Eliana Willis

British artist Thomas J Price probably could have counted on some controversy when he erected a sculpture of a Black woman in New York’s Times Square. Unveiled on April 29, the 12-foot-high bronze Grounded in the Stars shows an unidealized woman in everyday clothes, standing with hands on hips, gazing into the distance with a contemplative look. Per a description of the work by the presenter, Times Square Arts, Price’s practice “confronts preconceived notions of identity and representation.”
And controversy he got, despite a subtle degree of aggrandizement; Price’s figure stands in a pose that nods to Michelangelo’s David, and Jean Cooney, director of Times Square Arts, was drawn to the artist’s work “because of the novel ways in which he imparts a sense of reverence for people’s everyday humanity,” she told Artnet News in February.
But she’s being greeted in some quarters online as an unflattering representation, one with an “attitude,” one who looks stereotypically angry.
Times Square Arts’s own Instagram post of the work has generated dozens of comments, with plenty of love-eyes, flexing muscles, and fire emojis. But they run the gamut, including bessieblount16’s terse “Trash” and Ms_izzie_bee’s “I h8yte your statue as it’s not an accurate representation of Black American Women. We come in all shapes and sizes and you have her plainly dressed looking angry. You’re British and know nothing of Black American Women. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Thomas J Price, Grounded in the Stars (2025). Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts.
“This is some leftist nonsense just to piss off white people,” contributes JayeF121212. “And based on the comments, blacks dont like it either.”
Predictably, aesthetic conservatives use President Donald Trump’s slogan to denigrate the work; one meme juxtaposes it with Antonín Pavel Wagner’s classicizing 19th-century Hercules and Cerberus, in which the mythical Greek hero sports abs for days, under the heading “make statues great again.”

Right-wing media also found a way to place the work in a context they are obsessed with.
“Who is this woman?” asked Fox News host Jesse Watters on Thursday. “What did she do to get a statue? A nice one, too!”
In answer to his own question, he concludes, “Nothing. This isn’t a real person. It’s a DEI statue.”
Price is aware of the debate. On May 9, he reposted to Instagram a slideshow from the popular real_toons account, whose first slide sums up the positions: two Black women flank the sculpture, one saying “I love this!” and the other saying, “Wow, I hate this.” More Black people join in the conversation in succeeding slides, one asking, “What’s next, pajamas and a bonnet?” while another pipes up to say “We are so deep in European beauty standards that the idea of a plus-size Black woman being honored is somehow disrespectful?”
Price did not immediately answer a request to weigh in on the debate, sent via Times Square Arts.
The Times Square installation coincides with Price’s exhibition, “Resilience of Scale,” at Hauser and Wirth’s SoHo showroom. His first major show with the gallery in New York, it presents five similarly towering bronze figures depicting everyday Black people. In Time Unfolding (2023), a woman consults her phone; As Sound Turns to Noise (2023) shows a woman in athletic wear; Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) (2025) shows a man in sneakers and a sweatsuit.
Thomas J Price, Grounded in the Stars (2025). Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts.
Price’s Times Square installation also takes place in the same city at the same moment as many Black women (and men) are enshrined in their everyday glory in Amy Sherald’s acclaimed Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “American Sublime,” where the artist shows Black people as stylish and confident. Prominent Black artists are in the spotlight at the Guggenheim museum as well, with a Rashid Johnson retrospective, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a rooftop installation by Jennie C. Jones.
Other Black artists have also used Times Square as a place to comment on representation of Black people. Price’s midtown installation comes a few years after artist Kehinde Wiley, known for painting young men of color in settings and poses inspired by art historical portraiture, erected a sculpture, 29 feet high and also in bronze, of a Black man in everyday clothing—Nike sneakers and a sweatshirt—but astride a horse, riffing on monuments immortalizing Confederate leaders in the American South.
“Thomas J. Price:Grounded in the Stars” is on view at Broadway and 46th Street April 29–June 17, 2025. More

