Eliana Willis

The Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice has tapped Marina Abramović (b. 1946) for a solo show timed to next year’s Venice Biennale—and her 80th birthday. The Serbian performance artist will be the first living woman to have her own exhibition at the storied institution.
“I was 14 when my mother first brought me to the Venice Biennale. We traveled by train from Belgrade and as I stepped out of the station and saw Venice for the first time, I began to cry. It was so incredibly beautiful—unlike anything I had ever seen,” Abramović said in a statement. “Since then, returning to Venice has become a tradition, and after receiving the Golden Lion in 1997, the city has always held a special place in my life.”
Abramović was the first woman artist to receive the biennale’s Golden Lion. She is closely involved in the organization of the show, “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy,” which originally appeared at the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, in collaboration with the Marina Abramović Institute. It introduced the artist’s interactive carved mineral sculptures, or “Transitory Objects,” which she believes can positively affect visitors’ minds and bodies.
But at the Accademia, those works, as well as earlier ones, will be interspersed throughout the museum’s permanent collection, putting Abramović’s work in conversation with Renaissance masterpieces. It’s the first time that the museum has let a contemporary art show extend beyond its dedicated temporary exhibition galleries.
Marina Abramović, Shoes for Departure, (1991/2017). Photo: by Heini Schneebeli, courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018, ©Marina Abramović.
A Performance Artist’s New Age Sculptures
“This is a transformative moment—not only for the Gallerie dell’Accademia, but for the role museums can play in the future,” Shai Baitel, MAM’s artistic director, said in a statement. “Placing Marina Abramović’s work within the permanent collection brings past and present into direct dialogue, and invites audiences to inhabit that space with their own bodies.”
The “Transitory Objects” are made from natural materials like quartz and amethyst that were historically used in Venetian mosaics, which ties into the city’s long history as a hub for culture and the trade of rare materials. Abramović invites audiences to activate beds and structures embedded with these crystals by lying or sitting on them.
Marina Abramović, Copper Bed for Human Use (2012). Photo: by Fabrizio Vatieri, courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery.
“It’s not that I’m going to be able to perform when I’m 80, 90, 100, whatever,” Abramović said during a virtual press event announcing the Shanghai show. “I have to find the system in which my mission and my legacy can go on. And this is exactly [what I do] with the ‘Transitory Objects.’”
She believes that spending long periods of time training to use these minerals can have remarkable effects, such as imparting the ability to practice telepathy, which Abramović has said anyone can learn in just four years.
“Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy” at the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai. Photo by Yu Jieyu, courtesy of the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
Performance Art in Dialogue With Art History
The exhibition also spotlights Abramović’s Pietà, a 1983 photograph of her and former partner Ulay (1943–2020) posed as the Virgin Mary holding the body of Jesus after the Crucifixion.
It will be displayed alongside Titian’s (1485–1576) last painting, the Pietà (c. 1575–76), completed by Palma Giovane (ca. 1548–1628) and part of the Accademia’s collection, in a celebration of the 450 anniversary of the canvas.
Titian, Pietà (1575–76). The artist’s final work, believed to have been completed by Palma Giovane. Collection of the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
Documentation of other historic Abramović works will be on view, such as her six-hour endurance performance piece Rhythm 0 (1974), in which audience members were invited to choose from 72 objects on a table, and do with them whatever they wanted to the artist.
Of special note is her Golden Lion-winning Balkan Baroque (1997), a memorial to the Bosnian War in which the artist sat in the hot Venetian sun, scrubbing the blood off a festering pile of 1,500 freshly butchered cow bones.
Marina Abramović, Balkan Baroque, June 1997. Performance at XLVIII Venice Biennale; 4 days. Photo: courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives, ©Marina Abramović
Then there are Abramović’s famed collaborations with Ulay. In Imponderabilia (1977), the two stood naked at the entrance to the exhibition, forcing visitors to squeeze past their genitals to pass through the narrow doorway. In Light/Dark (1977), the pair repeatedly slapped each other in the face.
The Accademia’s contemporary and Modern art shows have become a highly anticipated part of the Venice Biennale agenda. During the 2024 edition, the museum hosted the nation’s largest ever show of the great Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904–1997). And for the 2022 biennale, Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) debuted his highly anticipated, exclusive Vantablack works there. Before that, the biennale spotlight went to Mario Merz (1925–2003), Philip Guston (1913–1980), and Georg Baselitz (b. 1938).
Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Photo by Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images.
“The Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia’s openness to contemporary art, in conjunction with the International Art Biennale, has become a highly anticipated and established event,” Giulio Manieri Elia, the Accademia’s director, said in a statement. “We are particularly honored and delighted that it is now the turn of Marina Abramović.”
“Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy” will be on view at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Calle della Carità, 1050, 30123 Venice, Italy, during the 61st Venice Biennale Arte, May 6–October 19, 2026. It will travel to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Viale delle Belle Arti, 131, 00197 Rome, Italy.  More

American art in the 20th century was dominated by the New York art scene—think Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop art—but in the mid-1960s, a then little-known movement originating in Southern California began to gain broader critical attention: Light and Space.
Formed by a loosely associated group of artists, the Light and Space movement reflected a preoccupation with visual perception, as well as penchant for material experimentation. While artists like Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell have become some of the best-known of the movement with their large-scale installations and unconventional use of both artificial and natural light, artist Norman Zammitt, who died in 2007, was a pioneering colorist whose work reflected the core ethos of the Light and Space. It was less a style than an experience, a kind of art that dissolved boundaries and asked viewers to step into a world of perception itself. This was Light and Space: a sensorial field that expanded art beyond canvas and object into the realm of atmosphere and phenomena.
Installation view of “Norman Zammitt: A Degree of Light” (2025). Courtesy of Karma.
Though Zammitt enjoyed considerable success in his lifetime, his name has since edged closer to the margins of art history. Decades after his work was first shown in New York, Karma gallery in Chelsea recently debuted a new show dedicated to the late artist, “A Degree of Light.” Comprised of two of his most important bodies of work—his laminated-acrylic pole sculptures and hard-edge “Band Paintings”—the exhibition revisits Zammitt’s artistic innovation and introduces his practice to a whole new audience.
“This is the first time in almost 60 years that Zammitt’s had a show in New York, and the first real survey of his work here,” said Karma gallery owner Brendan Dugan. “I hope people leave seeing him as a visionary who pushed materials and ideas in ways that were very much of his moment but also ahead of it.”

Archive photo of Norman Zammitt in the studio. Courtesy of Karma.
Who Was Norman Zammitt?
Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1931, to an Italian father and Mohawk mother, at seven years old the family moved to Kahnawá:ke Mohawk Territory outside of Montreal, which was followed by a brief stint in Buffalo, New York, before ultimately relocating to Los Angeles County.
Showing an interest in drawing and animation from an early age, his artworks and cartoons won him a range of amateur competitions by the time he finished high school, leading him to enroll at Pasadena City College. His aspirations to pursue art professionally were disrupted by the Korean War, during which time he served a one-year tour of duty as an aerial reconnaissance photographer. It is difficult not to miss how that vantage point—absorbing the sweep of atmosphere, the curving horizon, and the shifting veil of color from above—later informed his sensibility, deepening his awareness of light as both subject and medium. During his tour, he continued to develop his practice and returned to the school in 1956. Initially intending to study commercial art, he instead changed course and studied fine art at the Otis College of Art and Design (formerly the Otis Art Institute), receiving his M.F.A. in 1961.
Archive photo of Norman Zammitt in the studio. Courtesy of Karma.
In the year before graduating, Zammitt joined the roster of the prestigious La Cienega Boulevard gallery, helmed by pioneering Modern and contemporary art dealer Felix Landau. Zammitt’s earliest works from this period were mixed-media abstractions, but he soon turned to more figurative works and even experimented with elements of Surrealism through what are referred to as his “Boxed Figure” paintings. These paintings used the form of body parts—foot, head, arm, nose, eye—depicted on individual boxes arranged against a monochromatic background. When first exhibited at the University of New Mexico, they were subject of a complaint and censorship as they were considered controversial.
Archive photo outside of Norman Zammitt’s studio. Courtesy of Karma.
Evolving Practice
In the mid-1960s, Zammitt first began exploring the possibilities of plastic. Though plastic was invented around the turn of the century, the post-war period saw an explosion in the material’s popularity. The artist began transitioning away from his figurative works and toward constructions made from layered, transparent sheets of painted glass and acrylic.
