Eliana Willis

Chiara Camoni believes that there are two kinds of artists. There are “those who do not touch matter,” she says, “and those who cannot do without it.”
“I belong to this second group,” Camoni adds. That feels apparent when looking at her highly sensual works, rich organic matter mixes with tactile ceramics. Her carefully conceived sculptures explore the meeting point between domestic design and the natural world: vibrant flowers, colorful vegetation, and anthromorphized forms meet in energetic installations, which are created via her instinctive gestures.
The Italian artist also draws and makes vegetable prints; she has previously worked on expansive films. Much of this range is on view in “Call and gather. Sisters. Moths and flame twisters. Lioness bones, snakes and stones,” her new exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, the largest body of work ever shown by the artist.
The exhibition’s radial floor design is inspired by Italy’s late Renaissance gardens and ancient amphitheaters, inviting viewers to wander through its various pathways or linger for a moment among individual works.
Photo: Arthur Pequin
“When I entered the Shed space at Pirelli HangarBicocca, I immediately felt the need to seek its center, then to open the doors to let the light in,” Camoni tells me in an interview. “At that point, I began to relate to the space in its entirety. Without raising walls, I drew corridors, rooms, environments. Images of archaeological sites and gardens came in, and we know that weeds, shrubs, and wild vegetation happily grow where there are ruins.”
Her Butterfly Vases (2020–22) challenge the imagined line between art and craft and are made using foraged plants. They are glazed with sand collected from local rivers and the iridescent ashes of flowers, reimagining Egyptian canopic jars, ancient food storage earthenware, and antique decorative vases.
The show also features the artist’s human-sized Sisters (2017–23), which change form through the duration of an exhibition. Some, for example, are made of wax which gradually melts, creating a constantly evolving form.
Chiara Camoni’s Sister, (2022). Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024. Produced by Biennale Gherdëina. Courtesy the artist; SpazioA, Pistoia, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio
“I work by addressing monumentality not in terms of size, but rather in poignancy, density, reiteration of gestures, temporal duration,” Camoni says. “The Sisters are monumental figures, although they are on a human scale. They are sculptures that live in change, filled with themselves, composed of thousands of small pieces of hand-molded terracotta. They configure themselves differently each time: they come, they show off, and then they are ready to disappear again!”
Camoni’s ceramics mirror the inherently individual nature of her organic matter. They are rustic, asymmetrical, and carry the various marks and scars left by the artist’s hand. “I believe they come from an unconscious, emotional zone and do not follow the linear progression of rational thought,” she adds.
Chiara Camoni’s “Call and gather. Sisters. Moths and flame twisters. Lioness bones, snakes and stones.” Exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, (2024). Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio
Camoni has a highly collaborative process with nature, but also with friends and family who take part in creative workshops. “Much of my work originates at home or in the garden, conditioned by the weather and climate, as well as the surrounding sounds and voices,” she says. “I experience the wonder, the encounter with the artwork, which I consider a subject in its own right, that demands an active relationship.”
She began working together with her grandmother, Ines Bassanetti, early in her artistic practice in 2002. Bassanetti went on to become her assistant, leading to an unusually close familial artistic bond. Her grandmother created a body of plant and animal drawings with Camoni, part of La Grande Madre series. More recently, the artist invited friends and collaborators to choose books and memorabilia for Carrozzone (2021), an installation taking the form of a traditional wagon.
Chiara Camoni’s “Call and gather. Sisters. Moths and flame twisters. Lioness bones, snakes and stones.” Exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, (2024). Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, MilanPhoto Agostino Osio
“I believe that authorship can be opened to other people,” she notes. “I like to bypass a certain technical competence, to welcome unexpected deviations. I also feel that around the artworks in the before and after—in the creative moment that precedes them and in the fruition and activation that follows—moments of intensity, little epiphanies coagulate. If I am not alone, if there is someone with me who sees and feels all this, then they really exist.”
Many of the items used in the artist’s work—from plants to ashes, sand, and soil—are collected from her surroundings. It is important to her that they come from her everyday experience, and she often transforms original materials in radical ways, sometimes burning or combining, modeling or sorting them. While she roots her practice within ancestral and archaic traditions, she also references a sense of collapsing time with her materials.
Chiara Camoni’s Dogs (Bruno and Tre), (2024). Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024. Produced by Pirelli HangarBicocca. Courtesy the artist; SpazioA, Pistoia, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio
“Ceramics, stone, or wood are as contemporary to us as a smartphone,” she says. “It all starts with a walk, which can also take place in a city; I collect flowers, leaves, wild herbs and, thanks to the juices they release on the fabric, these figures ‘arrive.’ I consider them to be spirits hidden behind the first level of reality, as we see it.”
