Eliana Willis

After a year making its way across the country, “The Great Elephant Migration” has reached its final destination, touching down in Beverly Hills in Los Angeles County.
The environmentally minded public art show, which has traveled 5,000 miles, features 100 life-size elephants crafted by Indigenous artisans of the Coexistence Collective, in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in south India—most of which are portraits of actual elephants who live there. (A couple of African elephants from the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya have also snuck into the parade.)
Each piece is made from lantana camara, an invasive weed that has proliferated across India, sculpted onto a steel rebar frame. The project removes the lantana camara and converts what isn’t used for the art into a fertilizing product called biochar. That means the project is actively working to improve elephant habitats, while also raising money for 22 conservation non-governmental organizations, or NGOs.
The elephant artworks have been for sale along the route, with the artisan collective crafting new versions of each of the purchased pieces to prevent the thinning of the herd. With works priced between $8,000 for the babies (five feet tall) and $22,000 for a 15-foot-tall adult male with tusks, sales have totaled over $3 million to date.
“The Great Elephant Migration” in Beverly Hills. Photo: by Alex Berliner.
A Cross Country Trek Concludes
The hit public art show has been on the move since last July, when the herd appeared on the seaside cliffs of Newport, R.I.
It’s made for quite the nationwide spectacle in every stop on its expedition west: taking to the cobblestone streets of New York’s Meatpacking District; the sands of Miami Beach during Art Basel; the green lawns of Houston’s Hermann Park; overlooking the majestic Grand Tetons at Jackson Hole’s National Museum of Wildlife Art; and along the Rocky Mountain Front in Browning, Montana.
“The Great Elephant Migration” in Jackson Hole, in front of the Grand Tetons. Photo by Ami Vitale)
The trip’s last stop is Beverly Gardens Park, across from the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts—fitting, as the center’s namesake is also funding the new Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a vegetated overpass designed to help animals safely cross the city’s 101 freeway.
First designed in 2015, the nearly one-acre bridge—the largest in the world—is being constructed by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and is expected to open next year. There won’t be any real elephants crossing, but species who use it are expected to include mountain lions, bobcats, gray foxes, coyotes, and mule deer.
“The Great Elephant Migration” traversing the Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. Photo: courtesy of Caltrans.
Art transportation is an expensive and complicated proposition even on the best of days—like when you’re not moving 100 full-scale elephants—and the organizers knew they wanted to stage the show in the most environmentally friendly way possible. So the elephants made the trip down the East Coast and cross country to California via a fleet of electric trucks.
In a festive touch that doubled as nod to the artworks’ origins, the trucks were decorated with traditional Indian lorry art.
“The Great Elephant Migration” arriving in Beverly Hills on an electric truck decorated with traditional Indian lorry art. Photo: by Elisa Ferrari.
The Woman Behind the Stampede
“The Great Elephant Migration” is a project with an impressive scale, dreamed up by Ruth Ganesh as part of her work fighting to protect Asian elephants as a trustee of the U.K. NGO Elephant Family. She founded the Real Elephant Collective nonprofit, which oversees the artisan collective, with scientist and elephant researcher Tarsh Thekaekara, whose wife, Shubhra Nayar, designed each individualized sculpture.
The artists actually live in harmony with the elephants they are representing in these artworks—a message Ganesh hopes has resonated with audiences as the sculptures have made their way across the country.
Ruth Ganesh with one of the sculptures of “The Great Elephant Migration.” Photo: by Vince Bucci.
“It is a symbolic journey on behalf of all wildlife that is currently navigating a very human-dominated world—crossing roads, navigating train tracks, agricultural plantations, and towns and cities,” Ganesh told the Beverly Press.
The project was originally launched overseas, at India’s Kochi Biennale in 2019. Other international outings followed in London in 2021, and at the Lalbagh Botanical Garden in Bangalore, India, in 2024. But to bring the herd to the U.S., Ganesh enlisted Dodie Kazanjian, founder of Rhode Island nonprofit Art and Newport, as the curator.
A child with one of the sculptures of “The Great Elephant Migration.” Photo: by Vince Bucci.
What’s With the Blankets?
There’s an added fundraising element in the exhibition’s final stop, with an auction on Artsy of 70 bespoke blankets created by both high-fashion designers and Indigenous communities around the world. The initiative is called “Wrapped in History,” and was unveiled in a ceremony draping the blankets over the herd upon its arrival in California. The protective gesture is deeply rooted in tradition.÷
“In many cultures around the world, we honor wisdom and genius, if you will, with blankets,” Cristina Mormorunni, co-founder and director of conservationist group Indigenous Led, told the Beverly Hills Courier. “This blanketing ceremony is really special because it’s bringing together Indigenous artistry and culture and ceremony with some of the most incredible fashion houses on the planet.”
“Wrapped in History,” an installation of textile art at “The Great Elephant Migration.” Photo: byVictor Arriola for BFA.
Indian designer Vikram Goyal curated the selection of blankets, including contributing a work of his own that translates his favored technique, hammered repoussé metalwork, into textile form. The piece is based on one of his gilded wall sculptures, which was in turn inspired by a 17th-century Rajput manuscript called The Book of Dreams that features traditional Indian symbols of elephants, according to Vogue.
“Blankets are vessels of protection, identity, and story,” Goyal, said in a statement. “In this context, each one becomes a monumental gesture, a way of honoring the past while materially supporting a more compassionate, interdependent future.”
“The Great Elephant Migration” make its journey by electric truck. Photo: by Kirsten Glover.
Some of the other blankets are by Ralph Lauren, Diane von Furstenberg, the Navajo Nation, and the Chanakya School of Craft, a nonprofit that teaches traditional embroidery techniques to women in India. The online “Wrapped in History” benefit auction runs July 1 through August 1.
“The Great Elephant Migration” is on view at Beverly Gardens Park, 9439 Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California, July 1–August 1, 2025.  More