The city was in full spring bloom during the public days of Gallery Weekend Berlin—but ChertLüdde‘s Alvaro Urbano show “September and Lions” was a sharp contrast that, in some ways, fit the underlying atmosphere of the city. The installation of end-of-season park foliage, cigarette butts, delicately crafted from metal, was rooted in melancholic introspection. It would be a lie to say things have been easy breezy in Berlin in recent months. Quite the opposite: There were deep cuts to the cultural sector, and politics have been causing divisions in the art world. Plus, there’s a new, more right-leaning government and cultural minister to reckon with.
Guests, fresh from Cyprien Gaillard’s video installation “Retinal Rivalry,” dumped their 3D glasses in a bin and gathered at the garden apéro at Sprüth Magers, sipping wine and discussing the sudden resignation of Joe Chialo, Berlin’s culture minister. His exit followed a cascade of public missteps and was made worse by the announcement that €130 million in cultural funding was to be cut from the city’s budget. While this doesn’t directly impact the gallery space, the ripple effect is undeniable. Institutions are rattled, and uncertainty—never great for business—hangs in the air, especially in austerity-minded Germany.
But no matter. Gallery Weekend Berlin buzzed anyway, infused with a mood of resilience, even defiance. We dance on.
Alvaro Urbano, September and the Lions, installation view at ChertLüdde, Berlin, 2025, Photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza, Courtesy of the Artist and ChertLüdde
In an unusual twist, the event kicked off on May Day, a national bank holiday for International Workers’ Day. For the art industry, “working” meant oysters and air kissing on the patio of KaDeWe, the historic multistory department store usually teeming with tourists bent over perfume vitrines. The large arcade windows of the building were taken over by galleries. Pamela Rosenkranz’s water bottles, filled with flesh-toned silicone and acrylic paint, stood on plinths where Etro resort wear might normally be displayed—at comparable price points.
24/7 exhibition in the window front of KaDeWe from April 22 to May 10, 2025. Photo: Ludger Paffrath
Now in her second year, Antonia Ruder seems to have found her stride at the helm of Gallery Weekend, after taking over last year after the departure Maike Cruse, who headed to Art Basel in Switzerland. Ruder inherited a platform of 55 galleries and a rocky market. “The global art market has become much more competitive,” she said in a recent interview with the German press. “Berlin remains a major player thanks to its unique art scene, but staying relevant means continuously taking action.” Her updates to the format this year were well received: Alongside the 24-hour window project at KaDeWe was a series of artist talks at the Neue Nationalgalerie, a podcast lifting the veil on studio practices, helmed Financial Times columnist Enuma Okoro, and expanded public tours.
Katharina Grosse and Klaus Biesenbach at Gallery Weekend’s annual dinner. Photo: David von Becker
Things will seem normal, but there will be signs. First, the normal: Everyone I spoke to, from dealers to artists and collectors, noted that the event felt international again after a post-lockdown lull and competition for attention with the Venice Biennale last year. We even had an A-list celebrity: Usher, who collects art, was seen in a Berlin-looking trench coat enjoying seasonal asparagus at the Gallery Weekend dinner—hosted within LAS Art Foundation‘s exhibition of Laure Prouvost—though the star allegedly had to leave before dessert (understandable given that he had to perform at the Met Gala on Monday evening). An internationally established blue-chip gallery was scrambling to get its star artist on the guest list of Berghain for Saturday night. Collector Frédéric de Goldschmidt said an invite to artist Zuzanna Czebatul‘s after-party at Berghain, hosted by her gallery Dittrich & Schlechtriem had “sealed the deal” on deciding to come. Some things don’t change.
But there are signs that the before times are no more. Gone are the days when Gallery Weekend was dominated by painting-only shows by the most established rostered artists working on canvas; many exhibitions instead favored experimentation. In these uncertain times, all directions are favorable. At Galerie Neu, a cheekily opaque show prompted some visiting children to throw around colorful bits of SoiL Thornton‘s pom-pom installation and some even pocketed them. This later seemed ominous when I learned that each pom-pom in the exhibition represented one year of the artist’s life.
Installation view “Toy” by Sebastian Jefford at Noah Klink. Photo courtesy Noah Klink
“You have to be flexible, but you can also be more playful,” said Noah Klink, a dealer in his third Gallery Weekend. He was showing a suite of ink drawings by Sebastian Jefford, plus ochre roof material custom-fitted to the interior walls of his gallery, on which moonlike faces gazed out. Berlin has yet to recover the “brand” it had during the apex of post-internet art in the late 2010s (some of those artists reappeared in a brief revival in 2022). But the city’s lack of a unified scene may now be its strength. It is diverse, varied, and allows space for experimentation in a place that remains an incubator for artists.
Gallery Weekend Berlin’s annual dinner at LAS Foundation, with Laure Prouvost’s installation visible above. Photo: David von Becker
There were some key posthumous discoveries on this front. Many recommended David Medalla‘s “Luftbrücke” at Mountains, a show with more institutional muscle and ideas than it could fit on the walls. The gallery expanded into a nearby space, a former apothecary, to show the breadth of an artist who worked for a time in West Berlin. The kinetic art pioneer, who died in 2020, left a vast oeuvre that includes paintings, neon sculpture, and delicate collages. His ethereal bubbling sculpture, called Cloud Canyons, pours over itself at Julia Stoschek Collection‘s post-image group exhibition; a cascade that signaled to me a needed return to what one might call poetic artists’s art. Similarly, Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti brought the ephemeral, playful, and profound fog sculptures of Fujiko Nakaya to the Neue Nationalgalerie‘s historic sculpture garden.
Fog sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya in the sculpture garden of Neue Nationalgalerie, © Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / David von Becker
Beyond the official program, new formats proliferated that brought together sharp curation and business-oriented projects. Noah Klink hosted a group show “Soggiorno” at Tanya Leighton. At a historic church in Mitte, collector, curator, and now art advisor Tiffany Zabludowicz and curator and advisor Anneli Botz launched their debut exhibition under the banner of their new platform Tyger Tyger; the large group show “I Sought my Soul” brought together works by artists including Jacolby Satterwhite, Jean-Marie Appriou, and Mire Lee. Optimism for the current age was the operative word—and the exhibition included an immersive breathwork session during Gallery Weekend. The first in a series, the multihyphenate enterprise to help private collectors and institutions curate and build their collections. “Why not be hybridized, as long as it is additive to the art world?” said Zabludowicz.
Also choosing Berlin: American Art Projects presented “America Unframed,” a tightly curated selling exhibition of well-selected artists from overlapping scenes between L.A., New York, and other American hubs. Organizers Benno Tubbesing (of Ruttkowski 68), Matthieu von Matt, and William Croghan (of Deitch) said they plan to continue the series, spotlighting a new generation of American artists who’ve been underexposed outside of the U.S. Artists like painters Tristan Unrau, who recently gained representation from David Kordanksy, and Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., who had a solo show at Deitch in New York that closed this January, hung together as a visual lexicon of Americana, drawing on Pop Art, realism, vernacular signage, cinema, and online visual culture.
“America Unframed” courtesy American Art Projects
New models are also taking shape on the institutional front. The most visible sign may be the Chanel-backed commission at Hamburger Bahnhof, launched with a monumental work by Klára Hosnedlová. The 12 percent cut to Berlin’s cultural funding likely accelerated the need for an increase in these partnerships. German museums will now be asked to reconsider not only how they fund—but what they fund.
Across Europe, art sales are down 8 percent year over year, and sales are vital—no one disputes that. Institutions partnering with private patrons; selling exhibitions framed as such but with curatorial depth; all this no longer feels un-Berlin; nor does a heterogeneous set of artists pushing past genre toward a poetics of presence. We are seeing some sort of paradigm shift—one still hazy at the edges, but unmistakably underway. Perhaps, taken together, it will someday read as a slow, accumulative response to political inertia, market fatigue, and evolving social priorities.
Things can be much more imaginative, provisional, and porous, and more poetic than polished, too. At KW Institute on Sunday morning, artist Matt Copson and critic Dean Kissick hosted a panel styled after Art Basel’s Conversations series with three nine-year-old guests; together they earnestly discussed the meaning of art. The kids and the two adults on stage spoke, with startling directness, about what art meant to them; a reminder of what an individual and immediate experience art viewing can be. One European collector, singularly rattled by this, demanded to know what the event was supposed to be. But Copson had already turned that question to his panelists, asking the children whether the conversation itself could be an artwork. There was no firm consensus. And that, perhaps, is the point. Maybe uncertain times have taught us something that was always true—that all directions, all interpretations, are favorable. More

