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    in Exhibitions

    Why the Curators of the Gwangju Biennial Are Quarantining for Weeks (and Working Overtime) to Mount a Show Almost No One Can Visit

    Angelo Plessas was doing plank pose in the narrow space between the foot of his bed and the hotel wall. Several of his quilted sculptures were spread out beneath him to soften the hard floor. Hotel staff dropped off warm meals several times a day.
    “It is sort of like a residency,” the Greek artist told me over a WhatsApp call on day seven of his 14-day quarantine in an 18-square-meter room in Seoul. (The artist had been uploading the footage to Instagram as a kind of performative ritual.) Following his stay, Plessas planned to head to a sacred mountain to meet the South Korean shaman Dodam, with whom he is collaborating for the 13th Gwangju Biennial.
    Production still from John Gerrard Mirror Pavilion: Leaf Work (Derrigimlagh) (2019). Courtesy of the artist.

    It’s not exactly how Plessas imagined he would return to South Korea after an initial trip there in late 2019. Back then, a large group of international artists, shepherded by artistic directors Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala, went on a series of site visits ahead of the esteemed exhibition—Asia’s largest and oldest. At the time, the virus was perhaps already somewhere in the world, but it was nowhere near their imaginations.
    Since then, Gwangju’s organizers have had to delay, adapt, rethink, and rework to accommodate a constantly shifting public-health situation. After two postponements, the biennial is preparing, finally, to open on April 1. (South Korea has been praised for its response to the pandemic; its most recent seven-day case count came in at under 500.)
    Yet the opening will look very different from the buzzy biennials of previous years. Of the 69 participating artists (who are responsible for 41 new commissions), only four individuals—including a two-person collective—were able to travel to South Korea to install their works in situ. 
    Natasha Ginwala (R) and Defne Ayas (L). Photo: Victoria Tomaschko.

    The challenges posed by the lockdown era have rushed the biennial circuit into a future that many were already discussing. Had the daring, female-led show in South Korea intended to be a spectacle reminiscent of biennials past, it likely would have been rendered moot by the pandemic.  
    But neither Ayas nor Ginwala wanted to continue with “this machine of biennials,” as Ayas put it. Instead, they sought to offer an antidote to it, by exploring spirituality, resistance, and community healing. The events of 2020 gave those themes a new sense of urgency.
    “We were ready to debunk the biennial format and stretch it, but we did not know we would be stretching it this much,” Ayas said with a laugh from her own room a few floors above Plessas. “The cracks we were looking into just got deeper.”
    Video still from Theo Eshetu’s, Ghostdance (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

    Hive Mind
    The biennial, titled “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning,” comes at a moment when loss, grief, and separation are globally felt. And so the duo has gravitated toward two seemingly disparate themes: shamanism, a dominant form of spirituality in South Korea, and technology. A form of cosmic gravitas pulses through the exhibition’s preamble of essays, talks, and online programming.
    The surreality of the enterprise was clear from conversations with a number of participants who traveled to Gwangju for the opening. All were performance artists whose works could not be presented remotely. Plessas, who came from Athens, shared his hotel wall with Canadian conceptual artist Judy Radul. They would see each other for brief moments when they picked up their food in the hall.
    The show’s co-curator Defne Ayas, meanwhile, was in her room on video calls with Ginwala, who was already on the ground helping to install the show. It will be set across four locations over a now-shortened four weeks: a historic theater, a sacred mountain, a classical biennial hall, and the Gwangju National Museum. One could consider the Internet the fifth, unplanned venue.
    Still from Judy Radul’s Good Night Vision (2013). Courtesy the artist.