In 1968, the same year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, he began making his cast laminated acrylic “poles,” lithe, monolithic sculptures that feature unique spectrums of banded color. Measuring only an inch or two wide and upwards of nine feet tall, while Zammitt was restricted by the number of colors the commercial manufacturer had (which otherwise predominantly catered to clients ordering signs), he still managed to create an incredibly diverse range color combinations. Their dimensions push opticality to its limit, as from a distance the eye automatically moves across the arrangement of colors, and up close the poles extend beyond the range of vision.
Installation view of “Norman Zammitt: A Degree of Light” (2025). Courtesy of Karma.
A core element of “A Degree of Light,” their inclusion alongside Zammitt’s more well known “Band Paintings” illuminate the artist’s inquiry into perception itself. Within the context of his other glass and plastic works, they also underscore the significant role his practice played in the Finish Fetish style—also known as the “L.A. Look”—which occupied a space at the intersection of Pop art and Minimalism and is frequently referenced as an extension of Light and Space. Within this style, which too emerged in the 1960s, artists using innovative materials and fabrication processes put greater emphasis on the work’s surface, favoring smooth, seamless finishes.
“The poles are central to his practice,” said Dugan. “The forms quite literally catch and echo light. They’re also part of the bigger Finish Fetish story in Los Angeles and they’re important chronologically too. Zammitt began working in plastics in 1964; years before almost anyone else, which is something that was overlooked at the time but feels significant now.”
Installation view of “Norman Zammitt: A Degree of Light” (2025). Courtesy of Karma.
Light and Space
The late 1960s also saw Zammitt begin to produce cast laminated acrylic sculptures that foreshadowed the stye of painting he would soon master. The petite Untitled (ca. 1970–72) in the show at Karma echoes the precise banding of color and sleek finish that could be achieved through the medium and juxtaposed with Untitled (ca. 1976) illustrates a particular range of hues that he would continually return to.
Starting in 1973, Zammitt turned back to painting as it offered him a degree of color control that he couldn’t achieve with acrylic, but unlike his early work these were wholly abstract, made up of bands of color but with sporadic deviations into other precise geometric shapes, as can be seen in the 1977 Blue and Yellow Elysium, which features oblong triangles of color arising out of horizontal strips that anchor the lower half of the painting.
While the “Band Paintings,” which he continued to make through the late 1980s, often evoke blazing sunsets or shadowy sunrises, and the artist cited the skies of the American Southwest as a source of inspiration, Zammitt’s aim was not to create landscapes. Instead, they were a starting point. The Light and Space movement was focused on the perception of light and space rather than their representation, and, in Zammitt’s case, an opportunity to explore color at its limits.
Norman Zammitt, Blue and Yellow Elysium (1977). Courtesy of Karma.
Zammitt’s choices of color were anything but random or purely intuitive. Seeking to draw a connection between nature and color theory, he used mathematic equations, logarithms, and eventually early computer systems and programs to home in on specific sequences of color. He also developed a proprietary taping device that allowed him to execute the lines between colors—but, upon closer inspection, one will see that the colors do not exactly abut one another but instead overlap, albeit minimally, creating subtle gradations. Despite the precise processes and fastidious lines, his compositions still appear nonmechanical.
“I think what surprises me most about Zammitt’s paintings is how present his hand is,” Dugan noted. “Even though he used a lot of technology when making them, like the early Atari computer he used to calculate pigment ratios, you can still feel the artist in the paintings. They are meticulous, but human.”
The result of using nature as the foundational inspiration for this series of work is a profound sense of emotion. While the paintings might initially call to mind the natural landscape, careful and prolonged looking presents an opportunity to reflect on the effects of visual perception and the myriad experiences it brings.
Norman Zammitt, NEW 30, NEW 32, NEW 11 (1984–86). Courtesy of Karma.
A Rising Legacy
During his lifetime, Zammitt exhibited regularly at and had his work acquired by several major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), but for years his legacy faltered and he went without gallery representation for decades—until recently, as a flurry of events bring his oeuvre back to the limelight.
Last year, the artist was the subject of the retrospective “Gradations” held at the Palm Springs Art Museum, and this year he is included in the 12th Site Santa Fe International, “Once Within a Time.” And later this year, a new publication dedicated to his practice is set to be released.