Five years ago, nonprofit public art studio Monument Lab teamed up with Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania to ask important questions such as: What stories are missing from Bryn Mawr? How can and should the school reckon with its histories of systemic exclusion? Under the initiative Art Remediating Campus Histories, a series of symposia, lectures, student group consultations, and conversations with alumnae and community leaders followed, before culminating in a public call for proposals.
That’s when multimedia Washington, D.C.-based artist Nekisha Durrett entered the picture. Late last month, Bryn Mawr officially unveiled Don’t Forget to Remember (Me), a permanent public artwork for which custom pavers created pathways in the school’s iconic Cloisters courtyard.
From an aerial view, the intertwined paths are laid out in “the shape of a knot that cannot be undone, symbolizing interconnectivity, and making visual that Bryn Mawr is reexamining its history to tell all of its stories,” said Durrett in a statement. Two hundred and fifty of the 9,000 pavers are engraved with the names of Black staff whose work was critical to building and operating Bryn Mawr, particularly in its early years. Yet their contributions went unrecognized. In all, the project involves 26 pallets of brick, 211 tons of stone, 18 tons of sand, and 285 tons of soil.
Nekisha Durret, Dont Forget to Remember me lighting test, Bryn Mawr College, January 10, 2025. Photo: Steve Weinik
Perhaps it was not surprising that, after the request for proposals went out, Durrett’s inbox was flooded with suggestions from fans and friends familiar with her inquiries into historical narratives and monuments, encouraging her to pursue the Bryn Mawr project.
“I was fortunate enough to be chosen as a finalist,” the artist told me. “I’d been wanting to work with Monument Lab for years. Just the fact that they knew who I was, was really exciting.”
Even before she arrived on campus, Durrett learned in her preliminary research that there was a collection of ephemera related to Black life on campus that was contained in a random kitchen drawer. When she arrived on campus and saw it in person, she discovered “index cards that were burned around the edges. They were very fragile so I asked what they were.”
Nekisha Durrett, current students, and alumni collect soil from Perry House, ARCH Project, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, 2023 (Maya Estrara).
Durrett learned that they were time cards of servants who worked at the college from roughly 1900 to 1930. The cards nearly burned in a fire that happened decades later, around 1960. “Someone had the good sense to rescue them from the fire,” she said. Now, some of those names are engraved into the stones on the new pathway.
Durrett also joined a special student-led tour, known as Black at Bryn Mawr, part of which is a walk under the Cloisters to see the underground “servant” tunnel. “These tunnels made a lot of the work that Black staff were performing on campus invisible,” she said.
In her research, she also learned a lot about Enid Cook, the first Black graduate of Bryn Mawr, in 1931. Although Cook was accepted to study at the college, she wasn’t allowed to reside on campus, at the decree of M. Carey Thomas, the college’s former president and trustee who had “a very powerful and persuasive voice at the college,” said Durrett. Cook ended up living off campus with a professor and walking roughly a mile to and from school each day.
Don’ t Forget to Remember (Me) lighting test, Bryn Mawr College, January 10, 2025. PhotoSteve Weinik
Upon learning this, Durrett printed out a map of the campus and the surrounding area so that she could trace the path Cook would have taken to get to school each day.
“I just started thinking about pathways, and also thinking about those hidden tunnels under the Cloisters, and I’m thinking about M. Carey Thomas, this woman whose whose presence and influence on the college, caused pain and exclusion for many,” she said.
Thomas’s ashes are contained in the Cloisters, which Durrett visited on her Bryn Mawr tour with two students of color. “We were standing there and I already felt this gloom, this kind of heaviness of the space. They described to me how they felt being in the space and how many students of color, or any students, did not feel comfortable participating in events that took place in the Cloisters.”
Durrett said she “knew at that moment that that needed to be the site of this project. Whatever it was going to be, it needed to be there. That space needed to be reclaimed.”
Her choice of a braid motif, she added, was inspired by one of the students she spent time with while touring the campus. “They came to me as this really powerful symbol, thinking about hair braids as a protective hairstyle. It’s called a protective hairstyle because all of those braids are stronger together than they are apart. I was also thinking about the Transatlantic slave trade and all of the mythology around hair related to the middle passage.”
Nekisha Durrett inpainting stamped names with a custom glaze made from the soil of the Perry House, a former affinity house forBlack students on Bryn Mawrs campus. Photo by Steve Weinik.
The names in the pavers are further filled with soil that was collected from the site of Perry House, the former Black Cultural Center on Campus, Durrett noted. There were a number of sites that had been selected as possible project sites, “but I felt that Perry House was a little bit removed from the center of the campus,” including having to cross a busy road. “What I decided to do instead of placing the artwork there was to bring a piece of Perry House to the Cloisters,” she explained.
The results of Durrett’s years-long, thoughtful approach speak for themselves. At the April 24 unveiling, she described the sense of reaffirmation sparked by the project and how it’s beginning to “heal this community… I heard it come out of the mouths of alumni who were there, and had tears in their eyes. They felt like there was a healing that was happening on campus. It’s been very reaffirming for me particularly in the times we’re going through now, witnessing these very blatant attempts to erase history and to alter the past.”
With the artwork’s unveiling, she added: “It feels like it’s the official turning over of this piece to the community.” More