    Artists in Quarantine
    For the artists who did travel to Gwangju, the mandated pause was surprisingly welcome. “There is something special about stopping just before you make an artwork and waiting for two weeks, having the time to just keep thinking about it,” Radul said. 
    Ahead of the trip, she worked closely with two South Korean musicians on her eerily prescient commission. With help from Gina Hwang, who plays a geomungo (a plucked guitar-like instrument), and Hannah Kim (who plays the more percussive janggu drum and gong), Radul created a psychedelic, folkloric soundscape that she plans to record live inside a historic theater. 
    To film it, she long ago decided to use heat-tracking cameras—a medium she began exploring in 2013—that will record the heat imprints created by the musicians. Another camera will be pointed at the audience, should there be one come April. There is, of course, a certain irony to preparing this work in a world where free movement is contingent upon body temperature. (Radul was having her temperature taken at the hotel every few hours.)
    “Proximity, touching, creating sound in a room together—all of this has shifted,” she said. “The questions around biennials, where we just drop in and drop out, have been posed for years now. It does make you wonder what you will do for art. We are finding out right now what artists actually bring to a scenario when they show up or don’t show up.”
    ∞OS Session, 2019, V.A.C. Foundation, photo: Marco Franceschin.

    Participation in the show has been challenging even for artists who could not show up in person. Korakrit Arunanondchai’s new video, Songs for Dying, reflects on his own losses this past year, including the death of his grandfather. It pairs footage drawn from pro-democracy protests in Thailand (where Arunanondchai moved from New York at the beginning of the pandemic) and the 1948 Jeju Island massacre in South Korea with the minutiae that comes from witnessing the death of a loved one. His incisive editing—moving between surrealism, the news cycle, and a very personal narrative—feels fluid and familiar after the past year.
    The artist directed the South Korea portion of the video—which captures a shaman conducting a ritual for the dead on Jeju Island—remotely after it became clear he would be unable to travel. “It was hard,” he said. “I work with hidden narratives to begin with. And often, the thing that pulls you in is not what you can find on the internet.” (The film’s second chapter, Songs for the Living, will be shown at the Migros Museum in Zurich in September.)
    Video still from Korakrit Arunanondchai, Songs for Dying (2021). Courtesy the artist

    The Future Forum
    While the biennial plays an important role in the region—it was created to process and memorialize the Gwangju Uprising in 1980—attendance will necessarily be limited. Then, there is the so-called art world to consider. The traveling band of curators, writers, collectors, and art dealers that would normally attend will also be in absentia. Even the participating curators and artists will have packed up and left.
    That’s where the fifth venue, the online forum, comes in. Artists have generously shared their processes and created new online commissions. The catalogue chronicles a year-long conversation that was once meant for Gwangju, but which has now become more global. 
    Ayas spoke of a “mad loyalty” that the artists and curators have for one another and for the project. All that matters, she says, is that it “installs itself” in people’s minds in some important way. “Small is beautiful, and more meaningful,” she added. 
    Emo de Medeiros, Kaleta/Kaleta (2016). Courtesy of theartist.

    Her conviction begs the question: how much did we really see of these massive shows when we were running around previews trying to take it all in? Perhaps the slow and virtual drip of “Spirits Rising, Minds Tuning” offers a teachable moment. Maybe we do not need to see the whole in order to be touched by a part. 
    “This biennial was prophetic, in a way, because it was predicting the penetration of the virtual and this post-human feeling of virtuality,” Plessas said from his hotel room. “It will be interesting to see how it will be remembered.”

    The 13th Gwangju Biennale is on view from April 1 to May 9.
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    in Exhibitions

    A New Exhibition at David Zwirner Explores the Vital Similarities Between Two Titans of Modernism: Josef Albers and Giorgi Morandi

    In these turbulent times, creativity and empathy are more necessary than ever to bridge divides and find solutions. Artnet News’s Art and Empathy Project is an ongoing investigation into how the art world can help enhance emotional intelligence, drawing insights and inspiration from creatives, thought leaders, and great works of art. 