Together, the rise in attention paid to Zammitt indicates a shift in the art historical canon, one that recognizes him as a pioneer of not only of the Light and Space Movement but 20th century abstraction overall.
When asked why he thinks this cultural resurgence and renewed interest in Zammit and his practice is happening now, Dugan observed: “I think part of it has to do with his focus on the spiritual. His work lets you approach formalism through the mystical rather than modernist reduction. And his life story is fascinating. He grew up on the Kahnawá:ke Reservation near Montreal, served as an aerial photographer in the Air Force, and pushed back against the censorship of his ‘Boxed Figure’ paintings, which you can see at Site Santa Fe right now. Those threads give scholars and audiences new ways to connect with the work.” More

An annual celebration of the very best in British contemporary art, the Turner Prize 2025 returns this week with an exhibition of all four nominated artists in the northern English city of Bradford, Yorkshire. Though the showcases by Nnena Kalu, Mohammed Sami, Rene Matić, and Zadie Xa are not united by any particular theme, they each pull us into the artist’s own world while providing an environment for expansive, open-ended contemplation.
The four-part show opens at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery on September 27 through February 22, 2026. A new Turner Prize winner will be announced on December 9 during an award ceremony at nearby Bradford Grammar School. First prize is £25,000 ($34,000), with a further £10,000 ($13,500) awarded to each runner-up. Last year, the top honor went to Scottish artist Jasleen Kaur.
Cartwright Hall in Bradford, England during the Turner Prize 2025 exhibition. Photo: Andrew Benge/ Getty Images.
Founded in 1984, the Turner Prize promotes debate about the current state of art in the U.K. and has been no stranger to controversy, particularly in the raucous era of the YBAs, when the award spotlighted hotshots like Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, and Chris Ofili. Decades later, the award continues to recognize important achievements by artists either born or working in Britain. Here are this year’s shortlisted nominees.

Nnena Kalu
Nnela Kalu’s presentation at Turner Prize 2025. Photo: David Levene.
The standout artist this year is the Glasgow-born, London-based artist Nnena Kalu, who invites audiences to walk among her hanging bundles of found material—including tape, VHS tape, rope, paper, and fabric—that have been bound, layered, and knotted into place by a series of rhythmic motions. The pieces Hanging Sculptures 1-10 debuted last year at Manifesta 15 in Barcelona and, here, are exhibited alongside Kalu’s drawings; charged, swirling vortexes, one of which was recently included in the group show “Conversations” at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. The artist has used many of the same works to create a fresh, site-specific installation for Cartwright Hall.
Kalu, born in 1966, is the first learning-disabled artist to be nominated for the Turner Prize. Since 1999, she has developed her practice out of studios run by the charity ActionSpace, which quickly recognized the scale of her ambition. Kalu has been publicly exhibiting her work since 2016 and her first solo international museum exhibition, “Creations of Care,” closed last month at Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway. In 2024, she received her first commercial gallery show at Arcadia Missa in London.
Mohammed Sami
Mohammed Sami’s presentation at Turner Prize 2025. Bradford. Photo: David Levene.
The somewhat elusive Mohammed Sami has long been admired by those in-the-know for his paintings of landscapes or domestic settings that capture mesmerizing surface effects but are also filled with haunting, oblique references to violence. Most of these compositions refer in some way to the artist’s memories of the Iraq War, as in the case of an abandoned table overlooked by the shadow of a CCTV camera, as well as his eventual immigration to Sweden as a refugee in 2007. This is certainly the case for the pieces on view at Cartwright Hall, which include new works alongside canvases from his nominated solo exhibition, “After the Storm,” at Blenheim Palace.
Born in 1984, Sami’s major solo institutional debut was at Camden Art Centre in London in 2023 and, earlier this year, he was the subject of a show at KM21 in The Hague, the Netherlands. He has appeared in recent group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pinault Collection in Paris, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Among the critics, Sami is most widely tipped to scoop this year’s Turner Prize.
Rene Matić
Rene Matić’s presentation at Turner Prize 2025. Photo: David Levene.
