these elements taken together, and standing against the natural landscape of Storm King, the Kleroterion manages to appear both retro and futuristic at the same time.
Installation view of Taryn Simon, Kleroterion (detail) (2024) at Storm King Art Center. Photo: Eli Baden-Lasar. Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian, and Almine Rech.
One of the inspirational starting points for the piece was seen by Simon on a trip to Greece, where artifacts of Ancient Athenian kleroterion were on exhibit. These devices were randomizers, employed to select citizens to local or state councils, offices, or other public positions equitably by chance. No complete kleroterion is currently known, though there are advanced theories on how it might have worked from an operative standpoint. Studying fragments of the ancient tool as well as written accounts, Taryn created a version fit for the 21st century.
Despite the slick visual aesthetics of the work, at its heart, Kleroterion is participatory, a work meant to be played like a game. Similarly to its Ancient antecedent, visitors in groups of five each select one of the colored chips from the lower line and insert it into any open slot along the upper vertical line. At this point, it is up to the group to decide what to vote on: who is on the hook for doing the driving back down to the city? Where should we go to lunch? How much time should we spend here? Once decided, a hand crank on the side is turned, releasing the four small balls that trail down the machine’s interior and randomly knock out four of the five chips, with the remaining chip indicating the winner.
Speaking of the execution of the project and its reception, Storm King Art Center Artistic Director and Chief Curator Nora Lawrence said, “I have long admired Taryn’s practice and am thrilled to collaborate with her to realize Kleroterion at Storm King. The work is poignant and playful, a reflection on the role of transparency in democracy and the value of open space. It’s been exciting to see visitors come together to use the machine’s game-like elements, to shape the outcome through their own unique questions, and to experience its power-granting abilities.”
Installation view of Taryn Simon, Kleroterion (detail) (2024) at Storm King Art Center. Photo: Eli Baden-Lasar. Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian, and Almine Rech.
While its inspiration by an Athenian democratic tool invites broader considerations around voting, elections, and contemporary democratic processes, as Lawrence notes Kleroterion simultaneously doesn’t resist but rather embraces its associations with games, and more specifically games of chance—a stark and poignant juxtaposition. The chips, here literally, fall where they may, bringing questions around the allocation of power and the extent of power to the fore.
Though not visible, further evoking the effect of a classic coin-op game is what’s just beneath the surface. Inside the Kleroterion, there are no circuit boards or digital anything. Instead, there is an intricate core of machinery, entirely designed by Simon herself. Full of gears, levers, and an Archimedean screw (a helicoid that transports the four balls within).
“I’ve wanted to make a game for a long time,” said Simon via email. “And there’s no bigger game than politics. I grew up in my grandfather’s and father’s arcades. They both invented, manufactured, and distributed air hockey, pool tables, old school arcade games. Games were like oxygen—always there.”
With its artificial colorway and polished finish against views of Storm King’s South Fields and now-changing fall foliage, the kleroterion conveys a certain degree of uncanniness, one that tempts and repels at once. An apt physical metaphor for the allures and uncertainties of power, both micro and macro. More

Artificial Intelligence is disturbing and scary, but there is little one can do about it, said Tim Burton. He would know: The award-winning illustrator and director is known for his own slightly disturbing animated and live-action films such as Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, and Beetlejuice.
“It reminded me of other cultures where they did not like their picture taken because they thought they were taking your soul from it. And this, to me, was a more weird and extreme version of that,” said the director, referring to images created using A.I. to draw Disney characters in his style. Burton was speaking at a roundtable with Tim Marlow, director and CEO of London’s Design Museum ahead of the opening of “The World of Tim Burton,” a sprawling exhibition that chronicles the  famed director’s 50-year creative journey.
“[A.I.] gives me a weird sort of scary feeling inside. And what do you do? I don’t know,” he added. “No matter what they try to do to stop it, once you can do it, people can do it. I don’t know what you can do about it.”
