Eliana Willis

When the Notre-Dame de Paris caught fire on April 19, 2019, there was a terrifying half hour window in which it seemed the cathedral might collapse. The world watched agape as the spire toppled and smoke billowed out across the Parisian skyline. The smarts and daring of firefighters proved decisive. By midnight, the authorities would declare “she is saved” and a human chain led out of the smoldering building, carrying artworks, relics, and valuable books to safety.
On the five-year anniversary of the blaze, an exhibition featuring many of the rescued works will go on display at Mobilier National in Paris, the home of France’s furniture collection. As suggested by the title, “Restoring the Grand Decors of Notre Dame,” the exhibition showcases the technical expertise of those who have meticulously restored the building’s paintings, tapestries, and carpets.
“Since the fire of 2019, nearly 1,000 craftsmen have worked daily to restore the cathedral, among them are painting restorers,” Mobilier National said. “[Alongside the paintings,] sketches, drawings, and multimedia will be used to show the exceptional know-how of heritage restorers.”
Laurent de La Hyre, Saint Peter Healing the Sick with His Shadow. Photo: Mobilier National.
Among the 21 paintings shown at Mobilier National are 13 prized religious works from the 17th century, known as the Mays, so named for the month in which Paris’s goldsmith guild presented them to the cathedral. Created to express renewed Catholic faith in the wake of a devastating series of wars between Catholics and Protestants in the final decades of the 16th century, the Mays employed the country’s finest painters, typically to depict the acts of the apostles.
The Mays themselves have endured a wandering history of mixed fortunes. Beginning in 1630, they were hanged on the stone pillars alongside the nave before being scattered during the tumult of the French Revolution. Returned in 1802, they were deemed incongruous with Notre-Dame’s redevelopment of the 1860s and sent to the Louvre where they remained until 1905. Of the 76 Mays painted, the whereabouts of 52 are known.
Charles Le Brun, The Martyrdom of St. Andrew (1646). Photo: Mobilier National.
Though undamaged by the fire, the Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs (DRAC) chose to perform long overdue restorations, hiring 50 restorers over a 24-month period for the task. At Mobilier National, the Mays are presented chronologically—the diocese has a new layout planned for Notre-Dame—and are granted long overdue attention.
We meet Laurent de la Hyre’s Saint Peter, who wanders head bent and palm upturned through a scene of delirious sickness. We see Charles Le Brun’s Andrew, a man naked before God moments before he’s set upon by soldiers. The dense, dark work was Le Brun’s first following training in Rome and do much to burnish his reputation. We watch Nicolas Loir’s crimson robed Paul calmly blind a magician before the Cypriot Proconsul.
Nicolas Loir, Saint Paul Blinds the False Prophet Barjesu (1650). Photo: Mobilier National.
Also of note is the one ton, nearly 90-foot long choir carpet that was commissioned by King Charles X in 1825 and designed to mimic a Gothic stained-glass window. Barring major events (such as the marriage of Napoleon III or the visit of Pope John Paul II), it is rarely displayed with only the upper half on display here—the lower is still being restored and fitted with a protective braid.
Mobilier National will also present 14 tapestries that depict the life of the Virgin Mary, which were commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu in the mid-17th century. Created to decorate Notre-Dame’s choir, the cathedral sold them to Strasbourg cathedral in 1739.
A cathedral chair designed by Ionna Vautrin. Photo: Philippe Migea.
A slightly more modern turn comes in the exhibition’s final section that shows examples of the new liturgical furniture that have been designed by Ionna Vautrin and manufactured by Bosc, a based in Landes, France.
Notre Dame is due to reopen on 8 December, 2024, following restoration costs approaching $1 billion.
“Restoring the Grand Decors of Notre Dame” is on view at the Mobilier National, Galerie des Gobelins, 42 avenue des Gobelins, Paris, France, April 24– July 21.