“For the writer of fiction,” Flannery O’Connor once reflected, “everything has its testing point in the eye.” Writing, to her, didn’t just call on emotion and thought; it required “sense-impression” on the part of the author—on what and how she sees. It begins with the eye, “an organ,” she said, “that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.”
From O’Connor’s own eye would issue her deeply observed fiction, written from the late 1940s through early ’60s, now a fixture in the Southern Gothic canon. Underpinning it, though, was the writer’s little-known visual art practice—the cartoons, drawings, and paintings that summoned her perceptive powers. For years, scholars only had inklings of these artworks; a rediscovery, however, is changing that.
Flannery O’Connor’s painting of the family home at Andalusia Farm with her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, in the foreground. Photo: Anna Gay Leavitt, courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
For the first time, dozens of artworks by the Southern writer are seeing the light of day at “Hidden Treasures” at Andalusia Farm, O’Connor’s former homestead in Milledgeville, Georgia. Marking the centennial of her birth, the exhibition brings together her childhood drawings, cartoons, paintings on wood, and even a stuffed red-faced doll she had created, complete with plaid shirt and a large cape. At its heart is a 1952 self-portrait, in which O’Connor painted herself gazing out from under a wide sun hat, while flanked by a pheasant.
“The self-portrait was the first painting that arrived in our custody,” Andalusia curator Cassie Munnell told me over a phone call. “I knew that there was one out there, but I’d only ever seen black-and-white photos of it. To see it in person, to see it in color and the vibrancy of it, was just so exciting.”
Flannery O’Connor standing next to her 1952 self portrait. Photo: Alpha Historica / Alamy Stock Photo.
The entire collection had been stowed away for decades until it was recently unearthed—some works came from a storage unit behind a fast-food restaurant, others from the attic of the Milledgeville townhouse of Louise Florencourt, O’Connor’s cousin and co-executor of her estate. It was in the latter 19th-century building where O’Connor spent her teenage years, squirreling herself away in the top story to create art.
(Before she died in 2023, Florencourt bequeathed the property to the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities at Georgia College and State University, the writer’s alma mater, which also preserves her library and the Andalusia compound, now a National Historic Landmark. Some of the artworks have also been gifted to the school by the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust.)
Installation view of “Hidden Treasures” at the Andalusia Interpretive Center. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
Few eyes had seen the extent of the archive, which was fiercely guarded by Florencourt (one rare visitor to the storage unit, author Damian Ference, recalled it packed “wall-to-wall” with O’Connor artifacts). A worry of the early trustees, explained Farrell O’Gorman, who recently joined the trust, was that “the paintings might somehow distract from her achievements as a writer.”
Not so, said Munnell. The artworks “complement and expand” what we know about O’Connor, she noted. “You can see the ways that her ideas and the way she described people carried over. Her fiction is often quite dramatic and her characters are often described in these big, bold ways. This carries over in how she painted.”
Flannery O’Connor, c. 1950s. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, O’Connor came to visual art before fiction writing. At five, she was creating caricatures and sketches, which blossomed into her joyous, witty linoleum prints (compiled in 2012’s Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons). She submitted her illustrations to her high school and college publications; others, she compiled into small books. She paused her visual art when she entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1945.
It was in Iowa that O’Connor began her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), and a run of beguiling short stories shot through with pathos, dark humor, and keen perception. In them are characters wrangling with faith and self in the heart of the American South (which O’Connor, a devout Catholic, deemed “Christ-haunted”), threaded throughout with potent descriptions of desolate farms, of eyes “the color of pecan shells,” of a peacock with a “tail full of suns,” and of forest-lined roads, some leading straight to the sky. One senses the cartoonist in these deft strokes.
Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
In 1952, following a diagnosis of lupus, O’Connor returned to Andalusia Farm to live under her mother’s care. The homestead, purchased by O’Connor’s uncle in 1931, was where she would spend the last years of her life before her death at age 39. Despite her prognosis, she maintained a disciplined writing schedule—completing the now-classic The Violent Bear It Away (1960), for one—when not attending church, giving lectures, and painting her surrounds.
These rural scenes are dotted throughout “Hidden Treasures.” There are images of the farm’s horse barn, pictured amid stark tree branches; of a lake, surrounded by a verdant hill and captured with an Impressionistic hand; and of O’Connor’s beloved peafowl, which she avidly raised in Andalusia. “It’s all very grounded in the Southern farm experience, in this area, and our natural landscapes,” said Munnell.
Flannery O’Connor’s painting of fowl. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
But O’Connor also turned her hand to portraits: the show includes depictions of a green-clad female, believed to be her mother, and an African American woman in mid-crochet, likely a farm worker. There’s, of course, her self-portrait as well.
These later works follow her earlier caricatures—colorful portrayals of a wrinkled woman with a pointed nose and a cross-eyed man in a bowler hat, among others—that offer a highly comic counterpoint to her dramatic fiction. They might be juvenilia, but to Munnell, they hold stylistic hallmarks that carried over into O’Connor’s mature paintings such as “the ways that motion is displayed and details like facial features.”
Installation view of “Hidden Treasures” at the Andalusia Interpretive Center. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
And even in these simple drawings one can read O’Connor’s eye for mining meaning out of gesture and expression, and her knack for drawing from life, if not imagination. Drawing, in fact, might be the best medium to accompany fiction writing, she once stressed. “Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look” is essential, she said. “The writer should never be ashamed of staring.”
“Hidden Treasures” is on view at the Andalusia Interpretive Center, 2628 N. Columbia Street, Milledgeville, Georgia, throughout the summer. More

As the New York art world prepares for another busy art fair week, here’s our list of Frieze must-see shows at museums to galleries across the city. Whether you like emerging artists, rediscovered figures, or famous names from art history, we have you covered. See how many of these you can squeeze into your fair week agenda, and over the coming weeks.

“Kennedy Yanko: Retro Future” at Salon 94 and “Kennedy Yanko: Epithets” at James CohanApril 5–May 17 and April 5–May 10, 2025
“Kennedy Yanko: Retro Future” at Salon 94. Photo: courtesy of Salon 94, New York.
This duo of shows features Kennedy Yanko’s delightfully contorted abstract sculptures, made from salvaged scraps of metal combined with folded sheets of dried layers of paint. The artist has taken over all three floors of Salon 94’s Upper East Side mansion for her largest show to date—with a bonus group exhibition Kennedy has curated, “Metal and Memory,” featuring abstract works by the likes of John Chamberlain, Leonardo Drew, and Frank Stella. Downtown at James Cohan, Yanko has adopted a more somber palette for wall-mounted works with smaller, intricate details that she has described as inspired by “the dark place within me.”
Salon 94 is located at 3 East 89th Street, New York, New York. James Cohan Gallery is located at 48, 52 Walker Street, 2nd Floor, New York, New York.

“Salman Toor: Wish Maker” at Luhring AugustineMay 2–June 21, 2025
Salman Toor, Oh Father (2025). Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York.
After months of lockdown, one of the first new shows at the Whitney in 2020 was a star-making turn for Salman Toor, the Pakistani artist known for his green-tinted paintings exploring the imagined lives of queer South Asian men living in diaspora. This two-part exhibition—paintings in Chelsea, and drawings down in Tribeca—is Toor’s first solo show in the city since that break out, following an appearance at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Often celebrating private and intimate moments, these are artworks that capture a powerful viewpoint, informed by Toor’s own experiences living in New York City.
Luhring Augustine is located at 531 West 24th Street, and 17 White Street, New York, New York.