Tim Burton and Design Museum exhibition curator Maria McLintock visit ‘The World of Tim Burton’, a new exhibition at the Design Museum in London. Picture date: Wednesday October 23, 2024. Photo credit: Matt Crossick/PA Media Assignments.
His concerns about A.I. echo that of other artists and creatives. This week, more than 15,000 creative industry professionals—including musician Thom Yorke, actors Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon, and artists Joel Shapiro and Amoako Boafo—signed a statement calling for the halt of the “unlicensed use of creative works for training generative A.I.,” which they said is “a major, unjust threat” to the artists who make a living out of these works.
Burton’s exhibition at the Design Museum is a powerful demonstration of human creativity. Featuring some 600 items, few of them are digital. Some came from Burton’s personal archive and collections, others on loan from film studio archives and private collections from his collaborators.
Exhibition goers admired Tim Burton’s art at “The World of Tim Burton” at the Design Museum, London, October 2024. Courtesy of the Design Museum.
Taking the center stage are his drawings on paper, napkins, and canvas, and various other media. These date back to his teenage years, when he won a trash can design competition, through to his early adult life that laid the blueprint for his future career in filmmaking and unique aesthetics. His meticulous, eerie, and sometimes adorable depictions of otherworldly creatures underscore Burton’s prowess as an artist as well as a director. There are also drawings from his unrealized projects over the years as well as from his latest project, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), a sequel to his acclaimed 1988 feature featuring Winona Rider and Michael Keaton.
Also on view are models that were used in his iconic stop-motion features, such as Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Corpse Bride (2005). There is also an array of hand drawn storyboards and costumes from his films, such as the iconic Catwoman suit from Batman (1989) and the pair of scissor hands from Edward Scissorhands (1990). Costumes from his recent works such as Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Netflix series Wednesday (he is working on a second season) are also on show. Posters of Japanese Kaiju (monsters) films, books of Edgar Allan Poe and tales of monsters from the director’s collection reflect his cultural influences.
Tim Burton, Surrounded (1996). Courtesy the artist and the Design Museum, London.
“For me it’s about the process of things,” the 66-year-old said. “Drawing is very emotional and personal. It’s a therapeutic process. I see things in picture form, which is an emotional core to start with. The drawings can be turned into animation or live action films, or nothing.”
It’s not like Burton is completely anti-technology. “I’ve worked with CGI [computer-generated imagery],” he emphasized, likely referring to his films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Alice in Wonderland (2010). “I have nothing against it. Beautiful things can be found in any medium.”
He added that he feels “like stop-motion is the most artistic” and the most fun. “When you walk on the set and you see the miniature set, you see people moving these objects frame by frame. It’s an exciting, long process.”
An exhibition-goer examining the Catwoman suit from Batman (1989), on view at “The World of Tim Burton” at the Design Museum, London, opening to public on Friday, October 25, 2024. Courtesy of the Design Museum.
The exhibition already sold 32,000 tickets in advance, the biggest advance ticket sales in the museum’s 35 years of history. To accommodate the excessive demand, the museum will open late on Fridays and Saturdays throughout the rest of 2024.
But the director resisted staging an exhibition in London initially, despite living in the U.K. capital for a quarter of a century. When asked if London was a creative place for him, Burton responded with a long silence.
“Maybe I have thinner skin that I just didn’t really like going through the feelings,” he said, without explaining what those feelings were. He then continued saying that the show traveled to many different places over the years—14 cities and 11 countries since 2014, and a show in London simply “never really came into reality.” But the enthusiasm from the crew of the Design Museum successfully convinced him to stage the touring exhibition’s grand finale in London. He was impressed by the results.
Tim Burton visits ‘The World of Tim Burton’, a new exhibition at the Design Museum in London featuring over 600 items relating to the filmmaker’s career, ahead of it opening to the public on Friday. Photo credit: Matt Crossick/PA Media Assignments.
“The feng shui [of the show] is beautiful. It makes me more calm looking at it. Beautiful job,” Burton said to Marlow and exhibition curator Maria McLintock.