Times Square is about to get a sugar rush. Yvette Mayorga, the artist best known for her pink-hued, frosted confections, is unveiling her largest public artwork at the New York plaza—one that’s equal parts dreamy fairy tale and pointed social critique.
Come October, you won’t miss the maximalist Magic Grasshopper. The 30-feet sculpture is anchored by a pink Baroque carriage, its wheels tricked out with gold rims, being drawn by four carousel horses sporting Hello Kitty backpacks. A flag wearing a smiley face is planted on top of the vehicle. As with any Mayorga creation, the devil’s in the details: the work’s surfaces bear her elaborate faux frosting, created by piping acrylic through pastry bags.
For the Chicago-based artist, the sculpture mirrors the sheer scale and spectacle of New York’s hottest tourist destination. It’s a site of “overwhelming visual opulence, abundance, and commercial fantasy,” she told me, as much as a “transit space for everyday New Yorkers.”
“I want Magic Grasshopper to function at both of those levels: to catch the eye of a tourist with its scale and excess, but also to offer a moment of recognition, curiosity, or even joy for someone just passing by,” she said over email.
But Magic Grasshopper demands even closer inspection. A child of Mexican immigrants, Mayorga has long woven the Latinx experience with 18th-century Rococo aesthetics into a visual style she’s dubbed “Latinxcoco.” It’s a meeting that draws out colonial histories and invisible, often feminized, labor. Her signature piped frosting, for one, calls back to the labor of her mother, who worked as a baker in a departmental store in the 1970s after moving to the U.S.
Yvette Mayorga, The Procession (After 17th Century Vanitas) In loving memory of MM (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
Mayorga’s horse-drawn carriage, then, invokes more than one kind of journey—not just one undertaken by fairy-tale princesses, but by immigrants in pursuit of the American Dream. Its low-sitting wheels nod to the low-rider culture that emerged from Chicago’s Mexican-American communities, while its body carried painted depictions of migration. Not for nothing does Mayorga describe the work as “both a time machine and a dream machine.”
The design of the coach itself also echoes the royal carriage of the Second Mexican Empire, which was modeled Louis XIV’s coronation coach and is currently housed at the Chapultepec Castle in Mexico. The Nahuatl word for Chapultepec, chapoltepēc, which translates to “hill of the grasshopper,” gives Mayorga’s sculpture its title.
“I reimagine that history as a form of futurist Indigenous resistance,” she explained, “and a pink carriage as a fantastical, border-crossing vessel.”
Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
Bubblegum pink, fantasy, dreams, and other flights of fancy, in fact, have been apt channels for Mayorga to unpack deeper meanings and themes. She describes them as “powerful tools,” appealing on the surface yet layered below.
“Everyone can identify beauty; it’s universal. I use that to create a seductive, sugar-coated invitation into a much deeper conversation,” she said. “Beneath the excess is always a story—one about beauty, survival, joy, migration, and memory. It’s about making space for those stories in places where they’re not always told.”
The work marks the newest commission from Times Square Arts, which has previously invited the likes of Thomas J Price, Laurie Simmons, and Marco Brambilla to leave their mark on the crossroads of the world. Mayorga’s mesmerizing entry, said the organization’s director Jean Cooney, isn’t just made for the place, but for the present.
Laurie Simmons’ Autofiction: Moving Pictures, Waiting and Looking Up. Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy of Times Square Arts.
“Her work is so well-positioned for public consumption—an alluring sugary exterior and a tactility that immediately draws people in, as well as an unending depth and complexity for those who are willing to peel back the layers,” she told me over email. “The themes of immigration and colonial histories that Mayorga addresses in Magic Grasshopper have an enduring relevance, but are incredibly timely for this specific moment.”
Indeed, at a time when anti-immigration policies are roiling the country, Mayorga hopes migrants viewing the installation might see “a monument made with them in mind.”
“And for those who don’t share that experience, I hope Magic Grasshopper still opens a door into a layered narrative,” she said. “In a space like Times Square, where spectacle is the norm, I wanted to create a different kind of spectacle—one grounded in care, imagination, and power.”
“Yvette Mayorga: Magic Grasshopper” is on view October 15–December 2, 2025 at Times Square, Broadway Plaza between West 46th and 47th Streets, New York City. More