“Picasso: Tête-à-tête” at Gagosian and “Pablo Picasso: Still Life” at Almine RechApril 18–July 3, 2025 and May 1–July 18, 2025
Pablo Picasso, Femme au Béret Bleu Assise dans un Fauteuil Gris, Manches Rouges (Marie-Thérèse), 1937. Photo: by Sandra Pointet, courtesy Gagosian ©2025 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Pablo Picasso’s estate provided many of the works in this career-spanning show, with over fifty rarely seen paintings, sculptures, and drawings for this swan song for Gagosian’s Madison Avenue location. And just a block away, Almine Rech has brought together over 40 of Picasso’s still life paintings, an important part of his career that has often taken a backseat to figurative works that illustrate his complicated and increasingly controversial love life. Both shows have a family connection to Picasso. Gagosian’s is presented in partnership with the artist’s daughter Paloma Picasso, while the Almine Rech show is a collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, run by the dealer and her husband, Picasso’s grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.
Gagosian is located at 980 Madison Avenue, New York, New York. Almine Rech is located at 39 East 78th Street, Floor 2, New York, New York.

“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumApril 18, 2025–January 18, 2026
Rashid Johnson, Antoine’s Organ (detail) (2016). Photo: Stefan Altenburger, courtesy of the artist.
Palm trees and other plants are suspended from the ceiling of the Guggenheim, transforming Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda into a verdant greenhouse for Rashid Johnson‘s thought-provoking survey. There are also his ceramic mosaics, works made from African black soap and melted wax, and an installation with more plants and a piano that will be activated for musical performances.
The Guggenheim is located at 1071 Fifth Avenue New York, New York. 

“Mary Heilmann: Long Line” at the Whitney Museum of American ArtApril 9, 2025–January 19, 2026
Installation view of “Mary Heilmann: Long Line” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, On wall: Long Line (2025). On floor: Monochrome Chairs (2015). Photo: by Tiffany Sage/BFA.com. ©BFA 2025.
The Whitney Museum is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Meatpacking flagship with a tribute to perhaps the most memorable show from its opening, “Mary Heilmann: Sunset.” The exhibition’s functional installation of Heilmann’s signature brightly colored chairs on the fifth floor terrace provided the perfect place for visitors to take in the institution’s new downtown digs. This time around, she’s created a new indoor site-specific installation overlooking the Hudson River that again offers a welcoming opportunity for rest and relaxation.
The Whitney is located at 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, New York.

“Hiba Schahbaz: Magical Creatures” at Adler BeattyApril 24–June 20, 2025
Hiba Schahbaz, Book of Magical Creatures (2025). Photo: courtesy of Adler Beatty, New York.
Hiba Schahbaz has brought her delicate watercolors, informed by her training Indo-Persian miniature painting, to Adler Beatty, with a large site-specific wall installation of life-size cut-out paper works of dreamy mermaids and colorful vegetation. But the show also pairs historic European illuminated manuscripts from the 14th to 19th centuries, on loan from private collections and New York’s Les Enluminures, with Schahbaz’s own delicately hand-painted books featuring her feminine take on mythological creatures.
Adler Beatty is located at 34 East 69th Street, New York, New York. 

“Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” at the Museum of Art and DesignApril 12–September 7, 2025
Saya Woolfalk, Lovescape (2004) installed in “Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo: by Jenna Bascom, courtesy the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
It’s the first retrospective for 45-year-old Saya Woolfalk, whose career isn’t just about making beautiful, meaningful artwork. She’s also a masterful world-builder, crafting a dense scientific universe about a hybrid plant people called Empathics who live in sisterhood with the earth. Woolfalk has transformed the museum’s fifth floor into the Empathics’ world, with a dense and colorful installation of animated videos, paper collages, and life-size figurative sculptures wearing her textile works—which also serve as costumes. (If you don’t make it during Frieze Week, save the date September 7 for a live performance from the Alvin Ailey-Fordham dance program featuring the garments.)
MAD is located at 2 Columbus Circle, New York, New York.

“The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” at the Jewish Museum March 7–August 10, 2025
Rembrandt van Rijn, A Jewish Heroine from the Hebrew Bible (1632–1633). Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
A trio of paintings and six etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn star in this collection of paintings, prints, drawings, and decorative arts all inspired by the Jewish heroine Esther. The queen, whose story is told in the bible’s Book of Esther, is perhaps a surprising source of inspiration for the people of 17th-century Netherlands (although there are also artworks and devotional objects created by and for Amsterdam’s Jewish minority). The exhibition argues that the Dutch people saw a parallel between their fight for independence from Spain and how Esther saved the Jews of Persia by revealing her hidden faith to her husband, the king.
The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.

“Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku” at Jack ShainmanMay 6–July 18, 2025
Toyin Ojih Odutola, Congregation. Courtesy of Jack Shainman, New York.
Toyin Ojih Odutola, who was included in the Nigerian Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, has created a series of paintings honoring her late grandmother and uncle. The works are set inside an imagined Mbari house, a traditional sacred space for the Owerri Igbo people of Nigeria used to celebrate both deities and members of the community. Ojih Odutola, who first became known for her series of portraits of a fictional aristocratic Nigerian family, is here telling a more personal story about processing grief, and of spiritual community.
Jack Shainman is located at 46 Lafayette Street, New York, New York.

“Elizabeth Colomba” at Venus Over ManhattanApril 15–May 17, 2025
Elizabeth Colomba, The Magician (2025). Courtesy of Venus Over Manhattan.
For her first show with Venus Over Manhattan, Elizabeth Colomba is showcasing her take on Old Master paintings. Her flawlessly executed canvases largely depict ornate, familiar-looking period rooms—but these works are starring richly attired Black women who normally would have been excluded from those masterworks. Her figures are regal and powerful, depicted here with symbols of the occult, creating a missing chapter of art history.
Venus Over Manhattan is located at 39 Great Jones Street, New York, New York. 
“Leonor Fini: Small Faces” at NagasApril 7–May 24, 2025
Leonor Fini, Face II. Photo: courtesy of Nagas, New York.
Surrealist painter Leonor Fini (1907–1996) has enjoyed a long-overdue surge of attention in recent years for her sensual, otherworldly paintings of women. But you probably haven’t seen many of her drawings, a selection of which, featuring women’s faces, are the subject of this intimate outing. The artist’s delicate line work captures the simplicity of form in dreamy fashion.
Nagas is located at 47 West 28th Street, Floor 2, New York, New York. 