    “Albers and Morandi: Never Finished”at David Zwirner, New Yorkthrough April 3
    What the gallery says: “Both [Josef] Albers and [Giorgio] Morandi are best known for their decades-long elaborations of singular motifs: From 1950 until his death in 1976, Albers employed his nested square format to experiment with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects, while Morandi, in his intimate still lifes and occasional landscapes, engaged viewers’ perceptual understanding and memory of everyday objects and spaces.
    ‘Albers and Morandi: Never Finished’ will put each artist’s distinctive treatment of color, shape, form, morphology, and seriality in dialogue. Looking specifically at the stunning palettes of Morandi’s celebrated tabletop still lifes depicting humble vessels and vases and Albers’s seminal ‘Homage to the Square’ series, the exhibition will elucidate how the two artists’ careful daily acts of duration and devotion allowed each to highlight the essence of color and the endless possibilities of their respective visual motifs.”
    Why it’s worth a look: Albers and Morandi, contemporaries born two years apart, diverged in many ways. While Albers focused, especially at the end of his life, on a proto-postmodern exploration of relationships, stressing that all things are affected by their context, Morandi brooded over still lifes and landscapes, somehow managing to capture the anxieties of the 20th century in seemingly quiet forms.
    Both artists were concerned with color especially, and each one used it as a structuring and restricting element: Albers in his sometimes brash juxtapositions of blocks of pigment, Morandi in his more subtle, often monochrome palette. This show reveals the underlying mechanics that drove the artists in their differing yet crucially overlapping pursuits. Beyond that, the exhibition also reveals the emotional intelligence of two artists who figured out ways to be enormously emotive without using expressive marks.
    How it can be used as an empathy workout: Both artists believed in cultivating observational powers to better understand the world around them. As Morandi once noted: “One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding, it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.” And for Albers, the interactions between a work’s materials allowed the development of what he called “visual empathy.”
    “Respect the other material, or color—or your neighbor,” he told his students.
    Make sure to take time to look at each work carefully, noticing how the artists captured light, shadow, and their objects’ relationships to the spaces in which they sit. A sense of lonely beauty runs through Morandi’s 1947 work Fiora, for example, while Albers’s 1954 Study to Homage to the Square captures a kinetic kind of energy in bright, warm-toned hues.
    What it looks like: 
    Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (Still Life) (1957). © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Courtesy David Zwirner.

    Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (Still Life) (1953). © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Courtesy David Zwirner.

    Giorgio Morandi, Fiori (Flowers) (1947). © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Courtesy David Zwirner.

    Josef Albers, Study to Homage to the Square (1973). © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.

    Josef Albers, Study to Homage to the Square (1973). © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.

    Josef Albers, Study to Homage to the Square (1973). © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.

    Josef Albers, Study to Homage to the Square (1954). © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.

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    in Exhibitions

    ‘They Come Back as Ghosts to Haunt Western Museums’: Watch Artist Michael Rakowitz Recreate Looted Artifacts to Give Them New Life

    One of the defining moments of Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’s career happened when he was just 10 years old.
    “I remember my mother bringing us to the British Museum in London,” Rakowitz recounts in an exclusive new interview with Art21. She led him to the Assyrian galleries and pointed out a relief depicting the lion hunt of Ashurbanipal.
    “What is this doing here?” she asked.
    That was when Rakowitz began to understand that museums are not always neutral repositories for artifacts, but can also be tombs for objects that colonizers wrested from their homes and the people who created them.
    The artist has since attempted to replicate the thousands of cultural artifacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq—a project which he acknowledges may be impossible to complete—as part of an ongoing series titled “The invisible enemy should not exist.”
    One of the works, the bas-relief Room F, section 1, Northwest Palace of Nimrud (2020), is made from Middle Eastern food wrappers that the artist used as papier-mache to recreate a wall relief from a palace in Mosul that was destroyed by ISIS in 2015.
    “I started to think about what it would mean for those artifacts to come back as ghosts to haunt Western museums,” Rakowitz says in the interview, which is part of Art21’s Extended Play series, adding that since he began the project in 2006, scores more cultural sites, like the Mosul palace, have been decimated by ISIS and other extremist groups. 
    Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Michael Rakowitz: Haunting the West.” © Art21, Inc. 2021.

    Rakowitz often dresses his “ghosts” in the contemporary guise of imported food. “If a ghost is going to properly haunt,” he says in the video, “it has to appear differently than the entity appeared when it was living.”
    At Hamilton College’s Wellin Museum, the artist was commissioned to recreate another of the palace’s chambers: Room H, which was originally a reception area filled with steles, sculptures, and reliefs. In the 19th century, many of those objects were shipped out of Iraq to institutions like the British Museum, the Louvre, and even the Wellin Museum itself. In Rakowitz’s reproduction, only the objects that were still in situ when ISIS destroyed the palace in 2015 are replicated, haunting the very kind of Western museum that now houses the objects of his own past.

    Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s Extended Play series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Michael Rakowitz: Nimrud” is on view at the Wellin Museum through June 18, 2021. [embedded content]
    This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org

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    in Exhibitions

    Meow Wolf Has Opened an Interactive Surrealist Supermarket in Las Vegas With Projects From Hundreds of Artist Collaborators

    Today marks the opening of Omega Mart, Meow Wolf’s long-awaited Las Vegas follow-up to its wildly popular Santa Fe immersive art installation the House of Eternal Return, which helped kickstart the art world’s experience economy.
    “It’s really up to you to write your own story,” Emily Montoya, one of Meow Wolf’s co-founders and Omega Mart’s creative director, told Artnet News during a robot-led Zoom tour of the 52,000-square-foot space. Montoya recommends a two-hour stay, probably more than one: “You can’t really see everything on your first—visit multiple trips are encouraged to get the full thing.”
    The main attraction at Area 15, a retail and entertainment complex that opened off the Vegas strip last summer, Omega Mart bills itself as “America’s Most Exceptional Grocery Store.”
    At first glance, guests might mistake the exhibition’s entrance for a normal supermarket, with its shelves lined with ordinary comestibles. But a closer look reveals that they are stocked with more than 100 custom-made products, each more bizarre than the last, including “Who Told You This Was Butter?” air freshener, “Nut-Free Salted Peanuts,” and “Plausible Deniability Laundry Detergent.”
    Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

    “They’re all real and you can buy all of them,” Montoya said.
    And if one ventures over to the store’s “Frosty Drinkables” section for a cold beverage, you’ll step inside a refrigerator—almost as if passing through the wardrobe to Narnia—and reemerge in the otherworldly “Projected Desert.” Slip behind the lockers in the store’s employee break room, and you’ll find the futuristic headquarters of Dramcorp, the fictional corporate giant that runs the store.
    “Omega Mart is a subsidiary of the cyber-spiritual corporation Dramcorp, which is innovating technologies to revolutionize the supply chain,” Montoya explained. “These technologies have opened up portals which serve as the gateway from Omega Mart into other worlds.”
    Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

    The vaguely threatening nature of Dramcorp implies a critique of consumer culture. It appears to be lacing its products with an addictive “Additive S” ingredient, derived from a mysterious fount of energy called “the Source,” located in the bowels of the factory.
    Guests are welcome to tease out the details of this mythology if they like, or they can stick to posing with the Instagram-friendly displays for photos.
    “Our goal is to create an environment to let people come in and have their own interpretation,” Montoya said. “Our intent is to portray  a very nuanced and rich narrative that sprawls across multiple parallel dimensions of reality.”
    Those realities include 60 different environments spread throughout four thematic sections, all set to a soundtrack featuring Brian Eno, Santigold, and Beach House. More than 325 artists and other collaborators contributed 250 unique projects.
    A double helix slide at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.

    The experiential attractions include three massive slides for guests to ride. A sled outfitted with spray guns that release a sanitizing mist is sent down after each rider as part of health precautions, which also include timed tickets at 25 percent capacity and mandatory masks and temperature checks.
    The Las Vegas opening is a big step for Meow Wolf, which, since its founding in 2008, has evolved from a scrappy art collective to a multimillion-dollar operation backed by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. Omega Mart is the first new site to open in a planned series of expansions in Denver, Phoenix, and Washington, DC.
    But the company’s explosive growth has been threatened over the past year. In April, citing the pandemic’s “devastating economic impact,” more than half of Meow Wolf’s staff was laid off or furloughed. The Santa Fe flagship, which had been attracting 500,000  visitors annually, remains shuttered due to health regulations.
    There have also been rumblings of discontent among staff. Some announced an intent to unionize in September. Those efforts, Montoya said, “are still in talks and it’s still progressing, but that’s all I can really say.”
    See more photos of Omega Mart below.

    [embedded content]

    Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

    Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

    The Juke Temple at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

    The Projected Desert at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

    A desert environment at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.

    “Deli meats” that look like famous paintings at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.