This century’s latest digital and generative tools have opened frontiers for artists, ushering in novel mediums and methods, while fast-tracking the rise of algorithmic art. But, as a new show is arguing, code-based creations have roots way back, long before the advent of the digital age.
At Toledo Museum of Art, “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms” is retracing the history of code-based art, exploring how the geometric abstraction and rule-based systems of the early 1960s have made way for the generative code and digital methodologies of today. The 24 artists featured here span time periods, but their practices collectively reveal how computational strategies could shape creative expression. Their gathering here raises a new question: what does it mean to make art in the age of automation?
“Generative art has risen to prominence in recent years thanks, in part, to innovations introduced by blockchain technologies as well as generative A.I.,” said curator Julia Kaganskiy in a statement. “This exhibition considers the long lineage of generative and algorithmic strategies in art-making, as well as the shifting definition of generative practice and how artists work with rules, chance, emergence, and automation.”
Quayola, Jardins d’Été (2017). Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art.
In subject, “Infinite Images” joins past landmark shows such as “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018” at the Whitney Museum of American Art and “Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that explore how artists use systems and technology to challenge creativity. The Toledo Museum’s outing, though, widens the scope to highlight how the blockchain and generative systems have minted new approaches.
The exhibition opens on the 1960s, when pioneers of conceptual and abstract artists were venturing art by way of systems. Sol LeWitt was embarking on an instruction-based approach to his wall drawings (what we today might call “prompts”); Josef Albers was implementing rules for his color-rich paintings of squares; and Vera Molnár was producing her first computer artworks with an analog algorithmic process and a plotter. The exhibition brings together some of their significant rules-guided works—from Molnár intricate generative series “Interruptions” (1968–69) to an example of LeWitt’s printed instructions from 1977.
Entangled Others, Sediment Nodes #1 (2022–23). Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art.
The bulk of “Infinite Images” is given to the explosion of creativity in the digital age. Generative, on-chain art dominates, represented by Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks (2017) and Autoglyphs (2019), Snowfro‘s Chromie Squiggles (2020), and Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers (2021). But the show also spotlights how randomness and chance, simulation and interactivity are playing roles in contemporary art practices. Cases in point: 0xDEAFBEEF‘s Glitchbox (2021/2025), an audiovisual sculpture that can be “played” according to set parameters and Sarah Meyohas‘s Infinite Petals (2019), which intersects natural and manmade systems.
Notably, the exhibition marks the institutional debut of a number of digital creatives, among them Operator, the artist duo that’s been lending a conceptual lens to the blockchain, and Emily Xie, whose generative artworks have reimagined traditional crafts.
Operator, from the series “Human Unreadable” (2022). Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art.
A number of these digital pieces are emerging from the collection of Alan Howard, the hedge fund manager who—besides owning a $43 million Monet that once belonged to Imelda Marcos—began amassing generative artworks during the NFT boom. To him, these digital works represent a “natural evolution” of artistic expression: where creatives once wielded oils and paintbrushes, they now have new media to hand.
“Digital art continues this lineage, not in competition with traditional media, but in dialogue with it,” he noted in a statement. “This exhibition serves as an opportunity to experience firsthand how digital art resonates within the broader continuum of artistic expression.”
“Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms” is on view at the Toledo Museum of Art, 2445 Monroe Street, Toledo, Ohio, July 12–November 30. More

New York’s Upstate Art Weekend has grown in leaps and bounds since its founding by Helen Toomer in 2020. The sixth edition, running July 17 through July 21, features 158 participating art organizations—up from just 23 that first year—scattered across the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley. It’s also the perfect excuse to escape the city and see some art this weekend. You can tour the offering via Google Maps, but we’ve also put together a list of the shows we’re most excited about. Enjoy!

“Kishio Suga” at Dia BeaconOpening July 19
Kishio Suga installing Out of Multiple Surroundings (1988) at Kaneko Art G1, Tokyo, 1988. Courtesy of Dia Beacon.
Dia Beacon branches out from Minimalism to the related Mono-ha (School of Things) movement, with this solo show of one of its leading practitioners, Japanese sculptor and installation artist Kishio Suga. The 81-year-old artist called his works—made with industrial materials such as motor oil, concrete, and paraffin wax—“situations.” Unlike traditional sculptures, these were often ephemeral arrangements, with a precarious and unstable nature. The exhibition features four major pieces from the Dia collection, as well as significant loans. —S.C.
Dia Beacon is located at 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, N.Y.

“Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!” at Storm King Art CenterMay7–November 10
Sonia Gomes, Ó Abre Alas! (2025) at Storm King Art Center. Photo: Jacob Vitale. Courtesy of Storm King Art Center.
Afro-Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes’s Ó Abre Alas! (Or Open Your Wings!) is her first outdoor installation in the U.S., in which sculptures crafted from durable materials like paracord, fishing nets, and nautical ropes hang from a massive tree. The brightly hued materials recall a Carnival parade, a site of celebration. “My work has a lot to do with nature, with trees, with the movement of trunks, with branches,” said the artist. “I like that my work has this conversation with nature.” In the galleries, a selection of works spans her career. —B.B.
Storm King is located at 1 Museum Road, New Windsor, N.Y. 

“Presence” at UpbringingJune 6–July 21
“Presence” at Upbringing. Photo: Jurate Veceraite. Courtesy of Upbringing.
Serving as the headquarters of this week’s Upstate Art Weekend is Toomer’s new project space, which she describes not as a gallery but “a place to raise ideas.” (It’s hosting a Friday-night dance party upstairs.) The summer exhibition features seven women artists—Zoë Buckman, Tamar Ettun, Qiana Mestrich, Cheryl Mukherji, Rebecca Reeve, Keisha Scarville, and the great Nona Faustine, who died suddenly in March—with works dealing with themes of nostalgia, motherhood, and ancestry. —S.C.
Upbringing is located at 236 Wall Street, Room 103, Kingston, N.Y.

“Tomokazu Matsuyama: Morning Sun” at the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study CenterJune 20–October 5
Installation view of “Tomokazu Matsuyama: Morning Sun” at the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center, 2025. Courtesy of Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center.
Tomokazu Matsuyama’s joyously colored works, layered with a sense of stillness and solitude, make him a compelling artist to pay tribute Hopper, the master of the isolated figure. Here, Hopper’s 1952 masterpiece Morning Sun takes the spotlight, as does Matsuyama’s meditative response, titled Morning Sun Dance, a large, densely detailed painting that captures a contemporary form of introspection. Process drawings and smaller paintings included in the show further show how the Japanese artist has engaged with Hopper’s treatment of light, space, and figuration—a quality, said Matsuyama, that “continues to influence my own thinking about isolation as well as my approach to painting.” —M.C.
The Edward Hopper House is located at 82 North Broadway, Nyack, N.Y.

