Eliana Willis

Artist Andres Serrano is no stranger to inciting controversy with his work—and his latest outing, “Infamous” at New York’s Fotografiska, is no exception. The exhibition includes a portrait of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, shot just months before the disgraced financier’s apparent suicide while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.
The portrait wasn’t initially taken for inclusion in the show, which focuses on a new series of photographers of racist memorabilia and other historic depictions of race that Serrano has purchased on eBay and other online auctions.
“After he died, I decided I had to put Jeffrey Epstein’s portrait in ‘Infamous’ because there’s no one more infamous than Jeffrey,” Serrano told Artnet News in a recent interview.
The portrait of a smiling, distinguished-looking Epstein speaks eloquently to one of the show’s core themes: the banality of evil and the rotten core at the heart of our nation, built on the backs of slave labor.
Andres Serrano, Infamous (Jeffrey Epstein), 2019⁣. Photo ©Andres Serrano, courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels.

Artifacts that Serrano purchased for “Infamous” include an 1822 bill of sale for a young boy name Joshua and a 1910 postcard with a photograph of a lynching. Days before the show’s opening, however, curators at Fotografiska made the decision to pull five of the most disturbing images from the show, including the lynching postcard.
As an artist who has made it his mission to provoke viewers, Serrano felt ambivalent about the move. “I was very surprised—it was unexpected,” Serrano said of the late-in-the-game change. “The times are changing and people, they’re cautious… I’m okay with that.”
(A Fotografiska spokesperson said the works’ removal was a curatorial decision based on wall space, cohesiveness of the show, and lack of further context on select images. “It was important to the museum that the images were properly contextualized,” the spokesperson said. “These decisions were not made to censor the work.”)
When the museum gave Serrano the opportunity to present the works on Instagram instead, where they could be proceeded by content warnings, he took it.
“America might think it’s lily-white and innocent, but it’s not,” Serrano said. “I love America, but let’s be clear about America. America was born of blood. It was founded with the blood of the Native American people who were murdered for their land.”
The Story Behind That Epstein Image
The show offers plenty in the way of haunting imagery, including the Epstein portrait, which comes with a stranger-than-fiction backstory. Serrano agreed to shoot Epstein’s photograph in exchange for a 16th-century statue of the Madonna.
Serrano, who collects Renaissance art, had tried to purchase the sculpture and a matching statue of St. John from an antique shop in 1995—only to learn that a man called Epstein had beaten him to the punch, splitting up the pair.
Andres Serrano wanted to buy this 16th-century Madonna statue in 1995, but Jeffrey Epstein beat him to it. The artist finally got the sculpture in 2018, in exchange for taking Epstein’s portrait. Photo courtesy of Andres Serrano.

Epstein soon learned that he owned a work of art Serrano coveted, and they met several times over the years to discuss it. (Serrano clarified these were business meetings attended by the artist’s wife, Irina Movmyga, and never involved dinner, parties, or Epstein’s infamous private jet or island.)
Fueled by an overwhelming desire to reunite the two religious statues, Serrano agreed in 2018 to a trade: Epstein’s portrait for the Madonna. The financier followed up—improbably, three months before his arrest in July 2019 and four months before his death—to secure his half of the deal.
“I have no doubt that Jeffrey Epstein was a monster and pedophile,” Serrano added. “I would have dealt with the the devil himself for that Madonna. And apparently, I did.”
Epstein’s portrait appears in the exhibition alongside a 2004 photograph of Donald Trump that artist shot for his “America” series, highlighting the president’s ties to the disgraced financier.
Andres Serrano, Donald Trump (2004). Photo courtesy of Galerie Nathalie Obadia.

Taking Inspiration From Donald Trump
“Infamous” grew out of Serrano’s last exhibition “The Game: All Things Trump,” featuring $200,000 worth of Trump memorabilia he purchased at auction. (A book about the project was released last month.) With everything from the flight manual for the short-lived Trump Shuttle to a tiny cake given as a favor at his wedding to Melania Trump, the installation speaks to Trump’s efforts to dominate the American consciousness—and his ultimate success.
“I liked to think that Donald Trump used the flag so much, he embraced America so much, that finally he made her his,” Serrano said. Focusing so closely on the president was far from a pleasant experience—aside from the rush from his auction victories.
“A second Trump term is a free-for-all—he’ll go for broke,” the artist said. “You’re not even going to recognize America.”
Andres Serrano, Black Dolls- Sandy, Vintage Rag Doll from the series “Infamous.” Photo ©Andres Serrano, courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels.