    A worm character at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

    Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

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    in Street Art

    Stop Motion Sequence by Ludo in Paris, France

    French artist Ludo is back with a new murals in Paris. Using oversized pasters and green paint, Ludo once again created a series of his hybrid creatures. On this stop motion sequence, it features Ludo’s favorite character together with his iconic skulls.

    b-sm = none; sm > 728×90;
    b-sm = 300×250; sm > none;

    Through his work, Ludo aims to reveal the opposites that cohabit our world, often taking unlikely pairings to absurd lengths. These dualities are reconciled by the artist through the creation of hybrid organisms.
    He is based in Paris, but his work has been also seen in London, Berlin, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Bangkok, Shanghai, Hong Kong and even in Vatican City.
    Take a look below for a few more images while we wait to hear more from Ludo in the coming weeks. More

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    in Exhibitions

    In a Disturbing and Exceptional New Survey, the American Folk Art Museum Is Defining a New Genre: Outsider Photography

    It’s been more than 70 years since Jean Dubuffet introduced the idea of Art Brut, and the art world is still learning to embrace the genre of art made outside of more industry-approved avenues of production. Now, there’s another evolution of the genus to consider: Photo Brut. 
    So posits a new exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. The largest survey ever to consider photographic art emerging from outside the mainstream art world—and often outside society itself—it may be the best photo show you see all year. 
    “Photo Brut,” as the exhibition is titled, brings together some 400 works culled from the unparalleled collection of French filmmaker Bruno Decharme, as well as the museum’s own holdings. In includes works by 40 artists, many unknown, who found in photography a space to reconstruct their lived realities into new worlds. (A larger version of the show was staged at the Rencontres d’Arles summer photo festival in 2019.)
    In defining the genre, curator Valérie Rousseau, who co-organized the show, recalls the words of art historian Michel Thévoz, who previously oversaw the Dubuffet-founded Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne: These artists “use the camera to play against type, by making their daily life an unreality or making their chimeras hyperreal,” Thévoz once said. “They use photography in spite of or beyond its presumptive objectivity, to imbue fantasy with the stamp of realism or, inversely, to sublimate an ordinary subject.”
    For these artists, Rousseau explains, “art making and the way they are living on a daily basis is fused; art is not a separate activity.” 
    Morton Bartlett, Untitled (Girl Reading) (2006). (Original c. 1955.) Photo courtesy of the Bartlett Project, LLC. © The Bartlett Project, LLC.

    The work of Morton Bartlett, one of the best known artists in the exhibition, is a helpful entry to the subject. From 1936 to ’63, Bartlett meticulously fabricated a series of lifelike plaster dolls, all styled as young girls and boys, and photographed them in tableaux alternately sweet and sexual, pure and prurient—in a way that recalls Balthus’s Thérèse paintings.
    A freelance photographer and graphic designer by trade, Bartlett was clearly aware of the camera’s capacity for world creation. His work was undeniably artistic in its craft and concept, but whether or not it was intended for an audience beyond himself is unclear. His biography also invites a psychological reading of the work: He was adopted at the age of eight after both of his parents died.
    Similar points could be made for nearly all of the artists in the show. They operated from a place of marginality, made work with little intention to show it, and, with few exceptions, experienced a great deal of trauma in their life. (The show, to its credit, focuses less on this latter point than does its catalogue, which was produced for the 2019 exhibition in Arles and never passes up the opportunity to mention possessive parents, abandonment, developmental disabilities, or homelessness.)  
    Many turned to the camera to capture performance, transformation, or role play. Czech artist Lubos Plny, whose work was included in the 57th Venice Biennale, used it to document extreme physical acts, such as sewing his head to his arm. Meanwhile, Japanese artist Ichiwo Sugino, now in his mid-50s, uses tape, markers, and other crude tools to mold his face to look like famous figures—Keith Haring, Jack Nicholson,  Louis Armstrong—then photographs the results for his Instagram. The ingenuity on display in Sugino’s pictures is remarkable. He currently has just over 1,000 followers. 
    Miroslav Tichý, Untitled (between 1960 and 1995). Courtesy of AFAM.