Asked if he would put his talent into designing objects for people, Burton hinted that he has a few tricks up his sleeves. “I got a whole range of joke shop items that I would love to introduce to everybody. I’ve got big plans,” the director said.
“The World of Tim Burton” is on view at the Design Museum, 224–238 Kensington High St, London, through April 21, 2025. More

A self-trained artist who often takes art and art magazines as his subject will get a major museum spotlight this coming winter. In its Projects gallery, which is free to enter, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is staging a show of California painter Marlon Mullen. His first solo exhibition at a major museum, it will, appropriately enough, serve as the premiere for a brand-new work inspired by the cover of the museum’s own publication Van Gogh: The Starry Night, devoted to one of its best-known works.
Featuring 25 paintings from the last decade, the show will include two examples from the museum’s holdings. One untitled 2017 work is based on an Artforum cover showing a work by Kerry James Marshall—which, itself, shows a Black artist holding up a gargantuan palette.
Born in 1963 in Richmond, California, Mullen has since 1986 been based at his hometown’s NIAD Art Center (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development), which hosts and supports artists with developmental disabilities. It’s part of a network of studios in the Bay Area working with this population, including Creative Growth and Creativity Explored.
After a decade principally working in printmaking, Mullen turned to painting. The Center started receiving steady donations of art magazines in the late 2000s, and Mullen has been working with it extensively ever since.
“He’s committed to the work of painting, thinking about what it is and what it can be, and to an exploration of abstraction that’s deep and resonant,” said Amanda Eicher, NIAD’s executive director, in a phone conversation. “Like many artists, he’s translating pop culture into form and texture and layers in a way that’s extraordinarily sophisticated.” 
Marlon Mullen at work in the NIAD studio. Courtesy of the artist and NIAD.
Examples in the show focus on covers and advertisements from top publications like Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, and Sculpture that feature works by artists as varied as Andy Warhol, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He doesn’t precisely reproduce the source material, but instead uses it as inspiration for graphic riffs in bold shapes and vivid colors. Other works are based on a series of Time-Life books with monochrome covers; the museum’s 2016 The World of Picasso features just the titular words on a blank background.
The show is organized by no less than the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, Ann Temkin, with support from curatorial assistant Alexandra Morrison.
“He’s really identifying his work as an artist with the art world as it’s presented through these publications, so it’s an intense relationship that he’s creating,” said Temkin in a phone call.
“There’s so much artistry,” she added. “If someone were to just say that the technique was copying the covers or advertisements, that would be such a misrepresentation. They’re a starting point in a way, but he makes his own choices.”
Mullen’s work is a notable entry in a long tradition of art that references existing art. Just to name a few examples: Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) sexualized Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1504); Cindy Sherman’s 1990 Untitled (#224) restaged Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (1593–94); appropriation artists like Sturtevant and Sherrie Levine recreated works by artists from Andy Warhol to Walker Evans; and Louise Lawler creates works showing her and other artists’ work in situ in museums, storage spaces, and collectors’ homes.
Marlon Mullen, Starry Night (2024), displayed with the publication it is based on. Courtesy the artist and NIAD.
Mullen’s work has appeared on major art-world stages before. The 2019 Biennial exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art included an untitled 2018 work depicting an Art in America cover. He’s also had solo exhibitions at in-the-know galleries like New York’s JTT; Adams and Ollman of Portland, Oregon (which represents him); and Brussels’s Sorry, We’re Closed, as well as New York nonprofit White Columns, and many other venues.
Museums have also collected his work, including not only MoMA and the Whitney but also the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and Oregon’s Portland Art Museum.
MoMA itself has a long tradition of showing folk artists, outsiders, and self-trained practitioners. Curator Holger Cahill mounted the 1932 show (just eight years after the museum’s founding) “American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900.” Five years later, William Edmondson would become the first African American artist to have a solo show there; in 2021–22, the museum organized a show of Joseph E. Yoakum. The museum owns examples by some of the best-known artists in this arena, like James Castle, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, Martín Ramírez, and Bill Traylor.
