Eliana Willis

A museum exhibition opening in the nation’s capital this summer explores the ways that Black artists use the century-old medium of collage to treat subjects ranging from national heritage to sexual orientation, from notions of beauty to fragmentation and reconstruction. 
“Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage” is billed as the first major museum exhibition devoted to contemporary collage and exploring the wide range of Black experience and identity in the U.S.
Paul Anthony Smith, The Tales of Tourism (2022-2023). Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, © Paul Anthony Smith.
Taking place at the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., it comprises more than 60 works by a multigenerational cohort of some 45 artists. The show was organized by the Frist Art Museum, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Derek Fordjour, Airborne Double (2022). Courtesy of the artist, David Kordansky Gallery, and Petzel Gallery. Photo: Daniel Greer. © Derek Fordjour.
“Multiplicity” includes a pantheon of stars including Sanford Biggers, Mark Bradford, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Lauren Halsey, Rashid Johnson, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Howardena Pindell, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, and Kara Walker. 
Lester Julian Merriweather, Moment (from #BetterGardensAndJungles) (2017). Courtesy of the artist, © Lester Julian Merriweather.
“Twenty-first-century collage is an arguably understudied and undervalued medium, especially in museum exhibitions,” explained Katie Delmez, senior curator at the Frist Art Museum and the exhibition’s curator. “‘Multiplicity’ is an opportunity to spotlight the formal complexity and vibrancy of the technique and to assert its contributions to the field through the lens of some of today’s leading artists.”
Kara Walker, Divining Rod (2007). Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., © Kara Walker.
Collage originated with French Cubists and German Dada artists a century ago, and the tradition has been taken up in innovative ways by African-American artists such as Romare Bearden, David C. Driskell, Jacob Lawrence, and Faith Ringgold. Some of the artists in “Multiplicity,” like Mutu and Deborah Roberts, principally work in collage, while it’s just a part of the practice of many of the others. 
Howardena Pindell, Untitled #3C (2009). Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, © Howardena Pindell.
“The exhibition asserts that collage parallels how identity is constructed with a multitude of elements that create a singular whole,” said Adrienne L. Childs, senior consulting curator at the Phillips Collection and organizing curator for the presentation in Washington. “The process of merging form and content aptly represents Black life. The artists create multifaceted works through the meaningful use of objects from their own lives that reflect their experiences and concerns.”
Lorna Simpson, 4 Walls (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, © Lorna Simpson.
A catalog further explores some of the ideas in the exhibition and includes essays by contributors such as UCLA African art assistant professor Tiffany Barber, Boston University art historian emerita Patricia Hills, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, and Duke University art historian Richard J. Powell.
“Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage” will be on view at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, D.C.m July 6–September 22.
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Amid the bustle of the Los Angeles International Airport, travelers can’t be faulted for missing an exhibition of works by the region’s most prominent artists. “Luminaries of Light & Space” celebrates the loose group of West Coast artists who, beginning in the 1960s, sought to expand perceptual experiences through light, color, and volume.
On view since 2022, the show features works by artists including Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Gisela Colón, Laddie John Dill, Fred Eversley, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, Hap Tivey, and DeWain Valentine. A singular highlight is Light + Shadow + Reflection + Color (#3 x 6’ D Four Fold) (2016), one of the last projects by the late Robert Irwin, an installation of his signature fluorescent lights.
Robert Irwin, Light + Shadow + Reflection + Color (#3 x 6’ D Four Fold) (2016). Photo: SKA Studios, LLC, courtesy of Los Angeles World Airports.
For Laura Whitcomb, who curated the show, LAX serves as a fitting venue for the show because of the ties between Light and Space artists and the aerospace industry. Eversley, Bell, Tivey, Dill, Colón, and Turrell were all children of chemists, physicists, and aerospace designers.
Peter Alexander, Pyramid (1969). Photo: SKA Studios, LLC, courtesy of Los Angeles World Airports.
“While the artists of the Light & Space Movement explored innovations of materiality forged by the aerospace industry in the 20th century, this installation extends the story of the movement into a new generation of creatives using sustainable materials and renewable energy,” reads the exhibition’s description.
Hap Tivey, Flame (2021). Photo: SKA Studios, LLC, courtesy of Los Angeles World Airports.
The show was scheduled to run through November 2025, but plans are underway to extend it ahead of the 2028 Olympics, set to be held in L.A. It’s the first cultural installment of “many” planned to enhance flying experience at LAX ahead of the Olympics.