    These two artists have found an outlet for their creations, but the same can’t be said for many of the artists in the show. Czech artist Miroslav Tichy, for instance, who made his own low-quality cameras to surreptitiously photograph women in public places, resisted showing his work even as curators took a liking to it late in his life. He lived on the streets while his apartment sat packed with prints, most degraded to the point of abstraction—an apt complement to his lascivious gaze. 
    Tichy’s work, and other examples in the show like it, raises the question, should we be looking at this art? Rousseau, for her part, has a positive take on the subject.
    “When I see these works in isolation, it can be raw or tough or crude; it can be a painful experience. But also I see a transformation,” she says. “I see a way that they have shaped their own trauma while building a reality that is absolutely positive and absolutely constructive. Everybody can look to these examples as inspirations, as… a desire to connect with people that are real around them.”
    Artist unidentified, known as Zorro, Untitled (c. 1940). Courtesy of AFAM.

    “Photo Brut” is on view through June 6, 2021 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
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    in Exhibitions

    A Bold New Show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland Calls Out the Institution’s Own ‘Consistent Anti-Black Practices’

    The Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland is magnifying and aiming to rectify its own “anti-Black practices” in an exhibition that opens this week.
    “Imagine Otherwise,” organized by LaTanya Autry, a curator-in-residence and co-organizer of the Museums Are Not Neutral advocacy group, takes place at MoCA and two Black-led Cleveland spaces, Third Space Action Lab and the Museum of Creative Human Art (MOCHA). On the roster are four artists: Imani Dennison, Amber N. Ford, Shikeith (who goes by one name), and Antwoine Washington, who is also MOCHA’s co-founder.
    Remarkably, the museum’s own description of the show points an accusing finger at itself.
    “Autry envisions possibilities beyond MoCA Cleveland’s consistent anti-Black practices by partnering with Black-led and centered organizations that regularly care for Black residents and others while challenged with far smaller budgets than many area white-led and centered arts institutions,” says the webpage devoted to the show.
    It will be a “limited, yet hopefully, significant prodding for an authentic, community-led institutional reckoning of MoCA Cleveland.”
    The Cleveland art world, Autry told Artnet News in a phone interview, is like “an apartheid system in a Black city. It’s outrageous. White institutions have multimillion-dollar budgets, and there are Black-led organizations that have zero dollars.” Her work, she explained, was a way of sharing the wealth.
    The show owes its inspiration to Christina Sharpe’s acclaimed 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.
    “I read her book a couple of years ago and thought right away I’d like to do an exhibition exploring the ideas in the book,” Autry said. “Though the show ended up changing with Covid, I love what we did because I ended up thinking more deeply about what Sharpe calls ‘wake work’ in terms of the curatorial practice.”
    Shikeith, still waters run deep (2021). Courtesy the artist.

    Shikeith’s art forms the core of the exhibition’s concept, and gets the largest gallery, for an installation dealing with “Black queer re-making” as a sacred space. Dennison will show a film shot in Johannesburg presenting an Afro-Futurist vision.
    Ford’s photographic work, meanwhile, expresses “the vast geography of Black ways of being,” and Washington will show an installation that uses sculptural table settings to comment on the promised, but not always delivered, “seat at the table” offered to Black people in America.
    The exhibition comes during a nationwide reckoning in which art museums are being called to account for their histories, including being led and staffed overwhelmingly by white people and neglecting the work of Black artists. Autry herself is the first on-staff Black curator organizing exhibitions in the history of the institution. (There was previously a Black curator of public programs, Deidre McPherson).
    MoCA occupies a prominent place in that very reckoning. In June, very shortly after the police killing of George Floyd ignited protests worldwide, it emerged that the museum had canceled an exhibition of works that depicted police brutality by the Afro-Latin artist Shaun Leonardo.
    The museum indicated that some Black staff and Black community members had opposed the show, and Samaria Rice, whose 12-year-old son Tamir was killed by police in Cleveland in 2014, sent Leonardo a cease-and-desist letter demanding he not show drawings of Tamir. The current presentation of the show, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, does not include those images.
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    in Exhibitions

    In Lieu of Mardi Gras Parades, Artists Are Turning New Orleans Homes Into Wildly Creative ‘House Floats’—See Images Here

    The pandemic can’t stop the party in New Orleans, where residents have transformed their homes into stationary Mardi Gras floats to help adapt the city’s traditional pre-Lenten celebrations for the age of social distancing.
    Last year’s festivities were among the nation’s first superspreader events, so there are no parades this year. Instead, in the interest of public health, Carnival has become a drive-through affair, with homes festooned with beads and all manner of decorations.
    “We’re doing this. Turn your house into a float and throw all the beads from your attic at your neighbors walking by,” wrote Megan Joy Boudreaux on Twitter on November 17, the day that the city called off Mardi Gras 2021. What began as a joke was soon formalized, with Nola residents planning for the unconventional take on the holiday season on the Krewe of House Floats Facebook group.
    The result is a stunning city-wide display of more than 3,000 homes decorated in the great traditions of American folk art.