“On Trees: Georgia O’Keeffe and Thomas Cole” at the Thomas Cole National Historic SiteJune 21–December 14
Georgia O’Keeffe, Dead Tree Bar Lake Taos (1929). Courtesy of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site.
More than a century separates Thomas Cole and Georgia O’Keeffe’s careers, but, as this exhibition argues, their practices blossomed on similar ground. Specifically, they imbued their paintings of trees and natural forms with deep, allegorical meaning. The show is anchored by two key paintings: Cole’s Hunters in a Landscape (1824–25), created after his transformative visit to the Catskills in 1825, and O’Keeffe’s Dead Tree Bear Lake Taos (1929), painted upon her first visit to New Mexico. Set in dialogue, the works on view—including other paintings and drawings by Cole—surface intriguing parallels between how the Hudson River School icon and 20th-century modernist regarded and reflected nature. (The museum is also hosting an exhibition featuring Cole’s daughter, the little-known china painter Emily Cole.) —M.C.
The Thomas Cole National Historic Site is located at 218 Spring Street, Catskill, N.Y.

“What’s Missing” at the Olana State Historic SiteJune 14–November 2
Ellen Harvey, Winter in the Summer House (2025). Courtesy of Ellen Harvey studio.
The historic home of Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church hosts immersive, site-specific works by New York artists Ellen Harvey and Gabriela Salazar that reflect on history, loss, ice, and climate change. Church himself famously sailed to treacherous waters to observe icebergs and paint them; those works partly inspired Harvey and Salazar’s new projects, as did some mysterious structures from the artist’s son’s blueprint for the estate. Harvey’s Winter in the Summer House reimagines Church’s long-lost summer house, with her own engraved panels of a glacial landscape, while Salazar’s A Measure of Comfort (Cake and Cord) explores humankind’s relationship with ice in a warming world. —B.B.
Olana is located at 5720 NY-9G, Hudson, N.Y.

“So It Goes” at Wassaic ProjectsMay 17–September 13
Rosabel Rosalind, Tabernacle (2025). Photo: Josh Simpson. Courtesy Wassaic Project.
This show’s title echoes a refrain from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five to study the ways we cope with recurring horrors—a slumber from which some 43 artists hope to arouse us. John Brendan Guinan shows sculptures inspired by his Catholic anarchist upbringing. Yomi Orimoloye’s portraits explore the gulf between our identities and our identifying documents. Saberah Malik’s tapestries show aerial views of megafloods in Pakistan in 2022. Rosabel Rosalind depicts the San Fernando Valley as the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. May we all wake up. —B.B.
Wassaic Projects is located at 37 Furnace Bank Road, Wassaic, N.Y.

“General Conditions” at the School: Jack Shainman GalleryMay 17–November 29
Installation view of “General Conditions” at The School | Jack Shainman Gallery. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio. Courtesy of the artists and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
A group show at Jack Shainman’s Kinderhook outpost sees more than two dozen artists reflecting on the current social and political climate, and how we respond—both collectively and as individuals. The concept of general conditions, as noted by exhibition artist Alisa Tenser, “resonates on multiple registers, all sinister but vague.” But there’s more than one way of approaching both general crises and conditions, as the artists in the show demonstrate. They include El Anatsui, Diedrick Brackens, Jesse Krimes, Gordon Parks, Rose B. Simpson, Becky Suss, and Elizabeth Zvonar. —E.K.
The School is located at 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, N.Y.

“Stan Douglas: Ghostlight” at the Hessell Museum of Art at Bard CollegeJune 21–November 30
Stan Douglas, Horschamps (1992). © Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner
This marks the first survey of multimedia artist Stan Douglas in the U.S. in over two decades and will trace his influence and innovation across 40 works from the 1990s to the present. It will include the premiere of an immersive, multi-channel video installation that revisits D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation with a selection of works that explore issues ranging from colonialism in the Americas and the legacies of transatlantic slavery, to modern movements for liberation in Africa and Europe. Douglas’s deep research provides an a comprehensive view of the present, helping us understand the moments of breakdown and chaos that attend societies in upheaval. —E.K.
The Hessell Museum is located at 33 Garden Rd, Annandale-On-Hudson, N.Y.

“Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy” at Art OmiJune 28–October 26
Installation view of “Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy” at Art Omi, Ghent, New York. Photo: Olympia Shannon.
Art Omi, the 120-acre sculpture and architecture park located in Ghent, N.Y., is hosting a exhibition dedicated to the work of Harold Stevenson at its Newmark Gallery. This marks the first institutional solo show in New York for the artist, covering four decades of his exploration of the human body in paintings, drawings and writing. Stevenson’s embrace of the male nude, in the pre-Stonewall era no less, led to challenges including a 1962 jail sentence for his gallerist Iris Clert and, in 1963, removal of one of his works from New York’s Guggenheim Museum. —E.K.
Art Omi is located at 1405 County Route 22, Ghent, N.Y.

“Arlene Schechet” at Catskill Art SpaceJuly 5–August 23
Arlene Shechet, Portal (2023). ©Arlene Shechet.
Hot off her major presentation at Storm King Art Center, sculptor Arlene Shechet is turning inward for this new show. On view here are intimate creations that bear out her explorations of material and geometry, her otherworldly forms—crafted with diverse elements such as clay, wood, and steel—surfacing a complex interiority. Wall works will be joined by her new series, “Pleat Seats,” made up of carved marble seating originally developed for Storm King, as well as her rarely exhibited textiles. The sculptor has even recreated a wall of her studio with plywood and shelving housing various wood and ceramic objects, making visible her intuitive approach to sketching in three dimensions. —M.C.
Catskill Art Space is located at 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, N.Y.

“Repair” at Shadow WallsJuly 17–27
Portia Munson, Redstart. Courtesy of the artist.
Artist Anna Cone founded Shadow Walls last year, with the goal of revitalizing an old family resort, Eva’s Farm, as a bed-and-breakfast and artist residency. Anne-Laure Lemaitre has curated an intriguing, experimental group show for the space’s second Upstate Art Weekend outing, with works by artists including Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Kat Chamberlin, Raul De Nieves, Joiri Minaya, and Portia Munson installed both in the property’s stately Victorian home, and across the grounds. —S.C.
Shadow Walls is located at 413 Silver Spur Road West, Purling, N.Y.