Rene Matić’s practice tends to center the photograph within a larger multimedia installation that includes sculpture, sound, text, and moving image elements, and their presentation at Cartwright Hall is no different. Based on their nominated show “As Opposed to the Truth,” at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Berlin, it foregrounds documentation of the artist’s own queer milieu against echoes of wider societal and systemic violence, in particular the rise of the far-right. The result is an uplifting celebration of resilience and defiance.
A centerpiece of the show is Restoration (2022–), a collection of abandoned black dolls, which Matić has rescued from thrift stores and tenderly rehomes and repairs. They connect this act to their father’s experience of neglect growing up as a Black child in the English city of Peterborough. Born in 1997, the artist has shown at several prominent U.K. centers for contemporary art, including Studio Voltaire, South London Gallery, and Bold Tendencies, and has been collected by Tate, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Martin Parr Foundation.
Zadie Xa
Zadie Xa’s exhibition at the Turner Prize 2025 in Bradford, England. Photo: Andrew Benge/ Getty Images.
Korean-Canadian artist Zadie Xa lives and works in London, and is nominated for her enchanting, immersive exhibition “Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything” from Sharjah Biennial 16. The immediately spectacular nature of the work, with its kaleidoscopic color scheme and nature-inspired soundscape, pulls the viewer in, introducing them to its more complex, spiritual meanings. Inspired by Korean shamanism, the work refers to various ancient rituals and evokes a folkloric connection to the oceans, most particularly in a dazzling golden arrangement of hanging seashells.
Xa, born in 1983, has had recent solo museum show at Space K Seoul, Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Leeds Art Gallery. She has also been included in recent group exhibitions at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and Copenhagen Contemporary.
“A beacon of the most exciting contemporary art being made at this moment, the Turner Prize continues to delight and provoke debate as it enters its fifth decade,” said Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and chair of the Turner Prize 2025 jury.
“Turner Prize 2025” is on view at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery  in Bradford, West Yorkshire from September 27 through February 2022, 2026.  More

There’s a wave of design energy running through New York right now, with galleries putting on some of the most ambitious shows of the season. From a blue-chip artist like Urs Fischer reimagining furniture at Salon 94 to the New York–based Women’s History Museum’s bleak fashion dispatch at Amant in Brooklyn, design is being presented with as much drama and daring as contemporary art.
Eclectic, eccentric, and unapologetically bold, it’s an ideal time to see how New York’s galleries are expanding the definition of design. Here are six shows worth seeing in venues ranging from the palatial Salon 94 in the Upper East Side to intimate upper-level Tribeca spaces.
1. “Urs Fischer: Shucks & Aww” at Salon 94
Urs Fischer, Clay Chair (2025). Courtesy of Salon 94 Design.
“In some way all chairs or furniture are figuration. The figure might be absent, but it obviously has to relate,” said Urs Fischer earlier this month as he was installing “Shucks & Aww.” “The sculptures are about the figure and the body.” Seating, surprisingly, has been at the core of his practice for years. “Of course you all know his sculptural practice,” said Salon 94 founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. “He takes a humble chair, and turns it into art. Now he’s reversed it and taken his art of the chair and turned it back into a functional object. So the first floor is actually a retrospective of his chair as sculpture, and then the second floor is his actual practice as a furniture maker.”  Artworks include a chaise made to look like a mound of clay but actually cast in polyurethane, a full-scale candle of art mogul Peter Brant leaning on a chair, and a toilet brimming with fresh fruit.
Upstairs the functional design pieces are every bit as outlandish, only this time you can sit in them. Among the standouts is Question, which looks like a ruin of an ordinary kitchen chair but is in fact cast in painted bronze, complete with a curling antenna that sprouts from its back. Then there’s Big Dog Chair, a mint-green straight-back perched atop a canary-yellow dog that doubles as its base. It’s all part of a full-blown product line that spans tables, lamps, mirrors, carpets, and seating galore. Scattered among these is the enchanting Elegy, a glittering installation of 700 hand-blown mirrored glass droplets that descend like a surreal storm. All of these are available in limited-edition batches.
Urs Fischer, L-Shaped Lamp (2025) and Sidewalk Mountain Couch (2025). Courtesy of Salon 94 Design.