“Francis Picabia: Eternal Beginning” at Hauser & WirthMay 1–August 1, 2025
Francis Picabia, La terre est ronde (The Earth Is Round), 1951. Photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds, Belgium,and Comité Picabia Geier Family Collection, ©2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
This Francis Picabia show from the Comité Picabia and co-curated by its president, Beverley Calté, and art historian Arnauld Pierre, comes to New York by way of Hauser & Wirth Paris—that’s right, a museum-caliber gallery exhibition so buzzy, it traveled. If you caught the artist’s 2017 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, you’ll be aware that he developed new and totally distinct styles every few years, exploring Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Dadaism. Here, the focus is on the twilight of Picabia’s career, from 1945 to 1952, the year before his death—a period that saw him create yet another new style by seeking to bridge the movements of Surrealism and abstraction.
Hauser & Wirth is located at 47 West 28th Street, Floor 2, New York, New York. 

“Tanya Aguiñiga: Weighted” at Albertz BendaMay 8–June 21, 2025
Tanya Aguiñiga, Seven Sisters. Photo: by Julian Calero, courtesy of the artist and Albertz Benda, New York and Los Angeles.
Raised on the border of Mexico and California, Tanya Aguiñiga creates art inspired by her experiences with communities in both countries. In the Los Angeles artist, activist, and educator’s first New York solo show, Aguiñiga looks to expand on her work using art as a tool to empower her community, and celebrate their physical strength. Drawing on traditional craft practices, she uses cotton, flax, copper, stone, and clay to make abstract woven and braided textile works that represent marginalized bodies. Some of the works use red dye secreted from cochineal insects native to Mexico and the Southeast U.S.—but only the females of the species—that became a valuable trading commodity during colonial times.
Albertz Benda is located at 515 West 26th Street, New York, New York.

“Ching Ho Cheng: Tracing Infinity” at BankMay 1–June 14, 2025
Ching Ho Cheng, Untitled (1982). Photo: Gustavo Murill, courtesy of Bank and the Ching Ho Cheng Estate.
A long-time resident of legendary New York artist haven the Chelsea Hotel, the late Ching Ho Cheng is known for his psychedelic canvases. The second New York show for Shanghai’s Bank gallery will feature archival photographs documenting his place in the downtown scene of the ’60s and ’70s, as well as some of Cheng’s never-before-displayed gouache windows works. Each one is a carefully observed painting of sunlight as it passed through the windows of his apartment and studio, rendered in thin layers of pigment applied with an airbrush in a technique Cheng developed himself. This effort to capture the ever-changing light of the sun ties into the Buddhist principle of impermanence, which is inescapable, and defines our own lives.
Bank is located at 127 Elizabeth Street, New York, New York. 

“Teruko Yokoi: NohTheater” at Hollis TaggartMay 1–June 14, 2025
Teruko Yokoi, Untitled (1987). Courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
Another former denizen of the Chelsea Hotel, the late Japanese artist Teruko Yokoi, is getting a restaurant at the building named in her honor later this month. But first, Hollis Taggart is opening a show of 20 works dating from the 1950s to year 2000. Yokoi trained in traditional Japanese painting before moving to the U.S. in 1953 and studying at the California School of Fine Arts and under Hans Hoffman in New York. Though she was one of the few women in the Abstract Expressionist scene, Yokoi remained deeply influenced by her native country. This show is focusing on her embrace of Japan’s traditional Noh theater in her work and artistic philosophy.
Hollis Taggart is located at 521 West 26th Street, 1st Floor, New York, New York.

“Mary Ann Unger: Across the Bering Strait” at Berry CampbellApril 17–May 17, 2025
Mary Ann Unger, Across the Bering Strait (1992–94). Photo: ©the artist courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.
Don’t miss the late sculptor Mary Ann Unger‘s monumental installation of abstract sculpture, Across the Bering Strait, being shown in New York City in its entirety for the first time. A feminist artist and curator—and member of the Guerrilla Girls—Unger suffered from cancer the last 14 years of her life, and is only now gaining more recognition for her work thanks to the efforts of her daughter, artist Eve Biddle, and widower, photographer Geoffrey Biddle. Convinced of Unger’s art historical importance, her family saved her large-scale works, including the most monumental of the all, Across the Bering Strait, a series of 34 large gray modular forms that recall bones and body parts. It’s a piece of great weight, both physically and philosophically, inspired by migration and the bodily suffering it can cause.
Berry Campbell is located at 524 West 26th Street, New York, New York. More