He has reservations—albeit much less dramatic ones—about Joe Biden, too. “Biden is a nice guy. He’s regular Joe,” Serrano said. “But I worry that Biden will be an appeaser who will try to go to the middle.” He is more excited about the potential vice president, Kamala Harris, who he photographed for the New Yorker.
Still, a potential Biden presidency would be far better for the country, he says—although less artistically fruitful. “I don’t think Biden inspires art,” Serrano said. “The thing about Donald Trump is if you hate him, he inspires you to do some anti-Trump work.”
Andres Serrano, Old Glory I–II, 1920’s American 48 Star Flag from the series “Infamous.” Photo ©Andres Serrano, courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels.

A onetime target of the Culture Wars, Serrano is concerned about the future of the US art scene, but doesn’t necessarily blame the president for the current state of affairs. He is more worried about artists and arts workers growing gun-shy of engaging with controversial subjects.
“What I fear is that a wave of self-censorship is going to occur,” he said. “I see it happening already with the [postponement of the] Philip Guston exhibition.”
An “Infamous” Follow-Up 
After throwing himself into Trump imagery, Serrano took a similar approach to an even more bracing subject for his latest series on view in “Infamous.” Many of the objects he photographed are overtly racist, designed for mass consumption such as advertising.
The project was completed last year, before the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests it sparked, which Serrano described as “an awareness and awakening that has been long overdue.”
Andres Serrano, The Perfect Song Featuring Amos N Andy, 1930s Music Sheet from the series “Infamous.” Photo ©Andres Serrano, courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels.

“Although we don’t have lynchings anymore, we do have killings of Black people by the police on a regular basis,” he said.
The objects in his photographs “basically had one intent, and that was to dehumanize Black and Brown people, to make fun of them and turn them into caricatures,” said Serrano.
He maintains it is important to see these images, and to realize how the attitudes that led to their creation still persist in some swaths of US society. To understand our current state of racial discord, we can’t look away from this ugly history.
Andres Serrano, Carnival Games-Chuck, Vintage Early 20s Century Board Game from the series “Infamous.” Photo ©Andres Serrano, courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels.

Indeed, even after delving into racist imagery for months on end and confronting the removal of his own work from his exhibition, Serrano isn’t sure if there’s ever a place for censorship in art. “That’s a tough question,” he said. “I don’t know where the line is, but that’s the reason that I’m an artist.”
“Andres Serrano: Infamous” is on view at Fotografiska, 281 Park Ave South, New York, October 23, 2020–March 14, 2021.
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As America faces down Election Day, many pundits see a real chance of a long and contested presidential election. Some battleground states could be very close, opening the possibility of Gore v. Bush–style court challenges à la the year 2000, meaning we may not know the results for days, or longer. Some see a real chance of a Supreme Court argument, in a court with three justices put in place by President Donald Trump.
But if you’ve been Google Image searching “the next American president” recently, hoping that the search-engine gods could tell you something even Nate Silver couldn’t, you might find that the winner will be… a vision board? Featuring owl stickers and foam roses and bits of wisdom printed on teabags?
Hmm, that can’t be right . . .
Gretchen Andrew, The Next American President (red) (2020).

Welcome to Next American President, an online art piece by Los Angeles–based artist Gretchen Andrew.
The self-styled “search engine artist and internet imperialist,” who studied information systems and is a veteran of Google and the financial software company Intuit, has commandeered the Google Image search results so that some of the first results you see will be just those hokey vision boards.
How did she do it?
She created a network of websites, including pages on sites like Eventbrite, Yelp, Quora, Soundcloud, and Twitter, loaded with web addresses and images and text that trick search engines into returning these images.
And rather than have them all return some image that could fool the viewer, she said, she loaded up the results with her own artworks.
“It’s important to me that when people see these works, they look wrong,” she said in a phone conversation. “I don’t want to confuse people, I want to confuse machines. I want people to be laughing at Google. If we can get both sides of the political spectrum laughing at big tech, that’s a good thing.”
Gretchen Andrew, The Next American President (white) (2020).