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“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” the 2024 exhibition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, promises to be a multi-sensory experience. Approximately 250 objects will be brought out from its collection, their various qualities enhanced onsite technologies.
The exhibition’s name refers to the “sleeping beauties” of the Met’s collection: garments that are so fragile that they can no longer be dressed on mannequins. They span across four centuries, and come from designers and fashion houses including Cristóbal Balenciaga, Lilly Daché, Hubert de Givenchy, Guy Laroche, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Loewe. Loewe’s contribution to the exhibition is a coat designed by Jonathan Anderson, made from oat, rye, and wheat grass which will slowly wilt and die during the course of the exhibition. Two examples of Charles James’s famous “Butterfly” ball gown will be included: one too delicate for display and the other in pristine condition.
Charles James, “Butterfly” ball gown (1955). Photo: Anna-Marie Kellen © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“When an item of clothing enters our collection, its status is changed irrevocably. What was once a vital part of a person’s lived experience is now a motionless ‘artwork’ that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled,” said Andrew Bolton, the institute’s curator in charge, in a statement. “The exhibition endeavors to animate these artworks by re-awakening their sensory capacities through a range of technologies, affording visitors sensorial ‘access’ to rare historical garments and rarefied contemporary fashions.”
Christian Dior, “May” ball gown (1953). Photo: © Nick Knight, 2024. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At the show, visitors can smell floral motifs in an exploration of the history of hats, with other scents developed by smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas. The walls of the gallery will be embossed with embroidery found on a 1615–20 waistcoat included in the exhibition, which visitors can touch and experience. An illusion technique called “Pepper’s ghost” will give visitors the opportunity to experience how women’s movement was restricted by the short-lived fashion trend of the “hobble skirt,” which peaked in popularity between 1908 and 1914.
The aural qualities of garments—notably Alexander McQueen’s famous razor clam shell dress from spring/summer 2001 and the metal designs in Marni’s spring/summer 2024 collection—will also be highlighted. Other technologies used in the show will include A.I., x-rays, video animation, and sound and light displays.
Iris van Herpen, “Physalia” dress (2020). Photo: © Nick Knight, 2024. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“’Sleeping Beauties’ will heighten our engagement with these masterpieces of fashion, by evoking what it was like to feel, move, hear, smell, and interact with them when they could be worn,” said Max Hollein, the Met’s director and CEO.
The garments and accessories will also be brought together by a theme of nature to further emphasize their transience and changeability. The exhibition will be split into three distinct areas, namely earth, air, and water, to explore how these elements have inspired fashion motifs and trends.
Jonathan Anderson, Coat, (2023). Courtesy Loewe. Photo: © Nick Knight, 2024. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The theme will echo that of the Costume Institute Benefit, better known as the Met Gala—its dress code this year is “The Garden of Time.” A fixture on art and fashion calendars, the gala happens as always on the first Monday of May, and will be co-chaired this year by Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lopez, Anna Wintour, and Zendaya. The event’s decorative centerpiece, installed in the Met’s Great Hall, will be unveiled during the gala and remain on view through May 7, before “Sleeping Beauties” opens on May 10.
“By appealing to the widest possible range of human senses,” said Bolton, “the show aims to reconnect with the works on display as they were originally intended—with vibrancy, with dynamism, and ultimately with life.”
Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen, Dress (2011). Photo: © Nick Knight, 2024. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave, New York, May 10–September 2.
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To Karnika Bai, Shanthi Muniswamy, and Joythi H., the opening of their eye-catching, monumental mural Diaspore (2024) at the Arsenale was more than just a celebration of their Venice debut. It was also an event to mark the 10th anniversary of India’s recognition of transgender individuals, a defining moment that allowed these trans artists and their community to start to feel a little less foreign in their own country.