Camoni hopes her works create an embodied experience for the viewer, which goes beyond the visual. “This exhibition is informed with energy, which I hope will be felt,” she notes. “There is a vibration running through it all, moving in the snakes slithering low to the ground, rising in the more vertical figures, winding up and down. There are so many eyes, looking everywhere, crossing the audience’s gazes but also looking at each other…”

“Call and gather. Sisters. Moths and flame twisters. Lioness bones, snakes and stones” is on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, through July 21, 2024.

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Qatar’s cultural landscape is progressing at a dizzying speed. The office leading the diminutive Gulf country’s cultural development, Qatar Museums, is investing heavily in the effort, allocating billions  to erect world-class museums, restore important heritage sites, and stage public art installations, many of them in far-flung patches of the desert. Barely the size of Jamaica, Qatar has opened no fewer than five major museums in the last 15 years, as well as numerous stadiums—as many as eight—in advance of the World Cup in 2022, the first Arab nation to host the international sporting event.
A new biennial, Design Doha, is the latest arrow in Qatar Museums’ quiver, and the newest initiative from its chairperson, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family. She is also a leading collector, known for acquiring major works from Paul Cézanne to Mark Rothko, on Qatar’s behalf.
Design Doha continues Qatar’s bid to transform the peninsula’s capital city into a global center of art and design. This year, its inaugural edition, the platform featured over 100 designers from the Middle East and North African (MENA), working in a range of disciplines, from architecture, urbanism, and landscape design to graphic design, textiles, woodwork, glass, and ceramics.
Richard Yasmine’s After Ago Collection, a tribute to Beirut’s architectural history.
Attending the opening week of Design Doha followed a dizzying pace, too, hustling between a head-spinning line-up of events, exhibitions, popups, and activations—each one bursting with top-notch craftsmanship and novel ingenuity. The sentiment was shared by the platform’s artistic director Glenn Adamson. The New York-based art and design historian said he was taken with the “explosive energy and creativity” of the Arab design scene. “As a newcomer to the region myself, I didn’t appreciate just how much talent there was,” he continued, “and it’s been inspiring to see the energy and commitment that participants brought to the event.”
The central showcase, “Arab Design Now” (through August 5), is said to be the first museum-level survey of contemporary Arab design. It consists of 74 works by MENA designers spread across several floors of M7, a creative hive centrally located in the modern, bustling neighborhood of Msheireb. The exhibition, curated by Rana Beiruti (founder of Amman Design Week in Jordan) reflects how “the Arab world is a diverse place,” she told me, “full of people from different walks of life and cultures. I wanted to celebrate that and show that Arab design is not disconnected from the global condition of design. Arab designers face and respond to the same challenges for our collective future.”
Installation view of “Arab Design Now” with Salima Naji’s clay dwellings on the right. © Edmund Sumner. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
“I also wanted to highlight,” she added, “the importance of looking at craft as an extension of the land, and the way designers in the Arab world respond to the unique geography of the region with innovation in material and attentiveness to sustainability.”
In one work, Sharing the Earth (Spatial Interiorities) (2023), architect Salima Naji mined her decades of research into vernacular building in Morocco, constructing a two-part cylindrical dwelling out of clay, straw, wool, and palm trunks sourced from a farm in Qatar, with traditional oculi at the top to allow for air flow. In another work, Tiamat (2023), designer AAU ANASTAS created a structure in self-supporting stone, its undulating shape informed by computational analysis of sand dunes as well as the Gothic-inspired pointed arches found across Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.
AAU ANASTAS, Tiamat (2023). © Edmund Sumner. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
Another observation from Design Doha is how carefully the designers have struck a balance between traditional craft sensibilities and contemporary aesthetics. “This is clearly a region that is currently enjoying the best of both worlds,” said Adamson. “Like Japan, Italy and Scandinavia in the 1950s and 1960s—geographies that reshaped global design at the time—you have a basis of continuous artisanship combined with newly emerging experimental practice.”
Installation view of “100 Arabic Posters.” © Jochen Braun. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
Elsewhere in M7, an exhibition of 100 Arabic posters presented the vibrancy of graphic design in the region while another looked back on a century of architecture in Doha, tracing the history of the city’s built environment through a variety of interpreted styles such as Arabic Deco, Doha Classicism, and Qatar’s take on Brutalism.