The show is playfully subversive, and nowhere more so than in Sidewalk Mountain Couch. Inspired by a pile of garbage bags, it inevitably calls to mind the Trash Bag Sofa by Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios—the stunt couch of Design Miami 2022. But where Nuriev’s version looked like creepy set decor for Saw 3, Fischer’s is pitch-perfect and chic. “You’re supposed to sink into it like a bag of leaves in the fall,” said Greenberg Rohatyn. The couch comes in a range of colors, but the subtly varied browns on view here are especially covetable, altogether it’s both comfy and oddly beautiful.
An installation view of Urs Fischer: “Shucks & Aww” Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94 Design © Urs Fischer Photo: Stefan Altenburger
But for me, it was all about the clever carpet: a floor covering printed to match the paint-splattered, scuffed surface of Fischer’s Los Angeles studio. Each carpet can be customized to fit a buyer’s space. It’s a trompe l’oeil gesture that is not only oddly beautiful but also reassuringly practical—no need to worry about spills here.
“Urs Fischer: Shucks & Aww” is on view at Salon 94, 3 E 89th Street, through November 1
2. “Colin Knight: Hero’s Wreck” at Superhouse
An installation view of “Colin Knight: Hero’s Wreck,” Photo: Matthew Gordon, Courtesy of Superhouse
Richmond, Virginia–based artist and designer Colin Knight channels a Lord of the Flies–like thought experiment: what if design students were left with only the carcass of a downed plane? “He’s obsessed with World War II era everything,” said Superhouse founder Stephen Markos, “mid-20th century design, mid-20th century fine art.” In “Hero’s Wreck” (through October 18), the exhibition includes aviation-inspired fare like an armchair that makes you feel like a gunner peering from the turret of a B-17 and Crash Fragment is a shrapnel-chic hanging light that resembles a salvaged wing component.
Colin Knight, Survival Raft (2025) Photo: Matthew Gordon, Courtesy of Superhouse.
Another standout chair mimics a survival raft packed with Labububu-sized infantry figures in life vests awaiting rescue. But the show’s pièce de résistance, Show Your Wound, is a sofa–snowshoe–sled hybrid, tufted with sheepskin for comfort; its rawhide back, molded from the contours of Knight’s own body, hovers between the suggestion of a body bag and an unexpectedly intimate embrace. Knight’s fixation on war and memory stems in part from his grandmother’s stories of surviving the Blitz, and by invoking Joseph Beuys alongside the wartime ingenuity of the Eameses, he has forged a distinctive visual language—funny and quirky at times, though never campy—that transforms WWII fascination into a meditation on masculinity and survival.
“Collin Knight: Hero’s Wreck” is on view at Superhouse, 120 Walker Street, 6R, through October 18
3. “Carmen D’Apollonio: Salut, Ça va, c’est moi“ at Friedman Benda
An installation view of Carmen D’Apollonio: “Salut, Ça va, c’est moi,” Photography by Izzy Leung, Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Carmen D’Apollonio
For her fourth solo show at Friedman Benda, Swiss-born, Los Angeles–based Carmen D’Apollonio has conjured her most ambitious body of work yet. “Salut, Ça va, c’est moi” runs through October 16 and is comprised of anthropomorphic lamps that feel at once playful and possessed—but by benevolent spirits. “I come from figuration, so I just thought, how can I do it a little different? I just go from one piece to the other. It’s evolution,” she explained. D’Apollonio specializes in lighting that doubles as conversation pieces, blurring the line between sculpture and design.
An installation view of Carmen D’Apollonio: “Salut, Ça va, c’est moi,” Photography by Izzy Leung, Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Carmen D’Apollonio
Some are crouched, some are droopy, some are gloopy, some look like they’re melting off a table. One even takes the form of a cartoonish high heel shoe, its front serving as a platter. “You can put fruit in here, or your keys,” the artist said on opening night. Making Plans for You is a goofily ingenious two-part lamp that seems to grow straight through a wall.
Carmen D’Apollonio. Photography by Schaub Stierli Fotografie. Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Carmen D’Apollonio.
All the Words I Didn’t Say doubles as a soft sculpture—larger-than-life and a little uncanny, it looks like a human figure leaning against a wall with a colossal lampshade for a head. This floor lamp has had it!