“If this edition’s theme, ‘Foreigners Everywhere,’ means being in different cultures and territories where you do not belong, this applies to us too” Bai, one of the lead artists from the Bangalore-based art collective Aravani Art Project, said in an interview during early hours of Tuesday’s pre-opening of the main exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
“We did not feel belong[ing] to the bodies that we were born into. People in our own country see us coming from another country, another culture. We are foreigners.”
While “Foreigners Everywhere” places exile, the marginalized, and the immigrant at the focal point of the exhibition featuring more than 330 artists and collectives, the work by Aravani Art Project pointed to another layer of understanding to the concept of “foreigner.”
The artists noted that members of the transgender community were wholly disregarded by the society in India. Their rights and needs were not recognized, and transwomen were seen by the mainstream as sex workers and beggars, they added. That only began to change exactly 10 years ago this week when the Supreme Court in India formally recognized transgenders as a “third gender” in a landmark judgement in response to concerns over the discrimination and harassment against them.
Xiyadie, Don’t Worry, Mom is Spinning Thread in the Next Room (A Love Scene When High School Student is at Home Writing Homework) (2019), featured at the Arsenale, Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
The artists have been part of the collective that works with the transgender community for eight years. They wanted to show the public that they are human beings and can pursue their dreams and individual freedoms like everyone else. Diaspore is a work about gender dysphoria and the journey of transition, the artists noted.
It is also a self-portrait. Joythi H, for example, is depicted holding an open bird cage releasing the imprisoned animal. The work contains motifs that relate to how transgender people find refuge in the physical body they feel comfortable with after transition. “We are no longer caged. We are free as a bird,” said Muniswamy.
Victor Brecheret, Virgin and Chile, featured in “Nucleo Storico Italians Everywhere,” Venice Biennale 2024. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
But they still have to deal with the discomfort and challenges of daily life. The artists said that when they applied for their passports to travel to Venice for the exhibition, they were questioned by the authorities repeatedly. “Why are you going to Venice? They asked why, why, why, just because of our identity,” Bai said. “But we are here. We are very proud to represent India and the transgender community.”
While the show shines a spotlight on works by queer, Indigenous, and diasporic artists, many of whom were previously unrepresented in the Venice event, some of the works on show also highlight the historical and political causes for such migration and repression, and the cultural influences they picked up along the way.
The section “Nucleo Storico” showcases dozens of works by Italian artists from the 20th century who traveled abroad and cultivated their oeuvre in the countries they resided, from Asia to Africa and the Americas. They all left the country for different reasons. They included those orientalists obsessed with the exoticism of Asia and Africa, convoys of the Italian colonial forces, and those who fled the fascist regime, antisemitic laws, and the country’s economic woes during World War II. The works are displayed on a glass easel, known as cavaletes de vidro, designed by Lina Bo Bardi, an Italian architect, designer, and exhibition maker who moved to Brazil in 1946.
The 60th Venice Biennale opens on April 20 and runs through November 24, 2024. 
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The story of Impressionism’s birth has been told so often, it’s more myth than historic event. Generally, the tale goes something like this: in 1874, a ragtag gang of disaffected artists reject the Paris Salon by staging an alternative exhibition, critics lambast the art, and the ‘impressionism’ movement is born.
It’s an inaccurate simplification, one the Musée d’Orsay is keen to counter and complicate in an encyclopedic new exhibition “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism.” The show arrives 150 years on from that exhibition and together with Washington’s National Gallery of Art, which will host the show in the Fall, the curators stress the primacy of context.
A scene from Musée d’Orsay’s virtual reality in which Monet paints the Le Havre seascape. Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
One approach arrives via “Tonight With the Impressionists,” a 45-minute virtual reality experience in which visitors flit between broad Parisian boulevards, Bougival’s plein-air painters, Monet’s hotel balcony, and the exhibition itself.
But, beyond art, what was going on in late 1800s Paris? Quite a lot, actually. The Third Republic was afoot with the French capital having endured siege in the Franco-Prussian war, barricade and bloodshed in the Commune insurrection, and aggressive transformation by diktat of Baron Haussmann.