Upstairs in a dimly lit, contemplative space, we took in “Weaving Poems,” showcasing the talent of Afghan-born, Amman-based designer Maryam Omar, who was commissioned to create a series of hand-woven abstract carpets inspired by the poetry and oral heritage of women weavers in Afghanistan, with whom she co-created the carpets. The exhibition is a product of Turquoise Mountain, a nonprofit founded by King Charles in 2006 to support artists across Afghanistan, Myanmar, and the Middle East.
Installation view of “Weaving Poems.” © Julián Velásquez. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
Another highlight is Moroccan artist Amine al Gotaibi’s astonishing work Desert installed at the Ned. “The combination of his soulful work in copper and wool with David Chipperfield’s sublime reimagination of an existing building (the former Ministry of the Interior) is just perfection,” said Adamson.
No cultural excursion to Doha would be complete without outings to the I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art, an instant landmark when it launched in 2008; the National Library, created by Rem Koolhaas/OMA (who’s also designing the Qatar Auto Museum, to be completed later this year), said to house a million rare books, manuscripts, and other materials stacked in a single open-space plan; and the striking new National Museum, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel to resemble massive discs of “desert rose” crystal formations, the kind that occur naturally in the Arabian Desert.
The National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel. Photo: Lee Carter.
Two more major museums are planned before the decade is out. Opening in 2029, the Lusail Museum—designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron—will hold one of the world’s most extensive collections of art, much of it from Qatar Museums’ holdings of European painters depicting the Arab world. And, in 2030, the Art Mill Museum will arrive, housed in a historic flour mill and designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena. The museum will incorporate the mill’s signature towering silos in its design.)
Then there’s Richard Serra’s East-West/West-East (2014) near the village of Zekreet on the western shore of the peninsula (about an hour’s drive from Doha on the east coast). Its four monumental Cor-Ten plates jut out of the sand like relics of a future civilization, in keeping with the cryptic austerity of the surrounding terrain.
Richard Serra, East-West/West-East (2014). Photo: Lee Carter.
There’s no question this is an optimistic moment for Qatar’s art and design scene, bolstered by the royal family’s largesse, a long history of fine craftsmanship, and a newly outward-looking perspective.
“Now that we have this success behind us and people know what Design Doha is,” reflected Adamson, “I think it will be possible to do something still more ambitious… I think the Arab region is now positioned to assume not just a more active, but in fact a leadership role in the global design conversation.”
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Rare treasures from the life of literary legend Anaïs Nin went on view in Santa Monica this week. The famed diarist was born in France, raised in New York, and returned to Paris before moving to America permanently in the 1930s. She spent a significant amount of time in LA along the way. Her ashes were scattered in Santa Monica Bay.
Elizabeth Banks’s Brownstone Productions collaborated with the Anaïs Nin Foundation on “Celebrating a Renegade,” a multigenerational exhibition that shares ephemera, artworks Nin made, paintings made of her, and pieces from five contemporary artists inspired by her legacy. The Georgian Hotel’s creative director Amber Arbucci curated the show, which remains on view at the landmark hotel’s Gallery 33 through March 22.
An installation featuring Nin’s typewriter, and three portraits pulled from her Silver Lake home—two of which are by John Maynard. Photo: Dashiell King, courtesy of The Georgian Hotel
Exhibition producer Brandon Milbradt told me she pitched this concept to the Georgian while developing a TV series around Nin. “Anaïs deeply admired artists, was a champion of other creators,” Milbrandt wrote. “I thought, why not showcase Anaïs with artists inspired by Nin herself?” Throughout her life, Nin produced four novels, four works of nonfiction, five collections of short stories, and kept a diary for 63 years that detailed her poetic introspections and many torrid affairs. Never-before-seen watercolors that famed author Henry Miller painted for Nin appear in “Celebrating a Renegade.”
Henry Miller, Childhood Dream (1973). Photo: Dashiell King, courtesy of The Georgian Hotel
“Anaïs was a dangerous writer in her time, and, for better or worse, is just as relevant today,” Milbradt said. In the 47 years since Nin’s death, she’s been called a monster (because she terminated a pregnancy), a narcissist (because she liked ostentatious outfits), and a bigamist (because she was.) But, as Nin’s diary noted, “no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men.”
Anaïs Nin. Courtesy of the Anaïs Nin Foundation
Nin was born in 1903 to two musicians. Nin’s mother moved her and her two brothers to New York after her father absconded with his mistress. Nin’s diary began as a letter entreating her father to return on that very voyage, at age 11. She dropped out of high school to work as an artist’s model and met her first husband, banker Hugh Guiler, in Havana at 20. Guiler elected to be omitted from the seven volumes of Nin’s diary that she edited and published from 1966 through 1977, but they stayed together throughout Nin’s life. Guiler’s money helped support the bohemians she knew.