“Carmen D’Apollonio: Salut, Ça va, c’est moi”  is on view at Friedman Benda, 515 W 26th Street, through October 16
4. “Rich Aybar: Rubberworks”  at TIWA Gallery
A selection of Rich Aybar’s rubber-and-steel-based lighting, presented with an industrial yet luminous sensibility. Courtesy of Tiwa.
Rich Aybar has quickly carved out a distinct design vocabulary—amber-hued rubber forms that feel both futuristic and primal, they are instantly recognizable. But what sets them apart is their sense of movement. “I really wanted the wiggle to be palpable,” he said. “A lot of people, when they first see the work, they immediately assume that it’s one of the other hard materials.” He added, “My rubber specifically comes from petroleum, so it’s also a necrotic material. I like the connection to ancient life or ancient death in it.”
In “Rubberworks,” Aybar expands his practice. During a residency at New Wave in Palm Beach, he learned to weld and began incorporating steel into his pieces, alongside sheets of natural Amazonian rubber sourced from the vine. At TIWA, these materials come together in lighting, vessels, and decor objects—including egg-like forms—that glow with a mix of industrial toughness and uncanny eroticism.
Rich Aybar at his studio. Courtesy of Tiwa.
The sensuality is undeniable. “It would be disingenuous to deny that there’s a sexual component or a seduction in the work,” Aybar said. “There is the invitation to imagine yourself enveloped in this world—as a hug or as a fuck, or cuddle. All of this is what I hope to impart.” The results are clean and polished, yet carry a twist of the uncanny—“something nice and naughty… finished, but also a little kinky,” as he put it.
“Rich Aybar: Rubberworks” is on view at at TIWA Gallery, 86 Walker Street, through October 8
5. “Chris Wolston: Gilding the Lily” at The Future Perfect
An installation view of Chris Wolston’s “Gilding the Lily.” Photography by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of the artist and Friedman Benda.
In “Gilding the Lily,” the New York- and Medellín-based artist and designer Chris Wolston has assembled a nature-inspired collection with subtle hints of humor and extravagance. “I was partially drawn to Art Nouveau techniques because of its use of natural forms in creating abstraction,” he said.
Chris Wolston with a bronze mirror from “Gilding the Lily.” Photography by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of the artist and Friedman Benda.
A central motif is the Yarumo leaf, which Wolston gathers from his garden in Colombia. Cast directly into bronze and aluminum, it recurs across dining tables, lamps, and chandeliers, giving the collection a through line that anchors its exuberance in something deeply personal. “They’re all cut from my garden. I have a collection of different species, so everything is just really close to home,” he explained.
The centerpiece is a monumental credenza constructed from thousands of welded wax daisy forms using the lost-wax technique. Though delicate in appearance, it is nearly indestructible. “It’s almost a ton of bronze,” Wolston said.
Chris Wolston, tapestry from “Gilding the Lily.” Photography by Joe Kramm. Courtesy of the artist and Friedman Benda.
Wolston also introduces wool wall tapestries woven in Morocco, designed first as watercolor paintings. “They’re sort of like these deconstructed lilies mixed in with traditional Berber motifs. And then there’s this other layer of distortion that happens in the hand of the artisan,” he said.
Another first for Wolston arrives this fall: his debut museum solo show opens in November at Dallas Contemporary.
“Chris Wolston: Gilding the Lily” is on view at The Future Perfect, by appointment, through October 22
6. “Women’s History Museum: Grisette à l’enfer” at Amant
Installation view of “Grisette à l’enfer” at Amant, Brooklyn. Courtesy of New Document and Amant.
What does one wear to the apocalypse? “Grisette à l’enfer” (“Grisette in Hell”), the first institutional exhibition by the New York–based Women’s History Museum—the art project and brand by Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan—reimagines the seamstress and shopgirl of 18th-century Paris as a figure wandering through a boutique blasted into the end times. Mannequins are dressed in gowns cobbled together from scavenged materials—porcupine quills, pelts, shattered glass, and casino chips—while an extremely uninviting pelted chair merges animalia with armageddon.
The whole thing has the feel of being homemade, improvised, and defiantly DIY, as if fashion itself had been rebuilt from ruins.
A sculptural chair from “Grisette à l’enfer” at Amant, Brooklyn. Photo: Angela Kelley.