The exterior of the building that held the exhibition in 1874. Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
Against this backdrop, 31 artists formed a co-op and launched a show in a photography studio north of the Seine. Sure, it was a riposte to the stuffy traditions of the Salon, but their reasons were as much financial as artistic. They wanted to control how their work was exhibited and sold.
Yes, the works shown by the Société Anonyme at 35 Boulevard des Capucines purported to be forward-looking, but there was no deep philosophy, no cohesive aesthetic. In fact, the “First Impressionist Exhibition,” the rather bland name by which the show has become known, is somewhat inaccurate: a mere seven of the 31 artists are considered Impressionists.
Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines (1874). Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
The exhibition was a critical and commercial failure. The group dissolved shortly thereafter and it would take several years for Impressionism to begin garnering the popularity it still enjoys today.
All the same, the show had its revolutions. The setting was new, two stories of eccentrically decorated interiors, flooded with light from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Once the sun set, gas lamps flickered on meaning that for a single franc, art lovers could visit after work. The d’Orsay show begins here, staging black-and-white photographs of the exhibition space before leading into the 130 works it has assembled.
Berthe Morisot, Port de Lorient (1869). Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
Many of the names swept up by the broad brush of Impressionism are on display here. There’s Edgar Degas with the twirl and step of his ballerinas, Paul Cézanne with his rural houses built of bold angularity, Edouard Manet and his earnest portrayals of modern life, Berthe Morisot’s young and fashionable scenes of light and whimsy. And, of course, there’s Claude Monet and his work Impression, Soleil Levant (1872), the hazy waterscape retrospectively offered up as the movement’s founding masterpiece.
There’s also much besides that doesn’t fit so neatly: an ornate bronze from Marius-Jean-Antonin Mercié, etchings both stern and bucolic from Félix Bracquemond, Camille Cabaillot-Lassalle’s oil painting of the 1874 Salon. One begins to question what exactly comprises Impressionism—and that’s precisely the point.
“Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism” is on view at the Musée D’Orsay, Esplanade Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Paris, France, through July 14, 2024. It travels to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, September 8, 2024–January 19, 2025.
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An enormous retrospective of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s eight-decade career will take over the entire ground floor of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Australia from December 15. The exhibition’s 180 works, which pair the NGV’s holdings with significant loans, will bridge Kusama’s early works with her latest spectacles, including the Australian debut of two new site-specific installations, and a never-before-seen Infinity Room. Kusama assisted the NGV in curating the show, even contributing artifacts from her own archives.
Portrait of Yayoi Kusama (c.1939). © Yayoi Kusama.
“We’re proud to back the the NGV’s summer blockbuster exhibition,” said Steve Dimopoulos, Victoria’s Minister for Tourism, Sport and Major Events, in a statement. “This must-see exhibition will attract visitors from around Australia and beyond—boosting our businesses and supporting local jobs.” The Hon. Colin Brooks, Victoria’s Minister for Creative Industries, called it “another coup for our creative state.”
Yayoi Kusama, The obliteration room (2002–present). Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art. © Yayoi Kusama.
“Yayoi Kusama” will play out across a thematic chronology starting with sketches, drawings, and paintings the artist made between the late 1930s and the early 1950s, while still living in Matsumoto, Japan—as well as from the late 1950s, when she left for Seattle, and then New York. Early family and personal photographs will help tell the rich tale.
Kusama’s gavel-smashing Infinity Nets paintings of the late 1950s and 1960s will demonstrate the development of her search for transcendence through vastness, and her Accumulation sculptures of the 1960s and 1970s will show her career-long affinity for repetition. Perhaps in lieu of the comments that clouded Kusama’s show in San Francisco last year, this show will share “archival materials pertaining to her socially engaged and politically charged performance and studio-based activities.”
