Eliana Willis

A massive Philip Guston retrospective, “Philip Guston Now,” whose postponement sparked an uproar, will now be “Philip Guston in Two Years.” The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has confirmed the show will open in 2022, not 2024, as previously stated.
“Navigating the exhibition schedules of four institutions, amid a global pandemic, has been complicated, but we are glad to be able to share a new schedule for the tour of ‘Philip Guston Now’ beginning in 2022,” said NGA director Kaywin Feldman in a statement. “This additional time will allow us to slow down, get past COVID, and bring the gallery’s community together in person for challenging conversations that will help inform how we rethink the exhibition.”
The new timeline will see the show debut at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from May 1, 2022 to September 11, 2022. It will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from October 23, 2022 to January 15, 2023 and to the NGA from February 26, 2023 to August 27, 2023. The tour wraps up with an international stop at London’s Tate Modern from October 3, 2023 to February 4, 2024.
The four museums behind the show had announced last month that they would postpone the opening “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”
A visitor looks at the work Riding Around by Philip Guston in Hamburg, Germany in 2014. Photo by Bodo Marks/picture alliance via Getty Images.

News of the delay of the exhibition, which was initially supposed to open in early 2020 (before an earlier lockdown-induced postponement), sparked widespread outcry among artists, curators, and others who accused the organizers of self-censorship.
A petition demanding the show open without further delay attracted signatures from more than 2,600 art professionals, while one of the organizing curators, the Tate’s Mark Godfrey, was reportedly suspended over social media comments calling the decision “patronizing to viewers.”
In pushing back the show, the museums were particularly concerned—especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the US over the summer—about the reception of Guston’s paintings of members of the Ku Klux Klan, which show hooded figures going about their daily lives.
Philip Guston, Scared Stiff (1970), sold by Hauser & Wirth for $15 million at Art Basel in 2016. The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy of the estate and Hauser & Wirth.

“Making the decision to postpone this show was not, as some have claimed, the silencing of an artist,” said MFA Boston director Matthew Teitelbaum in a statement. “I wanted to take the extra time, at this unpredictable moment, to make sure that Guston’s voice not only was heard but that the intent of his message was fairly received.”
While Guston’s revolutionary visual language, fueled by his anti-racist beliefs, “was, and is, his inspiring achievement,” Teitelbaum added, “it became very clear to me that these images were being received by others in a far different light than the way in which I understood them. For some, the images were painful.”
The original show’s catalogue included texts commissioned from African American artists Glenn Ligon and Trenton Doyle Hancock, who incorporates Klan figures inspired by Guston’s work into his paintings. But organizers determined they needed more time—and a more diverse team—to contextualize the images further.
The revised exhibition will incorporate reflections from more contemporary artists on what these historic works mean to them. Historians and other experts will speak about Guston’s KKK paintings in video clips. Visitors, too, will be invited to share their reactions.
The institutions have not yet decided if any Black curators will be joining the exhibition’s currently all-white curatorial team, but Teitelbaum said there will be “more diverse voices contributing to the preparation of historical framing materials that allow us to appreciate the context in which Guston worked and achieved his vision.”
In a statement, Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer, who emphatically opposed the postponement, said she was “cautiously optimistic” about the new schedule and revised approach.
“I believe it is essential for the exhibition to contextualize the depth of my father’s social conscience, allowing the hooded figures and other imagery to reclaim their meaning, including but also moving beyond specific references to the Ku Klux Klan,” she said. “What we need now, as so many have pointed out, is to actually see Philip Guston’s paintings and drawings in all their complexity, without reductive characterizations.”
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By the length of her thick black hair, the artist and writer Zehra Doğan exudes pride as a Kurdish woman. She wears an elegant nose ring and henna under her lower lip, and speaks of her life and art in Turkish, the language of her oppressors. Her first solo show in Turkey, which recently opened, follows her release from three Turkish jails.
“I proved myself as an artist to the whole world, except for my country,” says Doğan, speaking from London on a video call. The exhibition’s title follows that thinking. “Not Approved” opened on October 9 at a small art space in Istanbul’s Pera district called Kiraathane24, a rare bastion for arts activism in Turkey, including for LGBTQ+ and refugee artists.
The show includes clothing and materials she snuck out of prisons in Mardin, Tarsus, and Diyarbakir, where she was jailed at different times between 2016 to 2019; the latter city of Diyarbakir is her hometown, a place Kurds know as the capital of Kurdistan. Throughout the exhibition’s four rooms, there is scrawled-over newsprint, found material, pieces of writing, as well as paintings, all which champion Kurdish feminism.
Yet her political status still overshadows her creative work. “When you Google the name Zehra Doğan, you always see the news that Zehra Doğan was arrested because of artworks,” says Seval Dakman, who co-curated the show with M. Wenda Koyuncu, both of whom identify as Kurdish. “But we don’t know the artworks of Zehra Doğan.”
Installation view. Courtesy Zehra Doğan.