“One of the things that attracted me to thinking of proposing this as a venue for Mullen’s first solo museum show was the really deep connection to MoMA’s history, going back all the way to the beginning, of looking at the work of artists who—the wording has changed umpteen times—were not in a professional art world market and ecosystem, and instead forged different paths to recognition and visibility,” said Temkin. “MoMA, starting with [founding director] Alfred Barr and Holger Cahill and Dorothy Miller and so many others, from the early days right up to the present, has seen this this strand of creativity as a very vital part of Modern art history.”
“Projects: Marlon Mullen” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd St, New York, December 14, 2024 to April 20, 2025. More

“The Louvre’s enigmatic painting par excellence.” That’s how Bernard Dufour, a French abstract painter from the 20th century, once described Pierrot, a 1718-1719 painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau.
He’s not wrong. The painting is mysterious for a number of reasons. For one, it is merely attributed to Watteau, and not all art historians are convinced he is indeed its creator. We also don’t know who commissioned the painting, or what their intention might have been. Depicting stock characters from French-Italian plays known as commedia dell’arte, Pierrot—also known as Gilles—might have hung on a wall, or it might have been used to promote a particular performance.
Then there’s the relationship between the characters themselves. The central figure, a clown character alternatively referred to as Pierrot or Gilles—hence the two titles—is thought to have been based on sketches Watteau made of a young man known as “Vel.” The other figures in the painting also appear in the commedia dell’arte genre, including two lovers, and a captain.
Then there’s the figure on the left, hiding in the clown’s shadow. Referred to by some sources as a doctor, and by others as a grifter called Crispin— both familiar to 18th century European audiences, as he appeared as a Shakespearean character—he rides a donkey and looks directly at the viewer, smiling deviously.
Left, detail from Watteau’s Pierrot , known as Gilles; right: Louis Crepy after Antoine Watteau, Self Portrait of Antoine Watteau © National Library of France.
Though a secondary element of the composition, this shadowy character has temporarily taken center stage as restoration work on the painting— which involved removing its aged, dulling coat of yellow varnish—led to a surprising realization: that his face looks an awful lot like Watteau’s. If this is the case, how does it reinforce (or change) the image’s meaning?
Watteau was born in 1684 in Valenciennes, a French commune close to the modern-day border between France and Belgium. Growing up in the shadow of the Italian Renaissance, he was trained in the Baroque tradition, which is characterized by grandeur, drama, and emotional exuberance, but gradually moved towards the emerging Rococo style, which was like Baroque, but less dramatic, more decorative and colorful. And yet, the style is far from one-note.
Detail of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera (1717). Photo: Collection of the Louvre, Paris.
As art critic Jonathan Jones points out in a 2003 review of the painting written for The Guardian, Pierrot —or Gilles—has all the trappings of a typical Rococo painting: the flowing costumes, idyllic setting, and bright lighting that give off the impression of a nice summer picnic. But there’s also tension at this picnic: while all the other stock characters fulfil their predisposed roles, the eponymous clown “looks back at us: knowing, disillusioned, without a mask.”
Doctor or grifter, Watteau’s self-portrait remains in character, reinforcing the dissonance between ensemble and protagonist. Directing his devious smile at the viewer, he essentially repeats Jones’ point: that what we see on the stage is anything but authentic.
Pierrot is the center of an ongoing exhibit at the Louvre titled “A New Look at Watteau.” Running from October 16, 2024 until February 3, 2025, it’s part of a larger exhibition program titled “Figures of the Fool,” which looks at artists’ representation of one particular stock character: the jester. Spoiler alert: as in Pierrot, he’s not as happy as he seems. More

When Paul Gauguin’s Flowers and Fruit arrived at the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, in 1939, the then-fledgling institution had no idea what to do with it. The Haggin, after all, was founded as a historical museum, intended to preserve and showcase artifacts from the region’s early settlers. The donation by its patrons, Robert T. McKee and Eila Haggin McKee, of more than 180 European paintings, then, seemed beside the museum’s civic-minded mission—an afterthought. And though the works were put on view, they were treated as such.