Anaïs Nin, Circle of Friends, New York. Photo by Dashiell King. courtesy of The Georgian Hotel
“You are always asked to solve problems, to help, to be selfless,” Miller is recorded as telling Nin in a 1932 diary entry. “Meanwhile there is your writing, deeper and better than anybody’s, which nobody gives a damn about and nobody helps you to do.” Readers did give a damn about Nin’s writing though, ever since her diary debuted at the height of feminism’s second wave—and despite a period of repudiation when her ex-husband published her unedited diaries and extensive erotica.
Henry Miller, For Anaïs from Henry (1979). Photo by Dashiell King. courtesy of The Georgian Hotel
No amount of moralizing ever extinguished Nin’s impact. Social media and sex positivity have reinstated her accolades.
“Celebrating a Renegade” hangs Nin’s rarely-seen Circle of Friends drawings next to a contemporary collage with her face at center by Colette Standish, who produced an entire series of treated mirrors and lightboxes titled “Anaïs Through the Looking Glass and Other Stories.” The nudes of Michelle Magdalena Maddox’s sensual black-and-white photographs evoke Nin in more ways than one. Javiera Estrada’s technicolor free love photography also appears, alongside an intimate bathtub scene painted by Chloe Strang. Elsewhere, fragments from Amanda Maciel Antunes’s Trapeze Project foreground Nin’s relics.
An installation featuring Anaïs Nin’s diaries, old photos, and a handwritten note from Henry Miller on vintage Barbizon Hotel stationary. Photo by Dashiell King. courtesy of The Georgian Hotel
“From the little girl with a diary who migrated with her single mother as a child to begin a life in a new country, to the woman of many deaths and rebirths whose complexity of life challenged the dominant gender paradigms of our times,” Maciel Antunes said, “I want to remember her as a woman who removed obstacles to create her own freedom and did not wait for it to be given to her.” Nin’s handwritten journals sit nearby in a glass case. Animated by the artworks of our time, you can all but hear her voice floating off the bay, encouraging everyone who passes through “Celebrating a Renegade” to seize their liberty too.
“Celebrating a Renegade” is on view at Gallery 33, 1415 Ocean Ave, Santa Monica, California, through March 22.
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“I was drinking like eight coffees a day trying to figure this out,” Terence Koh was telling me last month, knelt over a portable burner in an empty micro gallery that would become his installation called KOHFEE. “Thinking about my move to L.A. and all these things, thinking about what the world needs right now… I don’t think the world needs another coffee shop.” I totally agree, and yet, was he on a journey to make one?
A trail of handwritten pencil notes, transmitted as jpegs via text, had led me to this meeting with the inscrutable Xennial artist. They were sent by Koh with his signature flourishes like “2morrow” and a doodle of an eye in the place of the word “I.” For those who don’t know, Koh was one of the highest profile artists in New York City in the aughts—alongside other Lower East Side royals like Dash Snow, Ryan McGinley, and Dan Colen. That was before he began to pull away from the spotlight, a move roughly timed to the ascent of Instagram.
Artist Terence Koh outside his installation. Image courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photographer: Nice Day Photo
Now on view through March 29 at Make Room, a commercial gallery tucked away on predominantly residential Waring Avenue between Hollywood and Hancock Park, “KOHFEE” offers an experience very different from the oppressively neutral aesthetics of cafes clad in cedar or Moroccan tiles and abuzz with loneliness.
KOHFEE smells different, too: over the past month or so, Koh has transformed the alcove project space into a cave for coffee rituals whose floors, walls, and ceilings are held together by a mixture of raw earth and cow dung. The glaring daylight visible from the only window onto the space feels centuries away when you are kneeling under the earthen dome on the far side of the little room, huddled around Koh’s tiny campfire where he boils his brew.
Artist Terrence Koh. Image courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photographer: Nice Day Photo
“It seemed ridiculous at first to do a coffee shop, but then, after I thought about how it’s a part of L.A. culture— like [the] sun and everything and how everybody seems like, ‘You know what? Let’s go grab a cup of coffee’—it’s a very positive thing for most people to come and gather,” Koh continued. “People let their guard down very quickly when I tell them it’s just like a simple coffee shop instead of an installation. I’m always joking that it’s almost like a serious art installation hidden inside a coffee shop.”
The last time I interviewed Koh about his work was in 2016, when he was exhibiting an installation called Bee Chapel in galleries on both U.S. coasts—the work consisted of a domed room of proportions similar to the KOHFEE, with an infrastructure that allowed proximity to the thousands of bees Koh had begun beekeeping since leaving Manhattan for the Catskills.