An Imprisoned Artist
Doğan exemplifies the struggle of Kurdish youth who are caught between armed statelessness and cultural survival in the midst of Turkey’s increasingly violent conflict with Kurds, a battle that has been ongoing for decades, but which became more heated since 2015. The Kurdistan Workers Party has been dubbed by the Turkish government as a terrorist organization and many politically active Kurds have been imprisoned.
In 2017, Doğan was jailed for three years after being arrested the year before on terrorism charges for her news reporting, as well as for sharing on social media an image of a painting she made of a Kurdish village destroyed by the Turkish military.
It was while in prison, at age 25, that she finally learned to write in Kurdish, and much of the show in Istanbul features her handwriting in the language, whether on cloth or within the pages of a notebook. She writes about the harsh reality of bodily confinement and political silencing as a Kurdish woman.
Courtesy Zehra Doğan.

“I cannot say that my activism in my artwork is only about feminism or only about Kurdish political issues, or about human rights. I’m Kurdish. I’m also a feminist. These two things can not be separated from each other. This is my life,” says Doğan. “I always fight against patriarchy, and at the same time I have fought against them as a Kurdish woman.”
Her sentencing brought her international acclaim, particularly in the art world. Her work was on view at the most recent Berlin Biennial. In 2018, she was featured in a major public piece by the street artist Banksy expressing concern over her imprisonment. Others, including artist Ai Weiwei and the Memory Museum in Rojava, Kurdistan, have collaborated with Doğan.
Yet in Turkey, little is known of her work beyond the painting that led to her jailing. “My country hasn’t accepted me,” says the artist. “None of the galleries in Turkey invited me to exhibit, except for Kiraathane24. I wanted to prove myself as an artist in my country.”
Zehra Doğan’s Womanhood. Courtesy Zehra Doğan.

Difficult Memories
The show does not spare the hardships of Doğan’s jail time. There are sketches of tortured faces in ruddy, blacked paint on newspaper; elsewhere, a public phone is installed with calling cards and a note reading “the world’s shortest 10 minutes,” a nod to the Kurdish diaspora’s struggle to keep connected with one another through persecution. Beside the phone work, a piece titled Womanhood features a simple white dress, browned and sketched with big-eyed faces, outlined black and adorned with Kurdish-style earrings. She snuck it out of jail as dirty laundry.
“This comes from impossibilities,” says Dakman, who is also the owner of Carre D’Artistes Istanbul, a pro-democracy art gallery chain based in France. “She didn’t have the material for art in prison. She demanded it, but they called her work propaganda.” As a result, Doğan used what she could source: menstrual blood, hair, and clothes. “If you are always under oppression, you are always finding solutions,” the curator adds.
Zehra Doğan’s Pain of Shahmeran. Courtesy Zehra Doğan.

One piece in “Not Approved” recalls Kurdish mythology. The story of Shahmeran, a half woman and half snake, is sketched over Doğan’s Kurdish handwriting from her imprisonment in the touristic city of Mardin in a piece called Pain of Shahmeran. Doğan depicts the mythical figure as a contorted woman giving multiple births, her sad face recalling antique mosaic portraiture in Turkey’s southeast. Shahmeran is bound hand and feet by hair, donning the characteristic red shawl traditionally worn by Kurdish women. The figure recurs across several works in the show, sometimes obscured by hair and blood, elsewhere unashamedly menstruating.
“With my artworks I try to fight with my society—not only the Turkish government,” Doğan says. “I am fighting with patriarchy in Kurdish society. We have to fight with them as women.”
Since being released in 2019, Doğan remains subject to threats as an artist, a woman, and a Kurd. Despite her love for her homeland, Doğan says she is unable to return because of security concerns.
But that has not curbed her ability to reach out to young Kurds to encourage them to prioritize cultural activism in the midst of Kurdistan’s armed struggles. In November, she plans to perform at a conference on human rights at Geneva University with Ai Weiwei. Her time in jail will continue to haunt and inform her powerful art practice and her activism, she says: “I didn’t leave my way of being in prison. I am always adding something new and different to my life and art.”
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