That is, until 1957, when the sale of the French artist’s Still Life With Grapefruits (1901) in Paris realized $255,000. The remarkable sum was enough to warrant an item in the New York Times, which the Stockton Evening and Sunday Record duly picked up. “City Possesses Rare Gauguin,” the article trumpeted, before quoting the Haggin’s director, who said the sale “unquestionably enhanced the value” of its own Gauguin. The institution swiftly promoted Flowers and Fruit from its McKee memorial gallery to its front hall in a special display—newly recognized, per its director, as “perhaps the most costly painting in the museum’s collection.”
Flowers and Fruit to the right of the mantle in the McKee Gallery at Haggin Museum, 1939. Photo courtesy of Haggin Museum.
Today, the Haggin’s prized Gauguin has returned, after a spell in storage, to view in another special display. This time round, there was no sale enhancing the painting’s value; rather, in a stunning turn of events, the work has been excluded from the artist’s most recent catalogue raisonné, casting a shadow on its authenticity. Was the still life a Gauguin to begin with? And if it was, why is it no longer?
Those questions go to the heart of The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin, a new book by art historian Stephanie A. Brown, which occasioned the show. In her biography of the painting, Brown traces the canvas’s journey from Paris to California—through smoke-filled auction rooms, a collector’s ornate salon, and a well-networked gallery in London to become the first Gauguin to land in a West Coast institution. “At its core,” she wrote in her introduction, “this is the story of how one object, one stretched length of painted canvas, passed through the lives of different individuals over the course of a century.”
Paul Gauguin seated in front of one of his paintings, ca. 1895. Photo: Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
The undated Flowers and Fruit depicts two vases of roses—one cylindrical and pink, the other deep indigo and plump—sitting on an ochre-colored surface that is scattered with green and red apples. In its bottom-right corner is the inscription, “à l’ami Roy” (to my friend Roy), and the initials “P.G.”
The dedication provided Brown her first lead: Louis Roy, who was in Gauguin’s tight circle of friends and peers. Her deep research surfaces the enigmatic Roy, a painter and art teacher so obscure that historians believed his was merely a pen name or even a hoax. But his very real existence, as Brown found, was often intertwined with that of Gauguin’s: they notably collaborated on a set of prints based on the latter’s Noa Noa woodblocks in the 1890s. Roy was apparently also dear enough to Gauguin to merit the gift of a still life.
After Roy’s death in 1907 at age 44, his collection was dispersed via auction. Flowers and Fruit would pass through the renowned Hôtel Drouot—twice—and New York’s Reinhardt Galleries before ending up in the collection of the McKees. The couple’s purchase of the canvas in 1929, Brown wrote, was “the first in a chain of events that would make the painting disappear from the international art world.”
The McKees’ original receipt recording the purchase of Flowers and Fruit by Paul Gauguin. Photo courtesy of Haggin Museum.
Her use of the term “disappearing” is spot-on, for the painting wasn’t just taken off the art market with its acquisition, but placed in a museum that did nothing to advance its profile, before disappearing entirely from Gauguin’s official catalogue raisonné.
Here, the story’s undercurrent of cultural power comes into focus. The Haggin directors, Brown noted, networked almost exclusively within the Stockton community, per the museum’s focus. “There is no record of their working with art dealers or art historians to learn more about the museum’s collection,” she wrote. “Their work was about the community and about keeping the museum central to it.” Flowers and Fruit was never sent out on loan or included in any touring shows.
So, when Daniel Wildenstein and Raymond Cogniat were compiling their latest catalogue raisonné—rifling through auction records, exhibition catalogs, and other historical archives—they found close to nothing documenting the painting’s provenance, much less its ongoing existence. “They likely did not know that Stockton existed, any more than people in Stockton knew that the Wildenstein Gallery [in Paris] existed,” Brown wrote.