“Maria Lai. A Journey to America” at Magazzino Italian ArtNovember 15, 2024–July 21, 2025
“Maria Lai. A Journey to America” at Magazzino Italian Art. Photo: Marco Anelli/Tommaso Sacconi. ©Archivio Maria Lai, by SIAE 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Collectors and Magazzino cofounders Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu have long been champions of Maria Lai, an under-sung Italian artist known for incorporating the weaving traditions of her native Sardinia into her practice. Her first North American museum show ranges from early paintings to three-dimensional “Telai” or “loom” works to documentation of her pioneering relational art projects exploring the relationships between people and nature through interactive performances. —S.C.
Magazzino is located at 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, N.Y.  More

Brace yourselves for sold-out tickets and hyped-up merch—KAWS is heading to the Bronx, with the New York Botanical Garden announcing a transformation of its 250-acre landscape in 2027.
Initial details of the takeover are slight, but it isn’t hard to imagine how KAWS, aka Brian Donnelly, might work his giant sculptures into the garden. Picture Companion floating on a pond, BFF lurking inside the Victorian-era glasshouse, or Chum lounging on an open lawn. The unnamed exhibition promises to be big, loud, and draw legions of fans devoted to the KAWS universe to the Bronx.
In terms of scale and target audience, the KAWS takeover picks up on 2021’s “Cosmic Infinity,” which saw the star Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama arrange her mirrored orbs, polka dot characters, and hypnotic yellow-and-black pumpkins throughout the botanical garden. The six-month show drew around 845,000 visitors, making it one of the best-attended in NYBG’s history.
Yayoi Kusama, I Want to Fly to the Universe (2020) at the New York Botanical Garden. Collection of the artist. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
“Both iconic and iconoclastic, KAWS takes over NYBG with bold interventions that put the artist’s work front and center against the living canvas of the Garden, creating unexpected moments for long-time fans and new viewers alike,” NYBG said in a statement. “Experience KAWS’s boundary-defying work within the beauty and complexity of the natural world.”
The announcement coincides with the recent opening of NYBG’s “Van Gogh’s Flowers,” which recreates the natural world that inspired the Dutch painter through the arrangement of nearly 20,000 plants, the vast majority grown in onsite greenhouses. Naturally, sunflowers abound, with NYBG displaying 32 types (one is named Vincent’s Choice) alongside installation sculptures from French artist Cyril Lancelin. The botanical garden noted receiving “record-breaking visitor numbers” during its inaugural weekend in late May.
KAWS, Small Lie (2013). Photo: courtesy KAWS.
KAWS, who has capably straddled the art and commercial realms, remains a polarizing art-world figure. A graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts, the artist made a name for himself in the city’s graffiti scene, marking up advertisements with cartoon graphics and characters, before going on to sell figurines, clothing, and assorted collectibles. Collaborations with Nike, Bape, and Comme des Garçons duly followed.
KAWS was feted with a landmark exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021, before showing at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where his work was placed in dialogue with that of the Pop icon. The traveling show, “KAWS: Family,” is currently on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and will be making a stop at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from November.
The Perennial Garden and the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden. Photo courtesy of New York Botanical Garden.
In addition to the KAWS exhibition, NYBG has announced a collaboration with Mr. Flower Fantastic, a multidisciplinary artist known for his floral sculptures. In 2026, the New York-based artist will use orchids to transform the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory into what NYBG calls “a tribute to the spirit, style, and skyline of our beloved metropolis.”
Mr. Flower Fantastic, who remains anonymous and is typically covered with protective gloves and a mask, is known for using flowers to channel pop culture. He has collaborated with Louis Vuitton, created a 12-foot Kobe Bryant jersey, and provided a flower installation for Spike Lee’s “Creative Sources” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
“The Orchid Show: Mr. Flower Fantastic’s Concrete Jungle” is on view February 7–April 26, 2026 and “KAWS” is on view May 22–October 24, 2027, both at the New York Botanical Gardens, 2900 Southern Blvd, Bronx, New York. More