The last Gretchen Andrew project that effectively rickrolled Google was one that virtually placed her paintings in booths at the inaugural Frieze Los Angeles fair.
This time, she’s aiming for, well, a bigger tent.
With her new project, she brings together the philosophy of “the law of attraction,” which says that sending out positive energy into the universe returns positive results; and Internet search-engine optimization trickery, which says that if you load your websites with the right language, you’ll get clicks (and dollars).
In case you haven’t seen one at your aunt’s house, people use vision boards to collage their dreams and desires and to put the law of attraction into action, so it’s an obvious tool for Andrew to use for this piece.
“In this project, I’m the person who is praying, and God at the same time,” she said. “I pray for something and I bring it into being. It’s about the power of attraction and all that, but I make it so!”
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In the 17th century, hundreds of witch trials took place across the five Nordic countries of Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, resulting in scores of deaths and casting a pall over the region.
Witch hunts were drastically skewed along gender lines, and often once a woman in a family was accused of witchcraft, her female relatives were targets of persecution for generations. While the trials in Salem have been widely documented and recreated in popular culture for generations, the incidents of indigenous violence in the Nordic countries have been largely left out of the narrative.

Albrecht Dürer, De fire hekse (The Four Witches) 1497, Nürnberg.

A new show at Denmark’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg explores this haunting time in history with archival material dating from the 15th to 18th century presented alongside contemporary works, including seven new commissions. The exhibition features work by artists including Carmen Winant, Louise Bourgeois, Albrecht Durer, and La Vaughn Belle, tracking not just witchcraft, but the way that fear and hatred spreads throughout communities, a phenomenon that remains painfully relevant today.
“At a time of global unrest, as the politics of commemoration are in question,” the museum says in a statement, “‘Witch Hunt’ suggests the need to revisit seemingly distant histories and proposes new imaginaries for remembering and representation.”
“Witch Hunt” runs from November 7, 2020–January 17, 2021 at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark. See images from the show below:

Sandra Mujinga, Ghosting, (2019). Courtesy kuntsneren og Croy Nielsen, Wien.Photo: Jan Khür.

Carmen Winant, The neighbor, the friend, the lover, (2020). Courtesy the artist and Stene Projects, Stockholm.

Virginia Lee Montgomery, Water Witching, (2018). Courtesy the artist.

Aviva Silverman, We Have Decided Not to Die, (2019). Installation view at VEDA, Florence. Courtesy of the artist and VEDA, Florence. Photo: Flavio Pescatori.

Louise Bourgeois, C.O.Y.O.T.E. (1947-1949). Photo: Installation view of C.O.Y.O.T.E. in exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois: Alone and Together’ at Faurschou Copenhagen. Photo by Anders Sune Berg, © The Easton Foundation. © The Easton Foundation/VISDA.

La Vaughn Belle, strange gods before thee (2020), video still. Courtesy the artist.

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Right now in Madison Square Park, a section of golden scaffolding surrounds a massive sculpture of a torch. The torch’s abstracted flames are actually made from mannequin limbs painted blue and entwined around each other so that they point up toward the sky. The work, titled Light of Freedom (2020), is the creation of Abigail DeVille, a contemporary artist born and raised in the Bronx, whose practice centers on the shifting urban landscape of New York and on memorializing lives lost.
With Light of Freedom, DeVille remembers the earliest enslaved Africans who were brought to New Amsterdam, only to be lost again to a history that privileges other stories over theirs.
In an exclusive interview as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, DeVille traveled around Harlem with a pushcart filled with trash as she visited personal landmarks of the changing neighborhood.
The story of Harlem, she says in the video, “is just the natives being displaced up to this very moment. But, they helped shape the place into what it is now.” Those people, like her grandfather who was raised in a boarding house that now carries a six-figure price tag, are the subjects of the “invisible histories” she wants to acknowledge with her artistic interventions. 

Installation view, Abigail DeVille’s Light of Freedom (2020). Photo: Andy Romer Photography. Courtesy of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

“It feels like the earth is shifting,” she says as she places a sculptural cast of her own face at the site of her grandfather’s childhood home.
In the video, DeVille goes on to trek to a sandy strip of land at the base of the Willis Avenue bridge near 126th street, which is believed to be the site of an African burial ground. There, she unloads her cart filled with fabric, metal, toys, and other cast-off objects. “I was trying to invoke a human kind of presence,” she tells Art21, “I think of trash as a record of existence… these things were used by people. History is permeating everything, whether you know it or not.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series New York Close Up below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. Abigail DeVille’s “Light of Freedom” is on view at Madison Square Park through January 31, 2021.
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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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