Last week, the artist Tanda Francis walked through a gallery door at the Met and stumbled into a world she helped bring to life. “Suddenly I saw the work I had poured so much thought into, now multiplied several times and dressed in stunning diverse looks… appearing like different people but with that very familiar face,” she recalled. “It was shocking, to the point where I had to look away just to pace or process what I was seeing.”
The sculptor and multimedia artist created the bespoke, distinctive mannequin heads for “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition. “I was so happy to see that this familiar face had developed to appear to take on so many new lives,” Francis added.
Tanda Francis working on the mannequin head for “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.”Photo: Anna Marie Kellen. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Francis’s contributions heighten “Superfine,” which runs from May 10 through October 26. Organized by guest curator Monica L. Miller in collaboration with Andrew Bolton and his team at the Costume Institute, it explores how Black communities across the Atlantic diaspora have wielded fashion—and especially suiting—as a tool of self-definition, resistance, and storytelling from the 18th century to today. The exhibition draws from Miller’s influential 2009 book Slaves to Fashion and includes recent runway looks, historical garments, photographs, ephemera, and newly commissioned works that underscore the depth and range of Black sartorial expression.
Francis, a Brooklyn-based sculptor best known for her large-scale public artworks, doesn’t typically work within the realm of fashion. But the exhibition’s themes resonated with her. “My work is about Africanness in America,” she said. “For this kind of major event from the Met to speak to the diaspora is something that I thought was interesting.” Her art frequently addresses the visibility of diasporic African people in public space, using her practice to explore ancestry, spirituality, and cultural memory.
Tanda Francis, RockIt Black (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
Francis’s outdoor works are often monumental African heads—regal sculptures that command space and attention. “Culturally speaking, [the head] is the important part of the body—the being, the spiritual house of the human.” In her view, “the body becomes secondary… something to hold the head.” She was a natural choice to scale down and replicate that focus in multiples for the Met’s exhibition. She based her mannequin on a historical figure, choosing a face whose story carried layered political meaning: André Matsoua.
Matsoua was a Congolese political thinker and founder of a movement that challenged French rule in the early 20th century. He is widely regarded as the original Sapeur and embodied militant Black dandyism. Sapeur is a term rooted in La Sape—a French abbreviation of the Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People. The Congolese movement celebrates men who express identity and resistance through flamboyant, impeccably styled European fashion. “He was very active politically and, in the community, to fight colonialism, and that was his way—by wearing the clothes of the colonizers,” Francis said. “That idea is just so interesting to me, you are wearing the clothes of the people who are controlling you. How do you do that and take control?”
Ensemble by LaQuan Smith, spring/summer 2025. Courtesy LaQuan Smith. Photo © Tyler Mitchell 2025
Aesthetically, Matsoua’s complex profile lends a nuanced, timeless narrative weight to the contemporary looks he wears in the exhibition. Though he appears only in modern ensembles, his face grounds them with a sense of history—whether styled in a Black Panther–inspired Telfar leather trench and bellbottoms from 2024, or in sharply tailored Louis Vuitton suits designed by both Virgil Abloh and Pharrell Williams.
To begin, Francis sculpted a wax maquette of the head, meticulously shaping it. At the time, she was enmeshed in a flurry of site visits for potential projects. “I knew I had to travel back and forth,” she said. “It’s something that I could put in my backpack and go.” The wax model was eventually scanned and refined digitally, allowing Francis to manipulate the form in a 3D environment. “In between the fiberglass and resin and the wax, it became a fully digital experience,” she explained. “I scanned the wax and worked with it in 3D—moving it around and envisioning how the piece, and the meaning behind it, could present itself.”
Suit by Ev Bravado and Téla D’Amore for Who Decides War, fall/winter 2024–25.Courtesy Who Decides War. Photo © Tyler Mitchell 2025
The experience has shifted Francis’s practice in lasting ways. “I’m doing more digital work now,” she said. “It’s been kind of beautiful. When I started this piece, A.I. hadn’t yet made its presence fully felt, and now it’s everywhere. So much has changed in just a few months. It’s made me want to explore the digital space more—while still keeping one foot in the analog. I like mixing the two, and I think that’s going to be more visible in my work moving forward.”
Though unaccustomed to working within the fashion sphere, Francis came to appreciate its immediacy and power as a medium. “This topic is heavy. It’s about race in America. It’s about Blackness in America,” she said. “And that’s something that’s been made very heavy, because historically, we haven’t dealt with it the way we should. It’s become this thing we have to keep lifting. And the interesting part is, we’re dealing with it here through fashion.” In “Superfine,” her work adds another layer to a complex conversation. More

In 1868, Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny, in a letter to his fellow journalist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, coined the term “homosexual” to describe same-sex attraction. He was writing to argue against the criminalization of private sexual acts—a cause he somewhat shared with Ulrichs, best known as the first gay man to openly defend homosexuality. But Kertbeny’s coinage, which publicly debuted in an 1869 pamphlet, would ironically create thorny issues of its own as it echoed through the ages.
For one, queer art historian Jonathan David Katz, who has spent the better part of six years unpacking the significance of the term, has found it often limited rather than liberated identity. “Essentially, the nomenclature helped to inaugurate a gulf between forms of desire that had previously been unified,” he told me over the phone. “What I began to think about was: how did we enter a world in which sexuality not only became bifurcated, but in some sense, became a defining trait of characters?”
Marie Laurencin, Le bal élégant (The Elegant Ball) or La danse à la campagne (The Country Dance) (1913). Musée Marie Laurencin, Tokyo.
But where the terminology has constricted (not helped by its cooptation by the psychology field), Katz discovered a sphere where queer desire remained far from circumscribed.
“Art,” he said, “picked up the slack as the possibilities of language became attenuated.”
That revelation is at the center of “The First Homosexuals,” an exhibition that just opened at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago. Across more than 300 artworks, Katz and associate curator Johnny Willis, leading an international team of 22 scholars, will trace how the birth of the term “homosexual” reframed artistic expressions of identity and sexuality. (The first part of the show, a smaller presentation, ran in 2022.)
Tomioka Eisen, kuchi-e (frontispiece) with artist’s seal Shisen (c. 1906). Tirey-van Lohuizen Collection.
While the show takes 1869 as its watershed moment, it fittingly opens with a section called Beyond the Binary, which arrays early 19th-century works that make no distinction between same-sex and different-sex desires. Erotic Japanese prints by the likes of Hokusai and Utamaro make a showing, as does sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s 1823–24 relief on the mythical relationship between Anacreon and Cupid.
Also key here is George Catlin’s Dance to the Berdash (1835–37), which depicts Sac and Fox tribe members dancing in tribute to a Two-Spirit leader, an individual born male who lived as a female.
George Catlin, Dance to the Berdash (1835–37). Smithsonian American Art Museum.
“The Classical past is widely recognized in terms of same-sex desire. This was fairly ubiquitous and unproblematic,” Katz noted. What changed, he argued, is the arrival of colonialism, which “carried that delimited binary across the globe and took what were often extremely accepting indigenous cultures and essentially turned them homophobic.”
Proof is in a later portion, titled Colonialism and Resistance, which explores how Europeans imagined foreign territories and cultures as overrun by what they deemed deviant sexual relations. Artists resisted. Mexican painter Saturnino Herrán, in 1916, produced Nuestros dioses antiguos, which celebrates a pre-colonial indigenous sexuality by depicting ancient gods posing, in Katz’s words, “like camp queens”; while Richmond Barthé, in his 1935 masterpiece Feral Benga, deployed European sculpture traditions to capture a Black sensuality.
Saturnino Herrán, Nuestros dioses antiguos (1916). Colección Andrés Blaisten, México.
In between, in sections including Portraits, Relationships, and History, the exhibition gathers a host of queer art icons. There are paintings of Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde, as well as self-portraits by Romaine Brooks and Florine Stettheimer. There’s a 1923 female nude by Tamara de Lempicka that shatters gender norms, and illustrator Gerda Wegener’s drawings of her partner Lili Elbe, who was born male (and immortalized in the 2015 film The Danish Girl).
Félix Vallotton, Gertrude Stein (1907). Photo: Mitro Hood.
Other queer relationships come to life in Alice Austen’s 1891 photographs and Marie Laurencin’s paintings of young women mid-dance. Just as intimate are Thomas Eakins’s 1887 painting of his partner Walt Whitman, and Rosa Bonheur’s sketch of her lover Anna Klumpke, which is making a rare outing.
In another unique showing, eight paintings by controversial German artist Elisàr von Kupffer will be making their U.S. debut at “The First Homosexuals.” These works once hung in the Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion, a compound established by Von Kupffer in Switzerland in 1900 as a haven for Clarism, his neo-religious movement that opposed divisions by gender. Their styles bear out the artist’s Renaissance influences, but their subject matter, noted Katz, “illustrated his ideals.” One painting apparently portrays the first same-sex wedding in art history.
Elisàr von Kupffer, La danza (1918). © Municipality of Minusio – Centro Elisarion. Photo: Claudio Berger.
Bringing together these many artworks from across the globe was not without its challenges. Katz rued the lack of artifacts from India (which balked at the show’s title), Russia (loans from which were canceled due to the ongoing war), and Slovakia (whose new populist government scrapped all loans). A Columbian collector, Katz added, also pulled their loans, feeling the works wouldn’t be safe in the U.S. under the Trump administration. “We’ve really fallen,” he reflected.
The last is unsurprising, though, considering the president’s crusade against so-called “gender ideology extremism”—in short, his bid to erase transgender people. In its way, the show offers a fine, resonant riposte that “queer and trans are inseparable,” Katz said, “that the literal first definition of queerness was of a kind of third sex.” He added: “Most other countries beyond the West fully understood that there’s a range of positions within one’s acceptance or refusal of gender.”
Tamara de Lempicka, Nu assis de profil (1923). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
That latitude may have been first restricted by the emergence of the term “homosexual,” but to Katz, it doesn’t have to remain that way.
“The notion of homosexuality is an historical notion, and as with all things historical, is subject to change. My first hope is that we will come to understand that the definition of sexuality is not a natural definition, but an historical one,” he said. “In the final analysis for me, that is a position of liberation, because it means that we recognize that other possibilities exist.”
“The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939” is on view at Wrightwood 659, 659 W Wrightwood Ave, Chicago, Illinois, May 2–July 26, 2025. More