This month, visitors to the Museum of Modern Art’s first-floor gallery will be greeted by a hulking architectural relic. No mere dusty artifact, it represents one of the few surviving remnants of a cultural landmark that overlooked Tokyo for decades. When it rose, the Nagakin Capsule Tower was embraced for its unprecedented design and swiftly immortalized in popular media. But just as vital to the tower was the close community that came to reside within its walls, one that avidly championed its preservation—even after it was destroyed.
When Nagakin was demolished in 2022 after years of decline, the city lost an architectural icon. But not all of it was gone: 23 of the building’s “capsules,” or single-occupancy modules, were salvaged, with 16 of them now having found permanent homes with art institutions and commercial facilities. Among those collectors is New York’s MoMA, which acquired a capsule in 2023 and has now put it out on view.
Installation view of “The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.
Capsule A1305 stars in the museum’s year-long exhibition “The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower,” following a six-month restoration process that reinstated as many of its original fittings as possible. Museum members will get to enter the capsule during special events.
The rescued pod is joined by archival materials, including original photographs, models, films, and recordings, that document the structure’s evolution through the years. More than an architectural survey, the show, noted curators Evangelos Kotsioris and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, will also spotlight Nagakin’s former tenants who came to inhabit, cherish, and safeguard the tower.
Kisho Kurokawa, Architect & Associates (Tokyo, est. 1962). Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo, 1970–72. Photo: Tomio Ohashi.
The aim, Kotsioris told me over email, was to “foreground the ‘many lives’ architecture can lead: as concept, blueprint, commodity, dwelling, and memory… The exhibition is a rare opportunity to unfold architecture not just as design, but as social life, preservation effort, and evolving popular narrative.”
Designing the Nagakin Capsule Tower
The Nagakin Capsule Tower that emerged in Tokyo’s Ginza district in 1971 was born out of Kisho Kurokawa’s vision for a new mode of urban living. Workers commuting into the city, he thought, would find sanctuary in the building’s 8-by-13 feet micro-dwellings, which were designed to center the needs of an individual occupant (as opposed to a family). Such a cocoon, he said, would be “a place of rest to recover in modern society, an information base to develop ideas, and a home for urban dwellers who love the city center.”
“A twenty-first century home that thoroughly pursues functionality: Nakagin Capsule Manshon (Ginza),” cover of promotional brochure for the Nakagin Company, 1971. Courtesy Tatsuyuki Maeda / The Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project, Tokyo, Japan.
Nagakin would come to house 140 prefabricated modules, each dotted with a large circular window and assembled in a stacking pattern that gave the steel and concrete tower its striking, asymmetrical silhouette. Inside were vibrant, ergonomically minded spaces that could be customized with amenities from TV sets to alarm clocks. So modern and forward-thinking was the project that Kurokawa insisted: “This building is not an apartment house.”
At its core, the design reflected Kurokawa’s principles of Metabolism, a theory he co-pioneered in 1960 that sought to fuse biology and technology, emphasizing adaptable and modular designs in the face of rapid urbanization. This also meant building with materials that could be easily replaced or recycled, thus refreshing a structure’s “metabolic cycle.” Where most Metabolist designs remained speculative, Nagakin had the rare distinction of being realized, Kotsioris noted.
Kishō Kurokawa in front of the completed Nakagin Capsule Tower, 1974. Photo: Tomio Ohashi.
“Kurokawa managed to turn a radical, seemingly utopian vision into a concrete reality,” he said. “The building crystallized Metabolist ideals of flexibility, renewal, and continuous transformation in a form that still feels ahead of its time.”
Nagakin’s Twilight Years
But despite Kurokawa’s best intentions and the reception that greeted the tower’s opening (all units were sold), the 1973 oil shock dashed the promise of intercity mobility. Over the years, the building’s capsules would be reimagined as offices, student rooms, art studios, libraries, galleries, and even DJ booths by young professionals, creatives, weekday commuters, and the odd Metabolism fan.
Noritaka Minami, A503 I, from the series 1972 (2010–22) (2017). © Noritaka Minami, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
Even as the structure began falling into grave disrepair from the 1990s, some of the residents remained Nagakin stalwarts. These tenants, said Vilaplana de Miguel, were “committed to preserving the building’s legacy, and their solidarity became a form of resistance against the repeated threats of demolition.”
A group of residents created the Nakagin Capsule Tower Building Preservation and Regeneration Project to push forward the restoration efforts in collaboration with Kisho Kurokawa Architects and Associates. Chiefly, they sought to realize the late architect’s plan, first proposed in 1998, to renew the capsules through refurbishment or reinstallation.
Alas, their advocacy did not pay off. Nagakin’s management company, lacking either the funds or the will, leveled the building.
From Nakagin Capsule Style (Tokyo: Soshisha, 2020), showing Wakana Nitta (aka Cosplay Koe-chan) in her capsule, which she uses as a DJ booth. Courtesy Tatsuyuki Maeda / The Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project, Tokyo, Japan.
The Afterlife of an Architectural Icon
The tower’s fall did nothing to stop the preservation group. Ahead of the Nagakin’s destruction, it earmarked 23 modules for recovery, striking a deal with the demolition company to receive them free of charge. (The building was also captured in photogrammetry by digital consultancy Gluon and archived as a digital 3D model.)
Today, the surviving capsules are dispersed in and beyond Tokyo. According to the New York Times, two pods, owned by entertainment firm Shochiku, are on permanent display in Ginza, and another one is being trotted out by an Osaka steel company at its trade shows. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, has a capsule, as does the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Digital photogrammetry documentation of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, January 2022. © ARCHI HATCH.
MoMA’s unit once sat right at the top of Nagakin’s Tower A and represents what Vilaplana de Miguel calls “one of the best-preserved capsules.” Still, it required attention after 50 years of exposure to the elements.
Beginning in December 2022, Kurokawa’s office led a restoration of A1305 that saw craftspeople revive the unit by hand according to original drawings and material specifications, said Kotsioris. The restored unit features original fittings—from cabinetry to bathroom fixtures—and even appliances, including a Sanyo refrigerator, Sony Trinitron TV, and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The exhibition environment has even been painted in bold pinks, oranges, and yellows to reflect the color palette of Tower A.
Kisho Kurokawa, Architect & Associates (Tokyo, est. 1962). Capsule A1305 from the Nakagin Capsule Tower. 1970–72; restored 2022–23. Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
“The result,” Kotsioris noted, “is a rare, near-total reconstruction of a living, time-stamped interior.”
It is rare as well, Vilaplana de Miguel added, for “an actual fragment of a building” to enter a museum’s collection, much less for it to anchor an exhibition, offering a singular lens through which to tell Nagakin’s story. “In doing so,” she explained, “we hope this exhibition can serve as both a blueprint and a provocation—demonstrating how museums might approach the archiving and display of ephemeral architecture.”
Installation view of “The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.