In fact, at the center of the exhibition is a commission titled Torch by Hap Tivey, which already echoes the Olympic flame that traditionally opens every iteration of the games. Whitcomb called it the “stabilizing anchor” of the show, “signifying the center of a futuristic altar where all faiths come together through the language of geometry.”
Installation view of “Luminaries in Light and Space.” Photo: SKA Studios, LLC, courtesy of Los Angeles World Airports.
Investing in public art is a big boon for airports. In fact, in a document from the Airports Council International notes that such dedication to public art can be seeded by local ordinances requiring a certain percentage of construction budget to be dedicated to art.
According to Whitcomb, “millions of passengers” have already seen the works on view in the 60-foot-long installation, which is presented with an auditory component produced by Dublab called Orchestrina, featuring 30 L.A. composers.
“By presenting Light & Space on a global stage, the installation underscores Los Angeles’s commitment to showcasing local artistic achievements to a worldwide audience,” Whitcomb said.
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On a sweltering day at the end of June, the gallerist Stephen Markos stood in front of a rather arcane and eldritch patinated copper totem. A barely discernible African mask peered out from inside the faintly glowing, cloudy resin component that capped off its sarcophagus-like carcass.
Alex Locadia, I See You light object with jewelry box (1989). Photo: Luiz Corzo. Courtesy of Superhouse.
“He was one of the first artists to bring Afro-futurism into functional art furniture,” Markos said about Alex Locadia and his 1989 work I See You. The piece’s sepulchral qualities faded away when Markos unlatched and lowered the hidden frontispiece to reveal a compartment containing a time capsule of the era. Bargain bling (sourced from street vendors) hung from rusty nails: gold-plated fronts, sunglasses, and thick chains.
“If Blacks had come to this country as Europeans, with their culture intact, what would Black Modernism look like?” is the question the artist asked when describing this early period of his work. Part lamp, part jewelry box, the sculpture is a standout of the group exhibition “The Odd Couple: American Art Furniture 1980-Now.”
Detail of the interior of Alex Locadia’s I See You. Photo: Luiz Corzo. Courtesy of Superhouse.
The show runs until August 17 at Superhouse, the influential and quirky 6th-floor art-and-design gallery in New York’s Tribeca. It veers from austere to irreverent. Howard Meister’s black stained-wood Nocturnal Chair is imposing with its towering straight back. The late Dan Friedman’s 1989 crimson compartmented coffee table Red Car (Strategic Orbital Simulator) would have blended in well with the retro futuristic décor at Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Ficus Interfaith is a duo that specializes in terrazzo. One can dine atop trompe l’oeil billiards on their Pool Table.
An installation view of “The Odd Couple.” Photo: Luiz Corzo. Courtesy of Superhouse.
Pippa Garner seems to be everywhere these days with work in the Whitney Biennial and a recent White Columns solo outing. “She’s having a major renaissance!” Markos said. Garner’s rather dowdy standing lamp is ingeniously bisected. The upper component connected to the wall with an industrial rig and seemingly hovers ghost-like (with exposed wires) above its lower portion.
Howard Meister, Nocturnal Chair (1980) (L) and Pippa Garner, Lampoon (1982- 2021) (R). Photo: Luiz Corzo. Courtesy of Superhouse.
“These artists are playing with different levels of functionality,” said Markos, who also founded the gallery. He has an intimate connection with all of the artists and has shown them before.
“But I’ve never brought them together in quite this way,” he said. “Some of the historical work would be considered craft, or part of the studio craft movement. Other work would be considered functional art. Both groups showed at different galleries, but they didn’t really mix all that much, even though they were making at the same time—socially either. There was a divide between craft and art. I’m using ‘art furniture’ as an umbrella term to describe all of that material.”
James Hong, Tropic of Cancer dining table (1981). Photo: Luiz Corzo. Courtesy of Superhouse.
A commonality in the offerings is it’s hard to guess a piece’s provenance by sight. Everything looks like it’s from a different era, from ancient to slightly off-kilter from its decade. The transparent Zen of James Hong’s minimal glass dining table is grounded with marine elements. The Rhode Island-based artist Elizabeth Browning Jackson utilized industrial materials, such as automotive paints, vinyl, and fiberglass in her early work. Her amorphous 1986 cherry-red Crown of Thorns vanity has moveable angular components that match its metallic legs and hide various compartments. She fabricated it a local Newport surf shop. The piece’s confluence of vectors and construction techniques exemplify the theme of “The Odd Couple.”