Yayoi Kusama, Traveling life (1964). The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. © Yayoi Kusama. Photo: Norihiro Ueno
The second half of Yayoi Kusama will present the sensational sights that have since catapulted the artist to household name recognition. The artist will again redux her reflective breakout installation Narcissus Garden, which was nearly barred from the 1966 Venice Biennale and has been replicated in an array of settings since. The NGV noted it’s aiming to acquire this rendition through its 2024 Annual Appeal.
Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin (1981). Collection of Daisuke Miyatsu. © Yayoi Kusama.
Two attractions will mark their Australia premier: the NGV’s newly acquired Dancing Pumpkin (2020)—one of five made—which audiences will be able to dance beneath, as well the six-feet tall tentacles of THE HOPE OF THE POLKA DOTS BURIED IN INFINITY WILL ETERNALLY COVER THE UNIVERSE (2019). Another space will evoke Kusama’s New York studio to honor her exploratory psychedelic parties, among the many varieties of “happenings” she staged in the 1960s. Still, none of these fantastical sights and scenes will inspire the same glee and awe as the unveiling of her new “kaleidoscope” Infinity Room.
Installation view of Yayoi Kusama, Infinity mirror room – Phall’s Field (1965) at the Castellane Gallery, New York. © Yayoi Kusama.
The artist’s polka dots will welcome viewers into the show from the NGV’s lobby, and Dot Vision, first realized in 2013, will form a whimsical cloud cover over the NGV International’s Great Hall. To truly complete her big Australian debut, the artist will also fabricate a site-specific artwork for the NGV’s iconic Waterwall. It’s not the NGV’s first time courting viral names to draw foot traffic, but it might be their biggest yet.
“Yayoi Kusama” is on view at the National Gallery of Victoria, 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, Australia, December 15, 2024–April 21, 2025.
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Inside the palace of the high priest of Vodoun in Benin, there is a framed portrait of George Floyd, with Breanna Taylor and Rashad Lewis on either side. Below their images is a line written in red letters: “Remember your ancestors.”
The Nigerian curator Azu Nwagbogu saw this on a research tour through the country that he took after he was tasked with the honor of curating the first pavilion for Benin at the Venice Biennale. Back in December 2022, he had received an unexpected phone call from the Beninese President asking him to stage the first pavilion for the West African nation. Nwagbogu then went on a journey across the country to meet with traditional rulers and custodians of culture to discuss Beninese history, culture, art, and the impact of the transatlantic slave trade.
The title of the pavilion “Everything Precious is Fragile” was inspired by Nwagbogu’s meetings with these rulers, and the Yoruba concept of Gèlèdè that focuses on the feminist idea of “rematriation” or advocating giving and receiving. The pavilion, entirely funded by the government of Benin, is among a total of 13 African countries that are presenting official national pavilions—up from nine in 2022.
Benin: Curator Azu Nwagbogu on his trip around Benin. Credit: Ugochukwu Emeberiodo
Among the 13 are three additional debutants staging their first ever national pavilions. These are Senegal, which will present “Bokk – Bounds” by Senegalese Alioune Diagne in the Arsenale, staged with Galerie Templon. Ethiopia is presenting “Prejudice and Belonging,” featuring the work of Tesfaye Urgessa, and Tanzania is displaying the group show “A Flight in Reverse Mirrors.” Returning African nations include Egypt, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
“We are not interested in treating Venice like some kind of Mecca where we go every two years and that’s it,” Nwagbogu noted. “Europe is not our center. Europe is an important place to have a conversation, but it is not the center of the world. After Venice, we need to bring the focus and intellectual capital back to Africa to have important conversations.”
The 13 pavilions are not alone—there are another 18 national pavilions from Europe and North America that are presenting artists from Africa or the diaspora. These include the Dutch Pavilion, which is showing the work of Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, a collective of Congolese artists. Kapwani Kiwanga, a Canadian artist of Tanzanian descent, is presenting new work for Canada. French-Caribbean artist Julien Creuzet is representing France, co-curated by Cindy Sissokho and Céline Kopp; Portuguese-Angolan artist Mónica de Miranda is showing work alongside others in the Portuguese national pavilion, and British filmmaker John Akomfrah, of Ghanaian descent, is representing Great Britain.