Today, as the urbanization and mobility Kurokawa foresaw continues to alter cityscapes, the show also stokes broader questions about urban living, housing models, and sustainable design. For Kotsioris, Nagakin invites us to consider alternative ways of living and building, particularly as urban space becomes a premium for single dwellers. Not for nothing, he noted, does the museum’s window facing 53rd Street carry the large text: “Would you live here?”
“This building, with its modularity and adaptability,” he said, “offers a timely lens through which to rethink how we inhabit the city—not as a relic, but as a living question.”
“The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd St, New York, July 11, 2025–July 12, 2026. More

Maria Lai (1919–2013) once said, “I wasn’t born in Sardinia—I am Sardinia.” This declaration captures the essence of an artist who fused the ancient traditions of her native island with radical experimentation. During the 20th century, Lai developed a singular visual language that combined abstraction, Arte Povera, and craft. Though celebrated in Italy as a key figure of 20th-century art, her name remained relatively unknown abroad during her lifetime. Now, more than a decade after her death, Lai is finally receiving her first North American museum show at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, N.Y.
The retrospective offers a sweeping reappraisal of a singular artist who wove together abstraction, Arte Povera, and craft into something wholly her own. Curated by artistic director Paola Mura, the show is the brainchild of Magazzino founders Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, who have known and collected Lai’s work for over three decades. The nearly 100 works are drawn from their personal holdings, as well as the artist’s foundation and the collections of various Italian museums. Magazzino also just installed Lai’s 1992 cement sculpture Colombe di Cemento as a permanent addition to its grounds.
“It was through a chance encounter that I met Maria Lai’s niece Maria Sofia Pisu, president of the Maria Lai archive, which began my investigation and education in her work,” Olnick told me, adding that from the outset she was captivated by its uniqueness, complexity and variety. The more she learned about her personal life and indomitable nature, the more she wanted to know about her.
“Why it took so long for her to be recognized is beyond me,” she said. “But I hope that all the work that went into mounting this exhibition will signal others to explore her work and her genius.”
Olnick and Spanu have long been dedicated to the promotion of Postwar and contemporary Italian art, and they have been instrumental in helping raise Lai’s profile. In 2017, Magazzino loaned works by Lai to Documenta 14 and the Venice Biennale, exhibitions that gave Lai a major international boost after a seven-decade career spent in relative obscurity. The following year, Lai hit a record high at auction that still stands, with a £150,000 ($195,236) sale of the seven-and-a-half-foot wide embroidered 1989 piece Lenzuolo (Bed Sheet) at Christie’s London, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Installation view of “Maria Lai. A Journey to America” at Magazzino Italian Art. Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art. Photo by Marco Anelli/Tommaso Sacconi, ©Archivio Maria Lai, by SIAE 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Who Was Maria Lai?
Lai was born in 1919 in Ulassai, a remote village in the mountainous interior of Sardinia.
“Maria Lai was an anomaly for a woman at that time and place, as she rejected the expected role of wife and homemaker,” Olnick said. “She expressed that she would always be grateful to her father for letting her go to study in Rome to pursue her art and live as an independent woman.”
In the 1940s, she studied in Rome under sculptor Renato Marino Mazzacurati and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, where she was the only woman in her class. But it was back home in relatively isolated Sardinia that she truly developed as an artist. She showed during her lifetime, but only intermittently, opting not to exhibit, for instance, in the 1960s.
Maria Lai, Composizione Polimaterica (1964). Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo by Marco Anelli, ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
She began her career painting the rugged local landscape, but by the 1960s, Lai began moving away from figuration and eventually abandoned traditional painting altogether. Instead, she turned to humble materials like stone, cork, fabric, and thread—transforming them into complex, richly textured works that evoked memory, mythology, and the handmade traditions of her homeland.
Among the most captivating works in the Magazzino exhibition are Lai’s hand-bound “Libri cuciti” (sewn books), which she created between 1975 and 2011. These sculptural books are filled not with the written word but dense lines of thread—sewn symbols and marks that speak in a language of their own. As a child, before she learned to read, Lai believed her grandmother was stitching stories into bedsheets as she mended them.
This belief sparked Lai’s lifelong exploration of thread as a form of writing and storytelling. That also included sewn geographies, abstract works in which she literally stitched the landscape, lines of thread standing in for the horizon.
Maria Lai, Voce di infinite letture (1992). Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo by Marco Anelli, ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
“There’s a poetry in all her art—the sewn books, the geografia, the ceramics and stones… I could go on and on,” Olnick said.
Lai even dabbled in the fashion world. In May, Magazzino opened a supplemental exhibition featuring a collaboration with Lai and designer Antonio Marras, a fellow Sardinian. The 2003 piece, Llèncols de Aigua (Sheets of Water), is a circular structure formed by a hanging white sheet on which the artists have stitched antique nightgowns and embroidered quotes from children in red script.
Installation view of “Antonio Marras and Maria Lai: Llèncols de Aigua.” Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo: by Marco Anelli/Tommaso Sacconi. ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2025/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
A Long History of Craft
Indeed, local craft of hand weaving—a traditional form of women’s work—was a touchstone for Lai, who drew on millennia of craft history. In the early 1970s, she began making what she dubbed “Sewn Canvases,” and three-dimensional “Telai” works, which is the Italian word for loom.
“The loom is the oldest tool, tied to patience and the ability to weave and hold things together. It is not just a work tool; it is a tool for relationships,” Lai said, as quoted in an exhibition gallery text.
“Behind me, I have thousands of years of silences, of attempts at poetry, of loom threads,” she added.
Maria Lai, Telaio in sole e mare (1971). Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo: Marco Anelli. Courtesy ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
And Lai was a pioneer of what is now known as relational art, creating interactive performance art pieces that highlighted the intricate web of relationships between people, animals, and the environment.
In 1980, Lai’s hometown of Ulassai asked her to create a monument to the fallen. Instead, she paid tribute to the living, inviting the remote mountain village’s roughly 1,000 inhabitants to participate in the first relational art piece in Italian art history. Titled, Legarsi alla montagna (To Tie Oneself to the Mountain), it was a collective performative piece that literally tied them all together. The Magazzino exhibition presents photos and a video of the ambitious project, which Lai considered her masterpiece.
“By fostering this connection of people, she provided a platform for a shared experience through creative expression, ultimately promoting social coherence and a sense of belonging,” Olnick said.
Maria Lai, Legarsi alla montagna, intervention on a photograph by Piero Berengo Gardin (1981–82). Courtesy ©Archivio Maria Lai. ©Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2025 1981–82.
The 1981 work, carried out over a period of three days, was inspired by a local legend of a young girl who narrowly escaped a deadly rockslide when she spotted a ribbon blowing in the wind and followed it to safety. Overcoming longstanding feuds to work together on the artwork, villagers wove a 16-mile-long blue denim ribbon through the municipality, connecting each and every home.
“Art should… make us feel more united,” Lai said in 2009. “Otherwise we’re not human beings.”
“Maria Lai. A Journey to America” is on view November 15, 2024–July 21, 2025 and “Antonio Marras and Maria Lai: Llèncols de Aigua” is on view May 17, 2025–January 27, 2026 at Magazzino Italian Art, 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, New York. The exhibitions are part of Upstate Art Weekend, taking place at 158 art organizations across the Catskills Mountains and Hudson Valley, July 17–21, 2025.  More