Elizabeth Browning Jackson, Crown of Thorns vanity, stool, hand mirror, and comb (1986). Photo: Luiz Corzo. Courtesy of Superhouse.
“I wanted to bring together what has traditionally been these three separate pillars: craft, functional art, and contemporary design,” Markos said. “They’re always shown separately. There are these divides. I want to break that down. And I wanted to show how similar they really are. How the current work that artists are making right now really has a legacy of what was happening in the eighties and nineties.”

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Fashion. Textiles. Interior design. Printmaking. Mosaics. Painting. Sonia Delaunay did it all. An artist and entrepreneur born in 1885, she defied the expectations of her era to enjoy forge a successful 70-year career fueled by her bold, colorful abstractions.
“For Sonia, there was no distinction between the fine and the decorative, and I think that opened up huge possibilities for her,” Laura Microulis, the research curator at New York’s Bard Graduate Center, told me. “This almost insatiable quest to create kind of propelled her throughout her whole life.”
Today best known as one half of a duo with her husband, Robert Delaunay, the artist stands firmly on her own in “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art,” her solo show on view through this weekend at Bard’s Upper West Side galleries.
“For me, Sonia’s work represents just kind of pure joy,” Microulis, who co-curated the exhibition with Waleria Dorogova, said.
Sonia Delaunay, Mosaïque horizontale, executed by Maximilien Herzèle (1954), on view with works on paper by the artist in “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Photo by Da Ping Luo.
The Bard museum, with its focus on decorative arts and design, took a different approach to Delaunay’s work than previous exhibitions, focusing less on her virtuosic sense of color and form, and more on the diversity of her practice and breadth of her artistic output.
Born in the Russian empire, in what is present-day Ukraine, Delaunay left home at 18 to study art in Germany, before moving to Paris.
There, in 1907, she exhibited alongside the likes of Georges Braque, André Derain, and Pablo Picasso in her first art show. (She briefly married the dealer, Wilhelm Uhde, in a mutually beneficial arrangement that allowed her to rebuff her family’s desire that she move home to Russia, and helped disguise his homosexuality.)
In 1909, Delaunay met Robert. They were married by November 1910, and had a son, Charles, in January 1911.
Installation view of “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery with Robert Delaunay’s painting Madame Heim (1926–27) and felted wool cloche and matching silk scarf by Sonia Delaunay. Photo ©Bruce M. White.
The birth inspired Delaunay’s first experiments with non-figurative art, when she made Charles a baby blanket with scraps of fabric, in the style of Ukrainian peasants. Struck by the almost Cubist effect of the color composition, she and Robert began experimenting with abstraction.
The blanket isn’t on view, but the show opens with Delaunay’s “Simultaneous dress” or “Robe simultanée,” a patchwork 1913 gown that Microulis described as “the star object of the exhibition,” on view in the U.S. for the first time ever.
“The dress is super special. Sonia made it to promote what she was doing in terms of her painting at the time,” she said. “It’s basically an abstract painting that she wears.”
Sonia Delaunay, Robe simultanée (1913), on view with works on paper by the artist in “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Photo by Da Ping Luo.
The dress was designed to illustrate the couple’s new concept of Simultanism, or Simultané, which is based on the visual relationship colors have to one another viewed side by side. (The couple would trademark the term in 1925.)
“It’s really the idea that colors, when they’re surrounded by other colors, look different,” Microulis said. “Simultaneous contrasts actually produces an optical effect whereby the colors [seem to] vibrate. And there’s a rhythmic sort of dynamism that is produced as your eye goes across the canvas.”
This concept became the guiding force for Delaunay across mediums, applied to furniture, clothing, accessories, and bookmaking, and even to playing cards and automobiles. The Delaunays designed sets and costumes for ballets and she opened her first fashion and interior design business, Casa Sonia, in Madrid in 1918.
Installation view of “Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Photo ©Bruce M. White.
Putting together the exhibition was something of a challenge. Many key examples of Delaunay’s work were recently on loan for her 2022 show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen, and are too delicate to be displayed regularly.
But that gave Bard the opportunity to delve deeper into her oeuvre, showcasing lesser-known aspects of Delaunay’s career, such as the tapestries she made for the French state in the mid-1970s, just a few years before her death.
The sheer range of projects on view in the exhibition is nothing short of remarkable, painting Delaunay as an ahead-of-her-time multi-hyphenate. (When I told Microulis I thought she would be an influencer if she alive today, she said I wasn’t the first to jump to that conclusion.)