Of course, neither the exclusion of an object from a catalogue raisonné nor its disappearance from the art market negate its authenticity. But Brown is more concerned with how value is defined and determined by the art world, and how a painting’s journey between the realms of the market and museum could radically transform how it is appreciated.
Installation view of “The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin” at Haggin Museum. Photo courtesy of Haggin Museum.
The new exhibition at the Haggin also includes the results of recent scientific analysis on Flowers and Fruit, which did in fact find the canvas accords with what was used in France in the late 19th century. They are revealed alongside documents illustrating the painting’s trip from Paris (including the McKees’ purchase receipt) and prints of Gauguin’s similar still lifes.
The viewer is left to decide, according to the museum’s press release, “what constitutes authenticity.” More meaningfully, they are invited to observe a work suspended between realities, with an incomplete history, its disappearing act just the tip of its story. The canvas “continues to exist in limbo,” Brown noted. “It is at once rooted in its historical connections and adrift from its origins.”
“The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin” is on view at the Haggin Museum, 1201 N. Pershing Ave, Stockton, California, through April 6, 2025. More

“You make up your own mind what to think.” Hew Locke’s voice arrives like a whisper out of nowhere, emanating from speakers suspended throughout his new show at the British Museum in London. The invitation is generous, assuring visitors that they are not here for a scolding. Rather, Locke hopes to start a “conversation,” albeit one that the U.K. has been putting off for as long as possible.
Grand Union Flag and paintings on display at the Hew Locke exhibition at the British Museum. Photo by Simon Ackerman/WireImage.
The British-Guyanese artist hardly need rely on dogma to get his point across. “Hew Locke: what have we here?” lacks the kind of strict narrative structure imposed on most museum shows. Instead, Locke has selected items from the British Museum’s Africa, India, and Caribbean collections; choice loans, and his own artworks to create a dense web of suggestive associations. Beyond this, the objects are left to speak for themselves.
“The exhibition is a collection of little stories that tell something really big,” said Locke ahead of the show’s opening on October 17. “Sometimes the objects may be very tiny.”
This is the case of each brass manilla that were produced in Europe and then used in Africa to buy goods, including enslaved people. Huge quantities were produced in the English city of Birmingham, and in some cases they were smelted down by artists in Benin to produce the Benin Bronzes that would later be looted back to England.
Lower Niger Bronze Industries bells, (900-1500) at “Hew Locke: what have we here?” at the British Museum. Photo by Simon Ackerman/WireImage
One takeaway is that many objects with what Locke calls “messy histories” defy age-old classification systems. For example, the Asante jug was made in England in the 1390s but later it made its way to Africa where it was a highly venerated object in the Asante royal court. It was photographed there in 1884 but, soon after this, returned to England as colonial loot. It has since been shown in the European Medieval galleries.
Traditional display methods had forcefully flattened objects like this into one dimension, but in Locke’s open-plan exhibition concept they are free to exist across multiple overlapping contexts.
While Locke has avoided including depictions of violence against people of color, it is heavily implied throughout the show. A particularly stark example is two ornamental brass discs that were looted along with thousands more sacred treasures from Benin City during a massacre by the British in 1897. These battered objects still bear the scorch marks from fires that destroyed the palace.
“The watchers” figures perched on top of installations at “Hew Locke: what have we here?” at the British Museum. Photo by Simon Ackerman/WireImage.
Some of Locke’s trademark extravagance and flair is expressed by new sculptures known as The Watchers, vibrantly dressed figures who peer down at the viewer with curiosity, observing our reactions. The artist himself also addresses visitors with his own yellow labels displayed beside official museum texts.
“My comments are very different, it’s my voice, my way of speaking,” he said. “I would hope that it’s easier to understand.” In some cases, these additions are a provocation, as in the case where Locke describes wood sculptures that the government of Jamaica has requested be repatriated as “Jamaica’s Elgin Marbles.”