John Akomfrah at his London studio, 2016. Photo: © Jack Hems, courtesy of the British Council.
Artists from the continent can also be found in Pedrosa’s main exhibition “Foreigners Everywhere”—where 54 artists from the 331 artists and collectives are African. Participants include Kudzanai Chiurai from Zimbabwe, known for his mixed media work that comprises paintings, videos, drawings, and photographs to tackle socio-political issues in his home country; Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi, who is 93 years old, will also be on view. He is known for his paintings and drawings that combine motifs from African, Islamic, and Western art.
“Venice is like an old lady that needs to be redressed,” Cameroonian-French curator Simon Njami said in a telephone interview from Venice. He has curated “The Blue Note” for the Ivory Coast Pavilion, which features five Ivorian artists inspired by the blue note in jazz music, which has its origins in the music made by African slaves. “I think that more African countries are understanding the importance of soft power. The Venice Biennale is still a platform where people can show their skills and talk for themselves. I think there’s a growing consciousness of the importance in showing art. Africa has a certain image and art can give another image.”
Work of Alioune Diagne, who is representing Senegal at the Venice Biennale. Photo © Laurent Edeline. © Courtesy of the artist and TEMPLON, Paris, Brussels, New York
“[‘The Blue Note’] is about resilience,” Njami said. “It’s a double-sided lesson for Africans and all people complaining that they’re victims due to colonialization. The lesson is that people with nothing to their names and no land invented the blue note that made a revolution in music because it created blues jazz. You don’t need to be rich to be able to say something.”
Njami, who previously called Africa’s participation in Venice a mess, believes that this year more African governments are supporting their country’s artists through representation that allows them to display their art on their own terms and not through the eyes of foreign curators. He said that more African nations will likely be represented in Venice in the future as further governments realize the social and political value of showing their art internationally.
But they do not always return. Ghana, which made an impressive debut in 2019 and participated again in 2022, is not presenting a pavilion this year. A Ghanaian art dealer said over telephone that this was due to a lack of funding.
Artists themselves are often key lobbyists helping to push for the launch of national pavilions and for their continuation year after year. “Since I was an art student, I always wondered why Ethiopia wasn’t represented in Venice,” the Ethiopian artist Tesfaye Urgessa, who is representing the country for their first pavilion, said in an interview.
Tesfaye Urgessa is representing Ethiopia at the Venice Biennale. Courtesy of Tesfaye Urgessa and Saatchi Yates. Photography by Kameron Cooper.
Urgessa’s alluring abstract figurative paintings, which are determined and unapologetic, reflect his experiences of racism after moving from Ethiopia to Germany. One year ago, he requested support from the Ministry of Tourism. After a lengthy conversation and much convincing, the ministry’s officials agreed. Yet funding for the Ethiopian pavilion did not come from the state, but was raised from private donors.
Nigeria, which staged its first pavilion in 2019, is another example of a mix of state blessing coupled with private funding (other pavilions in the Giardini, like the U.K., have mixed sponsorship). Titled “Nigeria Imaginary,” it will feature works by Ndidi Dike and Yinka Shonibare in a group show. Its main sponsorship comes from Qatar Museums. “There’s a real sense of optimism and dreaming that sits within the Nigerian psyche,” Aindrea Emelife, an art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art at MOWAA (the Museum of West African Art which is due to open this fall) and the curator of the pavilion, said in an interview.
“Nigerians often say, ‘no condition is permanent,’” noted the curator, who is based between between Lagos and London. “It’s such an interesting phrase because it acknowledges that things currently are not great, but it still reflects the opportunity that things could be better.” She emphasized how the theme of the pavilion looks back at specific moments in Nigerian history and personal memory. It also “explores roads not taken and a new imagination for the nation,” she added.