“Sonia had these very elaborate photo shoots with prominent photographers where she would dress in her clothing. All of those images would be sent out to to various press outlets,” Microulis said. “She was like her own press office.”
Sonia Delaunay in her studio at Boulevard Malesherbes (ca. 1925). Photo courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Robert died of cancer in 1941 at the age of 56, while Delaunay lived until 1979, age 94. She became the first living woman artist to have a solo show at the Louvre, in 1964, and remained remarkably productive even into her final years.
And Delaunay was mindful of her own legacy, compiling and exhaustive personal archive of letters, journals, and other materials documenting her remarkable life and many artistic accomplishments. A tireless self-promoter, Delaunay arranged to donate a large collection of her fabric samples and color cards—a selection of which are on view at Bard—to the Textile Arts Museum in Lyon, France.
“Sonia very deliberately wanted her textiles to become a part of the history of luxury silk production in Lyon,” Microulis said. “Given the strategic donations she made to French institutions later in her life, I think she knew on some level that her work and the work of her husband were going to be an important part of the history of art.”
“Sonia Delaunay: Living Art” is on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 18 West 86th Street, New York, New York, February 23–July 7, 2024.
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With sun-dappled landscapes and the azure allure of the Mediterranean, the French Riviera—also known as the Côte d’Azur—has seduced artists from Claude Monet to Pablo Picasso to Marc Chagall.
A new exhibition at Opera Gallery in Monaco celebrates artists’ lasting love affair with the Côte d’Azur. Under the patronage of Monaco’s Prince Albert II, the gallery will present the 35 modern and contemporary masterpieces in the new show “La Côte d’Azur, Terre d’Inspiration.”
Pablo Picasso, Personnage (Homme) (1970). Courtesy of Succession Picasso via Opera Gallery.
Beyond Picasso and Chagall, artists included in the lineup are Calder, Léger, Miró, Karel Appel, Fernando Botero, George Condo, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hartung, and Jean-Paul Riopelle. The gallery has also included some contemporary artists whose works have been “similarly energized” by the region.
Marc Chagall, Le peintre et sa vision des couples en rouge, bleu et vert (1981). Photo courtesy of Adagp, Paris via Opera Gallery.
The area around the French Riviera was simultaneously home to Chagall, Picasso, and an aging Henri Matisse for a span of a few years beginning around 1948. Even the famed Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon intermittently lived in Monaco, the sovereign city-state in the broader region of the French Riviera. More

When London’s V&A Museum announced in February that it was seeking a Taylor Swift superfan for an advisory role, it may have been burying the lead. 
Opening at the V&A South Kensington later this month will be “Taylor Swift | Songbook Trail,” a show centered on 16 outfits worn by the 14-time Grammy Award–winning musician. 
The show celebrates Swift’s lyrics and music videos in addition to her costumes, delving into the global Swift phenomenon. Also on view: instruments, music awards, storyboards, and previously unseen archival materials pertaining to her childhood and legacy. It stretches from her earliest styles, when she emerged as a country musician in 2007 clad in cowboy boots, to the jet-black ruffled-shoulder dress she sports in the video for the single “Fortnight,” from her latest album, Tortured Poets Department. 
“We are delighted to be able to display a range of iconic looks worn by Taylor Swift at the V&A this summer,” said Kate Bailey, senior curator for theater and performance. “Each [celebrates] a chapter in the artist’s musical journey. Taylor Swift’s songs like objects tell stories, often drawing from art, history, and literature. We hope this theatrical trail across the museum will inspire curious visitors to discover more about the performer, her creativity, and V&A objects.” 
A still from the music video for “Willow” (2020) by Taylor Swift. Photo courtesy TAS Rights Management.
Leading through the museum’s collection galleries, the “trail” will juxtapose Taylor’s looks with spaces and objects from the museum’s holdings. 
Designed by award-winning designer Tom Piper, the show anticipates Swift’s triumphant return to London’s Wembley Stadium for a five-night stand with opening act Paramore on August 15. 
The V&A is only the latest museum to seek to juice attendance with a Swift show. The Stone Harbor Museum in New Jersey has just opened a showcase of Swift memorabilia, including photos of a young Swift and her family vacationing at the bayside borough. Last year, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design devoted an entire floor of its facility to a show devoted to the pop star. 
“Taylor Swift | Songbook Trail” will be on view at the V&A Kensington, Cromwell Rd, London, the U.K., July 27–September 8, 2024.

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