An interior view of KOHFEE. Image courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photographer: Nice Day Photo
Since then he has had a handful of shows in the U.S. and Europe, including one at Office Baroque in Antwerp that incorporated larger features of this current project—an earth-covered room and campfire. More recently, he had a show at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York last year, whose press release was a handwritten decree similar in style to the texts I received, promising:

for 
the next 
few 
ears 
eye 
will 
dedicate my life too a single body of work 
no piece will bee larder than the size of the 
human heart 
—signed and dated, “24 dec ’22, lost angels.”
Born in Beijing and raised in Mississauga, Canada, Koh came up in post-9/11 New York as the pseudonymic asianpunkboy, publishing an eponymous zine which is now on view in the Brooklyn Museum’s Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines exhibition, through March 31.  
As asianpunkboy, he began exhibiting his work at Peres Projects’s original Los Angeles location in 2003. By 2007, his art career (and market) had feverish momentum and the media had begun to canonize him as a deity of sublime excess—a characterization that found some congruence with the content of his work. His first American solo museum show, which opened as part of the Whitney Biennial that winter, was a blinding 4000-watt lamp that turned on a black orb, set in an otherwise empty and all-white gallery on the ground floor of the Breuer Building.
A few months prior to that, Koh had moved into a three-story party palace at 45 Canal Street—in what is now the heart of Dimes Square, standing between Cervo’s and Dimes cafe—where he opened his own art gallery called ASS (Asia Song Society). By Art Basel Miami Beach of that year, he famously declared “I am the Naomi Campbell of Art” and also claimed that he intended to retire from art in the coming year.
Terence Koh in 2010 in New York City. Photo: Marie Havens/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Nevertheless, his art career continued to evolve and so did his fame. By 2010, he was not only an art star, but he was also in the headlines for things like helping Oprah coax a distraught Lady Gaga out of her dressing room at the Met Gala. That year he collaborated with Gaga on performances at the Grammy’s, an Amfar Gala, and a charity event in Tokyo. Then, in 2014, Koh left New York City. The mythologizing of how Koh quit the art world began.
“You are the first person drinking coffee,” Koh told me, grinning. “I just realized you are the first customer in this place, and it is gonna be so different because it’s such a mess right now, but I think that’s the fun part.”
Some artists seem practiced in pantomiming childlike excitement about their work for their audiences, but in Koh’s case it feels completely sincere. The fact that this project is more humble in scale than many of the outrageous creations that precede it seems irrelevant. “The next few weeks I’m really trying different oils and things that will go well together with herbs to make a coffee that’s very… very simple but also earthy… we might have milk options outside in pitchers,” he tells me before seeming to change his mind. “Or maybe no options of creamers. It’s a coffee shop, but there’s only one choice, and we don’t give you the option, and it’s free.”
Terence Koh’s KOHFEE. Image courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photographer: Nice Day Photo
On the day of the opening in February, a small line of patrons hugged the wall outside the door to the cave. Koh escorted groups of three or four of them at a time into the chamber; the event was a marathon of small coffee ceremonies where, each time, Koh held a heavy blackened pot over a small flame and grated and stirred various ingredients into the mixture. Once each batch was ready, he haphazardly poured it over a cluster of Dixie cups, spilling plenty of what was sparse to begin with. At one point, he mentioned something to the effect that spilling is an aspect of Chinese hospitality. (Outside the rush of the opening, during the project’s regular hours, coffee is served in ceramic cups Koh made himself.)
Personally, I was into the hippie brutalism of the experience. Everything about this project revolves around smallness and quiet: an anti-spectacle where nothing is for sale. I liked sitting on dirt and I enjoyed the taste and texture of a weird coffee-based potion with traces of plant sediment in it. I didn’t see God, but it was simple and special. Three women dressed like art collectors were conspicuously positive about how amazing they found the coffee to be. Someone told me they saw one of them sip theirs and then throw the rest on the street before saying how much she loved it. While Koh certainly has said nothing to suggest that his cafe is a social experiment, part of me wonders if it is in some way some kind of game.
Terence Koh’s handmade tea cups. Image courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photographer: Nice Day Photo
Koh’s original talent was always weaving enigmas, and I don’t believe he has much control over the fact that he’s a pop star, but this circumstance gives him superhuman license to blur the lines between art and life. When stars retreat from public life, they remain stars and, in fact “retreating from public life” is something only a star can do. It would be disingenuous to say that KOHFEE is an art world comeback for Koh. For one thing, there’s no way out of the pantheon once you’re in it—as evidenced by the routine reports of his comings and goings from retirement (like Cher), despite the fact he has actually maintained a studio practice consistently since the start.