London has been hit by a heatwave this week and the temperature at Marble Arch rose even higher on Thursday night as British pop star-turned-artist Robbie Williams opened a solo exhibition on his home turf to a crowd of hundreds.
“Radical Honesty” at Moco Museum London, features nearly two dozen canvas works and sculptures by Williams revolving around the themes of modern-day anxiety and emotional vulnerability inspired by his personal experience. The show is Williams’s third collaboration with the museum, which has been presenting solo shows of his works at its spaces in Barcelona and Amsterdam.
Robbie Williams posing with this canvas work Radical Honesty II at the launch of his solo exhibition at Moco Museum London on May 1, 2025. © Photography by Rob Jones for Khroma Collective.
Unlike most art exhibition openings, this one at the pink-themed three-story complex carried a pop concert flavor. Dozens of fans waited outside the venue for hours, including a group that flew in from Germany and arrived at the barricaded entrance at 9 a.m. in the hope of meeting the 51-year-old celebrity. Invited guests arriving from 8 p.m had to occupy themselves with the works on show on the ground floor and the basement level, while waiting for the star’s speech before they could be allowed to climb up the stairs to the first floor, where the exhibition is held.
At about 9 p.m., Williams made his appearance in a denim outfit and greeted the 200-strong crowd. Among them were British TV personalities Leigh Francis and Andy Goldstein, as well as British artists Chris Levine and Philip Colbert.
“There is a lot of negativities when it comes to celebrity doing art. They shouldn’t do it,” Williams said in his speech, addressing the criticisms he has received about his art-making. The star long been an art collector and has been exhibiting his work, including a showcase at Sotheby’s in 2022 and the launch of a ceramics series last year. But he continues to be questioned about the intentions behind his work.
A general view of the atmosphere at the opening of Robbie Williams’s new solo art exhibition ‘Radical Honesty’ at Moco Museum on May 1, 2025 in London, England. Photo by Dave Benett.
“The question is always why. It’s always with a dismissive term,” he continued. “If I listened to what the critics say, I wouldn’t do anything. I wouldn’t be anyone. I wouldn’t go anyone. And yet, I stand here before you with complete humility.”
Lionel Logchines, who co-founded Moco Museum with Kim Logchines-Prins, his wife and the museum’s curator, said the couple began collecting Williams’s works three years ago. The couple first discovered Williams’s iPad drawings on Instagram, noting that the “Angels” singer-songwriter had already been drawing for nearly two decades while on tour. The pair now has five works including paintings and sculptures, he noted. He likes the humor and discussions about mental health issues in Williams’s works and how they resonate with viewers’ lives and inner selves.
“It makes you feel good, that you are not alone,” Logchines told me at the opening. “For example, at a party, there’s so much anxiety for me, and he’s honest about it. That’s what I love. His work is really strong, with powerful messages. I think he will be the next Banksy.”
While most of the attendees of the opening reception did not seem to be the typical art crowd (some were busy posing for selfies with the art or trying to snap a picture of the star), there was no lack of audience members trying to take a serious look at the works featured at the show. Williams’s creations hang alongside other works by the likes of Takashi Murakami, Banksy, George Condo, Daniel Arsham, and KAWS, on loan from various private collections.
Robbie Williams sits on his “introvert chair” at his solo exhibition ‘Radical Honesty’ at Moco Museum London. © Photography by Rob Jones for Khroma Collective.
The colorful works are approachable, with reflective statements spelled across canvas that can easily resonate with a general audience. It is not hard to link with them with Williams’s other recent screen offerings such as his eponymous Netflix documentary and biopic Better Man, as the works are distilled from his personal journey to fame and battle with dyslexia and ADHD.
For example, his large-scale canvas depicting hilarious morning mirror pep talks and the candid thoughts of introverts struggling in social situations drew the most attention. In one painting of a red cassette tape, he penned: “Just because you’re dyslexic doesnt mean Youre not stupid.” He dedicates a cozy off-white one-seater in one room to introverts, calling it an “introvert chair” with a canvas work on the wall behind the chair that spells out the “rules of engagement,” instructing people not to engage with the introvert sitting on the chair.
Prescribed Identity is a large-scale sculpture in the shape of a hoodie with many small pockets, in which Williams lays out his history with addiction and self-medication. Like & Subscribe is an installation of a marble headstone with “I’m dead now please life & subscribe” inscribed on the surface, mocking social media culture.
“In a world obsessed with keeping it together, embracing the chaos might just be the most radical thing you can do,” Williams noted in a statement.
“Robbie Williams: Radical Honesty” is on view at Moco Museum, 1-4 Marble Arch, London, for a limited time. More