A North Carolina Algonquian werowance (leader) by John White. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Some exceptionally rare drawings from the late 16th century by John White record but also exoticize North Carolina Algonquian people and present the “New World” as a land of plenty that is ripe for exploitation. Locke has exemplified the real world consequences of this by staging the works alongside objects like a Akawaio feather headdress and a necklace containing seven stuffed hummingbirds.
He also weaves in his own biography, noting in the wall text how he once travelled out of Guyana on a steamer filled with caged macaws and parakeets being “shipped out for the exotic pet trade. Every morning somebody would go through the cages and toss out the dead birds.”
Silver-gilt dish set with gold pendant at the Hew Locke exhibition in The British Museum. (Photo by Simon Ackerman/WireImage)
Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Locke moved to Guyana at the age of five, just in time to see the country gain independence in 1966. Witnessing the formation of a national identity via a new flag and anthem instilled in Locke a keen interest in symbolism and its relationship to power. He returned to the U.K. to study in the 1980, the same year he began regularly visiting the British Museum.
“What it felt like then was, this is a big establishment institution and I’m small,” said Locke. “There’s no place for me in this. I can appreciate it but it’s not anything that I can partake in.” And in more recent years? “Then it became, well, this is my stuff. I’m paying taxes. I own this. I have a share in it along with everybody else. This stuff is part of my heritage.”
Locke was an obvious pick for the British Museum, in what is clearly an effort to address the longstanding controversies around its collection without making any major concessions.
Over the past few decades, the artist has become a hit with museum audiences for his glittering spectacles that draw us in before redirecting our attention towards Britain’s colonial past. In 2006, he dressed a bronze statue of the slave trader Edward Colston—yes, the one torn down during a BLM protest in Bristol in 2020—in golden cowrie shells, which were once exchanged for enslaved Africans.
Installation view of the “Entangled Pasts, 1768–now. Art, Colonialism and Change” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, showing Hew Locke, Armada (2017–19). Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. © Hew Locke. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024.
The floating fleet of ships in Locke’s Armada (2017-19) was the highlight of the Royal Academy’s “Entangled Pasts” exhibition. Each vessel represents a moment in history, from the Mayflower of 1620 to HMT Empire Windrush, bringing Caribbean passengers to Britain in 1948, and today’s cargo ships. Together, they capture the complex systems that underpin our globalized world. In 2022, two golden trophies for the Met’s Facade Commission invoked the violent ways in which many major museum collections are amassed.
Though Locke’s works inspire dialogue over straightforward judgement, the decision to invite him into the British Museum’s storerooms may still strike some as brave. How many more “messy histories” can the museum possibly want uncovered? Not least now it is being haunted by its more recent past.
“Fifteen years ago, people may have had a conversation about a show like this after a few bottles of Prosecco, then thought ‘forget that, it’s never happening’,” said Locke. “It is quite a bold thing.” Before accepting the offer, he had some reservations. “I said look, I’ve got opinions and a practice that I need to protect. You’ve got things you need to protect. Let’s see where we can meet.”
Hew Locke, Indra Khanna, & Isabel Seligman in the British Museum’s Prints & Drawings Study Room, 2024. Photograph © Richard Cannon.
He added that he and his partner, the curator Indra Khanna, greatly enjoyed the experience and received useful suggestions from museum staff. “We weren’t treated like terrifying people who came in to slash and burn,” he joked.
In the show’s epilogue, Locke wanted to acknowledge his own position in the establishment by presenting his Order of the British Empire (OBE) medal, which he wishes stood instead for “Order of British Excellence.” It is installed beside a cast replica of an Ife head, made by British Museum in the 1940s when the original was on loan from the Ife National Museum in Nigeria. “It may not be ‘real,’ but maybe that’s okay,” said Locke in an accompanying wall text. “Could replicas replace restituted objects in museums?”
It’s not the artist’s job to give us the answers but, in “What have we here?,” Locke encourages us to keep asking questions.
“Hew Locke: what have we here?” is on view at the British Museum in London through February 9, 2025. More