As I waited for my first cup back in February, Koh rejoiced suddenly—”Nice, it kind of works…yay!”—as the water tossed into the pot loudly sizzled. “Loneliness and solitude are two different things. Solitude is a beautiful thing. I’m starting to learn that and appreciate that you can have solitude in L.A., and then go and be social when you want. But I think I miss [how] when you step out onto the street in New York City, you bang right onto humanity and human vibration,” he said while simultaneously adding that he was not moving back to New York. “We do innately need that, to connect with humans physically and not through the screen. And in L.A. people are lonely, and they connect through coffee shops.”
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When the Carnegie Museum of Natural History shuttered their Walton Hall of Ancient Egypt last year, many of the museum’s priceless Egyptian relics left the public eye. More than 80 pieces from its cache of 5,000 objects went back on view last weekend in “The Stories We Keep: Conserving Objects from Ancient Egypt,” a new show that allows viewers to follow their preservation.
While the museum resolved last year that it would no longer display human remains, “The Stories We Keep” will share spectacles like a classic coffin lid and a 3,500 year old limestone stela alongside ancient ephemera like makeup and beer mugs.
Conservation technician Jenna Anderson with the coffin lid in “The Stories We Keep.” Photo: Matt Unger, courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
The show’s main draw is a 4,000 year old Dahshur funerary boat—one of only four known examples—currently under the care of renowned wood expert Mostafa Sherif, who CMNH recruited last year. Museum conservators will give daily demonstrations of their efforts amongst the show during its year-long run.
“Andrew Carnegie purchased the boat in 1901 and it arrived in New York later that year via steamer and traveled via rail from New York to Pittsburgh,” CMNH assistant curator Lisa Haney told me. “Once it arrived, it was quickly revealed that it would be too large to fit inside. So it was housed in a makeshift boathouse constructed outside the museum for five years while the museum was remodeled.”
Associate conservator Mostafa Sherif at work on the Dahshur boat. Photo: Matt Unger, courtesy of the Carnegia Museum of Natural History
According to Carnegie Magazine, Sherif has worked on two of the four boats from Dahshur. There, head curator Gretchen Anderson explains how CMNH’s specimen sustained damage since arriving. The boat was in a case from 1907 to 1956, but went on view, once staff coated it in a permanent compound called Wife’s Pride for protection. While it was exhibited over the next 20 years, visitors etched graffiti on the boat, and even climbed aboard.
Sherif’s “minimal intervention” to reinforce its structural integrity will avoid painting over gaps, which he considers “forgery.” He’ll then reassemble the boat, plank by fragile plank, for the 2026 show “Egypt on the Nile.”
Conservation technician Jenna Anderson at work. Photo: Matt Unger, courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
In addition to working before visitors in the show’s Visible Conservation Lab, conservators will host office hours and solicit questions via QR code to answer over social media. Attendees can try black lights and microscopes for themselves and reassemble 3-D scans of pot shards.
Objects on view in the Visible Conservation Lab. Photo: Matt Unger, courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
A press release around the exhibition acknowledges society’s longstanding fascination with its subject matter.
“I think ancient Egypt is so fascinating because there is such an amazingly preserved presence that is still visible,” assistant curator Haney told me. “All of the temples, architecture, and beautiful visual culture are so compelling and engaging.”
A coffin lid being conserved in the show. Photo: Matt Unger, courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
“The Stories We Keep” also recontextualizes these artifacts without demystifying them by drawing parallels amongst life across the ages.
One display presents Ancient Egyptian baubles alongside contemporary counterparts—including a beaded bracelet that belonged to an Ancient Egyptian child, hanging next to a plastic hospital bracelet worn by the newborn daughter of the museum’s director of exhibitions and design. Inviting viewers to observe these conservation efforts while staging such comparison inspires respect for yesterday’s trinkets as today’s treasures.
A visitor examines the Visible Conservation Lab in “The Stories We Keep.” Photo: Matt Unger, courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
“The Stories We Keep: Conserving Objects From Ancient Egypt” is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 4400 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, through March 9, 2025.
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Name a celebrity, and the British photographer John Rankin Waddell—better known as Rankin—has probably photographed them. Over the course of a three-decade career that began with co-founding the magazine Dazed and Confused (now Dazed) in 1991, Rankin has shot the likes of Kate Moss, Madonna, the Rolling Stones, Jay-Z, and Oasis. He has selected some of his most iconic images for a new show at Tin Man Art gallery in London.