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    A crowdfunded “Hire a Mardi Gras Artist” initiative helped employ out-of-work artists to create 11 house floats, and commissioned work for two more homes and seven businesses, reports local CBS affiliate 4WWL. Each display costs about $10,000.
    “We normally don’t do Mardi Gras stuff, but because the whole city wants Mardi Gras décor for their homes, we jumped right in,” Coco Darrow, of the local Stronghold Studios, told 4WWL. “Before the Krewe of House Floats, we had nothing. There were no jobs for months and we were barely surviving.”
    “This was definitely the turnaround we needed,” Rene Pierre of local float company Crescent City Artists told the Denver Channel. The business is thriving after decorating 64 homes.
    “Gustav Klimt” Mardi Gras house float, 1819 S. White Street. Photo by Laura Hettinger.

    Many house floats have been inspired by local traditions and classic Mardi Grad imagery. There’s also a house for the late musician Prince at 3804 Banks Street, and one for Dolly Parton at the Scriptura stationery store on 5423 Magazine Street. It features an Andy Warhol-style portrait of the country singer, who helped fund much-needed vaccine research.
    When Parton learned of the tribute, she sent a massive trove of her merchandise for the shop to hand out to visitors, reports the Times-Picayune.
    Meanwhile, there’s a Lego-themed house at 418-420 Eliza Street, Algiers, that looks to “Lego” the trials of the past year, and a tribute to the late Alex Trebek in the form of a giant Jeopardy! game board on the facade of 2371 Chippewa Street.

    Other memorable designs include the Little Shop of 2020 Horrors, which features murder hornets, a toilet paper shortage, and Audrey the man-eating plant at 430 Bounty Street, Algiers.
    “I took a sculpture class from a local float maker,” homeowner Cori Haines told local ABC affiliate WGNO. “2020 was a dumpster fire, so let’s just throw all the elements from it in and have fun with it.”
    Our favorite so far, however, is definitely the Gustav Klimt design at 1819 S. White Street, featuring a giant recreation of his masterpiece The Kiss.
    The final day of Mardi Gras is February 16, or Fat Tuesday, and a map of the city’s house floats can be found here.
    See more house floats below.
    A Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    The Scriptura stationery store on 5423 Magazine Street has been transformed into a Dolly Parton-theme house float for Mardi Gras. Photo courtesy of Scriptura.

    A motif in honor of Dolly Parton on a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    A transformed into a Jeopardy!-themed house float for Mardi Gras. Photo by Erin Whitely.

    The Bird House, a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    The Krewe of Muses Cosmos House is decorated with the nine Muses for a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    A Mardi Gras house float decorated to honor Prince in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.]

    A Mardi Gras house float decorated to honor Dr. Seuss and Dr. Fauci in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.]

    A Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans titled “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved Bayou.” Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    A Mardi Gras house float with a dinosaur in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    A Mardi Gras house float at 5438 Chartres Street, New Orleans. Photo courtesy of the Krew of House Floats.

    The King Cake Baby house, created by Royal Artists, a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    The Krewe d’Etat house, created by Royal Artists, a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    View of Mondo Kaya Feng Shui, whose decorations are sponsored by Krewe of Red Beans, a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    An absinthe fairy decorates a home in the Bywater, one of the Mardi Gras house floats in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    The Queen’s Jubilee House, whose decorations are sponsored by Krewe of Red Beans. It’s one of the Mardi Gras house floats in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    Goin Down Da Bayou house, a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    A Total Renovation Mardi Gras house float with decorations sponsored by Krewe of Red Beans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

    The Birds of Bulbancha House, whose decorations are sponsored by the Krewe of Red Beans, honors indigenous birds of Louisiana. It is one of this year’s Mardi Gras house floats in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

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