Aindrea Emelife is curating the Nigerian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Courtesy Aindrea Emelife
While African art is more present than ever, questions over misrepresentation linger. The Cameroonian pavilion is once again jointly curated by Cameroonian Paul Emmanuel Loga Mahop and Sandro Orlandi Stagl from Italy. Stagl was one of two foreign curators responsible for Kenya’s controversial showing in 2015, which the African nation then disowned. This year, the group exhibition is called “Nemo propheta in patria” (translated: no man is a prophet in his own land) and includes Jean Michel Dissake and Hako Hankson.
Crucially, increased African representation at the Venice Biennale means greater visibility and dialogue on the African continent as well. It also offers a chance to change the narrative. “Whether we show our works here in Venice or in a museum, wherever it may be in the West is great,” Ced’art Tamasala and Matthieu Kasiama of CATPC said as they finished installing in Venice. “But it means nothing unless we can share the benefits with our entire community, and we can create a level playing field in which we can all have access to the events that, so far, we have been excluded from.”
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In 1958, the music and fashion photographer Art Kane gathered together 57 of the most significant figures in jazz music around the stoops of 17 West 126th street in Harlem, New York. The shoot, known as “A Great Day in Harlem,” was commissioned for Esquire Magazine‘s January 1959 issue, and sitters included Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, and Count Basie.
Art Kane, A Great Day in Harlem (1958). © Art Kane Archive.
Forty years later, the photographer Gordon Parks paid homage to Kane’s shoot with a photograph that gathered 177 rappers and hip-hop artists on that same stoop in Harlem. Legendary figures in the photo, titled A Great Day in Hip Hop, included Busta Rhymes, Rakim, Slick Rick, Da Brat, Revered Rum, Fat Joe, and Naughty by Nature. Members of the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and the Wu-Tang Clan were also invited but did not attend.
The shoot was commissioned by hip-hop magazine XXL’s editor-in-chief Sheena Lester and became the largest gathering of musicians in a single image in history. By 1998, the front door seen in Kane’s shot had been boarded over, as had the left-hand window.
Johanna Fiore, Rev Run Arrives (1998) © Johanna Fiore.
Now, as hip-hop enters its 51st year, an installation at the rotunda of New York’s City Hall is celebrating that great day with a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the shoot. Titled “Hip Hop’s Greatest Day,” the show features shots by Jonathan Rheingold, then-publisher and co-founder of XXL, and those by the magazine’s editor Ben Osborne and Parks’s protégé, Johanna Fiore. Flyers and posters from the early days of hip-hop in New York, featuring icons from Run DMC to Salt-N-Pepa to DJ Kool Herc, are also included.
Jonathan Rheingold, Rakim (1998) © Jonathan Rheingold.
In a statement, Rheingold said he “made it a mission to identify folks who were snap­ping photos on 126th street that day and developed the largest archive of behind-the-scenes photos documenting that great day.” Parks may not have been a fan of hip-hop, he added, but “he understood the importance of this opportunity. And Sheena Lester, who was the editor-in-chief at the time, really convinced him that there was really no other photographer that one could possibly think of that would be more suitable to capture such an amazing moment than him, and he took it on.”
Jonathan Rheingold, Slick Rick (1998) © Jonathan Rheingold.
The installation is part of Rheingold’s ongoing efforts to celebrate the historical shoot, which includes a five-episode audio series, The Greatest Day, on what went into planning and engineering the photo.
“We are so thrilled to have the mayor’s office and Department of Cultural Affairs really give us a venue to share this with the rest of the city,” he said. “Hip-hop is part of the fabric of New York history, so of course it belongs in City Hall.”
“Hip Hop’s Greatest Day” is on view at City Hall Park, New York, through June 24. It can be visited by joining a public tour.
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