How does Rankin get take some of the most photographed faces on the planet and create something new that allows each personality to shine through? “My main approach is actually just talking to them about collaborating,” he said during a conversation at the show’s opening. “Obviously, I’m quite directional but I’m not trying to take the photograph, I try to make a photograph with the person. That approach allows people to feel comfortable.”
Rankin, No Different From Anyone Else?, David Bowie for Dazed & Confused magazine in 1995. Photo: © Rankin.
As you might expect when meeting a legendary musician, some of the shoots were filled with fond memories for Rankin. When meeting David Bowie in L.A., for example, “I thought I was going to meet the king of cool,” he recalled. “In bounced this guy who was the most enthusiastic sixth former [high-schooler] I’ve ever met. He was just extraordinary.”
“It really threw me because I was expecting him to be like his other pictures,” he added. “It taught me not to presume too much from what I saw in photographs.” The image was published in a 1995 issue of Dazed & Confused.
Press photo of Radiohead (1997), Pulp album promotion (2001), and PJ Harvey for Q Magazine (2001) at “RANKIN: Sound Off – Musicians 1990-2023” at Tin Man Art in London. Photo: Benjamin Deakin, courtesy of Tin Man Art, © Rankin.
While taking press photos for the band Pulp, Rankin was surprised when lead singer Jarvis Cocker suggested the shoot take place in his old Datsun minivan. “It’s kind of the most anti-popstar picture ever,” Rankin said with a laugh. “I think he bought [the car] because he was obsessed with the ads for it in the ’70s.”
“It’s kind of brilliant because it sums Pulp up in a way,” added Rankin, who also shot the cover for the band’s album Different Class (1995). “It’s almost the best Pulp picture I’ve ever taken because they’re very down to earth, very common people.”
Rankin, Smokey Richards, Keith Richards tour promotional image from 2002. Photo: © Rankin.
In a pre-Instagram age when images of celebrities were accessed via newsstands, Rankin was responsible for some highly memorable editorial shoots from the 1990s. Provocative, fun, and informal photographs that appeared in the pages of Dazed & Confused captured the spirit of Britpop and a cultural renaissance in both British art and fashion.
Rankin, Thom Yorke: You Do it to Yourself (1996). Photo: © Rankin.
“Thom Yorke was always exciting to photograph. He knew how to be himself perfectly,” Rankin recently wrote on Instagram. “Being so anti-commercial, Radiohead were perfect for conceptual shoots.” The image appears in a 1996 issue of Dazed & Confused.
Yorke recently showed his own artworks at the same gallery Tin Man Art, produced with long time artistic collaborator Stanley Donwood.
“Rankin’s visionary photography and publishing has transfixed music lovers for 30 years,” gallery director James Elwes said of the new show. “The works in this show empower and iconize an array of musical artists—for me, there are moments where we see pop transcend into folklore.”
Rankin, Blondie Eyes Shut, Debbie Harry for Dazed & Confused magazine in 1996. Photo: © Rankin.
On shooting Debbie Harry, Rankin has said: “You really have to try and push every image you’ve seen of her out of your mind when you photograph her. Everyone has seen hundreds of amazing pictures of her, you have to make a real effort to be different.”
Now the founder of HUNGER magazine, Rankin is still photographing stars of the British pop scene like Sam Smith and Dua Lipa, as well as titan of the U.K.’s grime music scene, rapper Stormzy. His view on how visual culture has changed since the 1990s? It’s become “very boring.”
Rankin, Spectre, Sam Smith in 2015. Photo: © Rankin.
“I reminisce about the period of time when you weren’t chained to the phone, this 24/7 always ‘on’ thing,” he said. “I know it feels attractive or like it makes us less bored but actually I think it makes us more bored. The greatest ideas come from me not being engaged with other people in the new way, through social media or video calling. It’s either when I’m walking my dog and being bored, reading books, going to a gallery. If I don’t do that, I feel very empty.”
He also lamented an era in which “you aren’t really make mistakes anymore. Everything’s being photographed or filmed 24/7. Everyone has a camera in their pocket and essentially doesn’t understand how powerful and destructive a camera can be,” he said. “It makes people anxious and creates a feeling of constantly being watched. That’s very bad for human beings.”
“RANKIN: Sound Off – Musicians 1990-23” is on view at Tin Man Art in Cromwell Place, London, through March 24. 
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The press got its first glimpse of the always anticipated Whitney Biennial yesterday. Curated by Chrissie Iles and Meg Olni, this 81st edition of the museum’s signature survey is titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing.”