“Before me,” Elsa Schiaparelli once insisted, “everything was black or navy blue or gray or brown or beige.” She’s not wrong. An unconventional designer, Schiaparelli would leave her mark on 20th-century couture by injecting it with fantasy, play, and unpredictability. Hers was revolutionary work that swept fashion’s dusty tones away in favor of the electric shade.
Next March, Schiaparelli is getting her first institutional spotlight in the U.K. at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art.” The exhibition will gather a whopping 200 objects—from garments and accessories to sculpture and paintings—to capture the history and sensibility of the innovative couturier.
“The V&A holds one of the largest and most important fashion collections in the world, and the foremost collection of Schiaparelli garments in Britain,” the museum’s director Tristram Hunt said in a statement. “Schiaparelli’s collaboration with artists and with the world of performance make the Maison and its founder an ideal subject for a spectacular exhibition at the V&A.”
Ankle-length coat of black silk jersey with facial profiles forming a rose-filled vase, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Cocteau and Lesage, London, 1937. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Born in Rome, Schiaparelli opened her first atelier in Paris in 1927. There, she dreamed up trompe l’oeil designs, experimental textures, shocking colors, and vivid prints—a groundbreaking vision that thumbed its nose at the staid codes of haute couture. They were provocative designs that stemmed from her commitment to personal freedom and self-expression, as much as her close ties to the Surrealist set.
A chance encounter with Dadaist Francis Picabia and his wife during a 1916 trip to America brought Schiaparelli up close to Paris’s Surrealist scene. She was swift to weave it into her practice. Throughout the 1930s, her atelier produced collaborative pieces including an evening coat embroidered with an optical illusion by Jean Cocteau, a fur bracelet concocted by Meret Oppenheim, spiral glasses designed by Man Ray, and with Salvador Dalí, a host of objects from the iconic Shoe Hat to the Lobster Dress.
Tears Evening dress and head veil, designed by Elsa Schiaparelli, February 1938 for Circus Collection, summer 1938. Fabric designed by Salvador Dalí. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
“Working with artists like Bebe Berard, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Vertes, Van Dongen, and with photographers like Hoyningen Huene, Horst, Cecil Beaton, and Man Ray gave one a sense of exhilaration,” Schiaparelli once reflected. “One felt supported and understood beyond the crude and boring reality of merely making a dress to sell.”
Schiaparelli’s theatrical designs also made her work a great fit for film and stage productions. She famously designed Mae West’s costumes for 1937’s Every Day’s a Holiday, tailoring them on a mannequin sculpted to the star’s proportions. The model would inspire the bottle for Schiaparelli’s Shocking fragrance, designed in collaboration with Leonor Fini.
Advertisement for the perfume Shocking by Schiaparelli. Photo: Apic / Bridgeman via Getty Images.
These creative partnerships sit at the heart of “Fashion Becomes Art.” Heading out on view will be some of the V&A’s holdings such as Schiaparelli’s Skeleton and Tears dresses, and the Shoe Hat, all created alongside Dalí. They’re joined by artworks by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Man Ray, which help illustrate the designer’s creative milieu. The museum also promises to unveil research that sheds new light on these collaborations.
After the designer’s death in 1973 and following decades of fits and starts, the new House of Schiaparelli was established in 2014. Texas-born design Daniel Roseberry took the helm as creative director in 2019, becoming the first American to lead a French couture label. He has sought to craft a new voice for the house, while keeping its Surrealist heritage in view.
“The more I reference her work and use it as a starting point, the better it makes my work,” he’s said about Schiaparelli. “Her legacy feels like an untold story.”
Schiaparelli by Daniel Roseberry. Long sheath gown, Matador Couture collection. Haute couture fall-winter 2021–2022. Patrimoine Schiaparelli, Paris. Photo courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum.
The exhibition will nod to Roseberry’s work, featuring pieces such as his gilded brass lung necklace from Fall 2021, which Bella Hadid donned at the Cannes Film Festival to viral effect. These designs, said the house’s CEO Delphine Bellini, “honor and reinvent [Schiaparelli’s] vision for a new century.”
“Schiaparelli’s fearless imagination and radical vision redefined the boundaries between fashion and art,” she added. “This exhibition celebrates her enduring influence through iconic collaborations with 20th-century masters and a pioneering fusion of creativity and commerce.”
“Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” is on view at the V&A Museum, Cromwell Rd, London, March 21–November 1, 2026. More