Curiously, the Whitney’s press release leads off by saying that the title is meant to capture the threat to our sense of reality posed by Artificial Intelligence. Truth be told, this topical theme seems at best a side note in its story. It is mainly represented in two works by the Berlin-based duo Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst (their project is also featured on the museum’s website) They seem like conceptual and aesthetic outliers here.
6TH FLOOR
P. Staff, Afferent Nerves (2023) and À Travers Le Mal (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
Four works by Harmony Hammond. Photo by Ben Davis.
Julia Phillips, Mediator (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Julia Phillips, Nourisher (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Diane Severin Nguyen, In Her Time (Iris’s Version) (2023-24). Photo by Ben Davis.
Carmen Winant, The Last Safe Abortion (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
Detail of Carmen Winant, The Last Safe Abortion (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
Various works by B. Ingrid Olson. Photo by Ben Davis.
Works by K.R.M. Mooney. Photo by Ben Davis.
Nikita Gale, TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME) (2023-24). Photo by Ben Davis.
Various works by ektor garcia. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Seba Calfuqueo, TRAY TRAY KO (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of work by Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst [foreground] and Suzanne Jackson [background]. Photo by Ben Davis.
Various works by Suzanne Jackson. Photo by Ben Davis.
Sharon Hayes, Ricerche: four (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
Carolyn Lazard, Toilette (2024) [foreground] and Mary Kelly, Lacunae (2023) [background]. Photo by Ben Davis.
Eddie Ruoolfo Aparicio, Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
Kiyan Williams, Statue of Freedom (Marsha P. Williams) (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
The second association the museum proposes for “Even Better Than the Real Thing” is more clearly where this show’s heart is. The defiant tone is meant to suggest a questioning who is considered the “real thing” and who has been considered marginal, fake, or derivative.
The show is full of statements about disability (Carolyn Lazard, Constantina Zavitsanos, and the collective People Who Stutter Create); statements about contemporary discrimination (Carmen Winant’s The Last Safe Abortion, Sharon Hayes’s piece interviewing queer elders); and works celebrating Indigenous resilience (Cannupa Hanska Luger, Rose B. Simpson, Demian DinéYazhi).
5TH FLOOR
Charisse Pearlina Weston, un- (anterior ellipse[s] as mangled container; or where edges meet to wedge and [un]moor (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Tourmaline, Pollinator (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Dora Budor, Lifelike (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Too Bright to See (2023-24). Photo by Ben Davis.
An element of Torkwase Dyson, Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground) (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
Canupa Hanska Luger, Unziwoslal Wašičuta (from the series “Future Ancestral Technologies”) (2021-)
Maja Ruznic, Deep Calls to Deep (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
Two paintings by Mary Lovelace O’Neal. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Dionne Lee, Challenger Deep (2019). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Isaac Julien, Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022). Photo by Ben Davis.
installation view of Karyn Olivier, How Many Ways Can You Disappear (2021) and Stop Gap (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
Various paintings by Takako Yamaguchi. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Constantina Zavitsanos, All the time (2019) and Call to Post (Violet) (2019/24). Photo by Ben Davis.
Various paintings by Mavis Pusey. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Lotus L. Kang, In Cascades (2023-24). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of works by Jes Fan. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Eamon Ore-Giron, Talking Shit With my Jaguar Face (2024) and Talking Shit With Amaru (Wari) (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Dala Nasser, Adonis River (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Rose B. Simpson, Daughters: Reverence (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Ligia Lewis, A Plot, A Scandal (2023). Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of Clarissa Tosin figurines at the Whitney Biennial. Photo by Ben Davis.
Installation view of one part of Demian DinéYazhi, we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.

There’s also a notable theme of celebrating heroic figures from Black history, in works by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (a tribute to Suzanne Césaire), Isaac Julien (an installation that examines the story of Alain Locke), and Kiyan Williams (a deck sculpture of Marsha P. Johnson).
3RD FLOOR
Pippa Garner, Inventor’s Office (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.
Detail of Pippa Garner, Inventor’s Office (2021). Photo by Ben Davis.

STAIRCASE
Speakers playing Holland Andrews, Air I Breathe: Radio (2024). Photo by Ben Davis.

GROUND FLOOR
Installation view of work by Ser Serpas. Photo by Ben Davis.
Detail of Installation by Ser Serpas. Photo by Ben Davis.

EXTERIOR
Billboard of by People Who Stutter Create, Stuttering Can Create Time.
On the whole, the show is anti-spectacular, with a focus on abstraction, assemblage, and fragments of things that suggest instead of speaking.
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