One part of the exhibition looks like a Tenement Museum tableau after the apocalypse. A mannequin in beekeeper-meets-bridesmaid get-up stands amid blown-out holes that reveal crimson skies and towering goth skyscrapers with crosses on their facades. Videos flicker with vintage runway footage, showing just how surprisingly wearable many of these garments are—you can almost picture them on a red carpet, if only someone would take the plunge.
Installation view of “Grisette à l’enfer” at Amant, Brooklyn. Photo: Angela Kelley.
Overhead, an electronic ticker unspools a delirious litany that succinctly sums up the show: “Women’s History Museum the rapture while wearing beautiful blinding gowns made of hilarious materials… lustful fashion shameless poisons anxious luxury nonperishable essence blissful waste melancholic vanity indefinite fantasy… filthy aspirations dreamlike apocalypse loud bones.” See you in fashion hell.
“Women’s History Museum: Grisette à l’enfer” is on view at Amant, 932 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY through February 15, 2026 More

To own a Radiohead record is to inherit a haunting visual world. Here, the art rock of OK Computer (1997) is wed with chalky collages, the downbeat electronica of Kid A (2000) accompanied by jagged alien vistas, and the jazzy abstraction of The King of Limbs (2011) represented by chilling specters. The band’s music doesn’t just ask to be heard; it insists on being seen.
That visual experience at the heart of “This Is What You Get” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the U.K., the first institutional exhibition to spotlight the art surrounding Radiohead. More than 180 objects have been gathered here, curator Lena Fritsch told me, to encourage “thinking about the relationship of visual art and music in a wider sense, to look at album covers differently.”
Installation view of “This Is What You Get” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the U.K. Photo: Min Chen.
The show is a homecoming of sorts for a band that formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, almost four decades ago. From the early ’90s, the five-piece would create music of increasing complexity, the grinding rock of its debut single “Creep” giving way to electronic and symphonic outings from “Idioteque” to “Burn the Witch.” Among the world’s most popular alt-rock bands, Radiohead is today also one of its most enigmatic (the group just announced its first tour in seven years), its strange soundscapes and cryptic lyrics matched by a sparse online presence.
Contributing to the band’s mystique is, of course, its indelible cover art. Since 1995’s The Bends, their album sleeves have been devised by artist Stanley Donwood in close collaboration with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. The pair met while studying art at the University of Exeter in the ’80s and have forged a decades-spanning partnership built on art, music, dark humor, and a shared appetite for experimentation. The Ashmolean exhibition, in fact, doubles as a portrait of their joint practice.
Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, The Bends album cover (1995). © 1995 XL Recordings Ltd.
“It’s really rare that an artist is involved in the creative process as early as Donwood,” Fritsch said. “His album covers and all the visual work relating to Radiohead are not just illustrations of sounds and texts, but created in tandem with them.”
As seen in the show, Donwood and Yorke’s collaboration has thrived on a kind of restlessness. Fritsch characterized it as “not a development or evolution in a linear sense, but there’s a lot of going back and forth, being fascinated by one artistic medium or style, then getting bored of it before being super inspired by something else again.” Where they threw themselves into computer manipulation for The Bends and OK Computer, for example, Hail to the Thief (2003) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) returned them to a painterly approach.
Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, Soken Fen (2013). © Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke.
Often, too, Donwood sets up a workshop close to where Radiohead were recording, allowing Yorke to easily switch between modes and Donwood to shape the cover art to the music. The process is such that, according to Donwood, “I find it hard to look at [the art] without hearing the music. It’s encoded.” This method of working also birthed Donwood and Yorke’s 2023 series of paintings, “The Crow Flies,” which debuted at London’s Tin Man Art and is on view at the Ashmolean.
“The music and the visual work both matter very much to me,” Yorke told me at that time. “One liberates the other a lot of the time.”
Here are five highlights from “This Is What You Get” that reveal just how Donwood and Yorke have married—and liberated—music and image over the years.
The Collages of OK Computer
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Heavy Snowfall on House (1995). © Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood.
One of the defining albums of the 1990s, OK Computer was Radiohead’s atmospheric meditation on existential dread and urban dislocation. And it had sleeve art to match, created by Donwood and Yorke scanning and digitally collaging a trove of found images—”from old textbooks, brittle magazines from junk shops, what-to-do-in-emergency cards taken from aeroplanes, out-of-date manuals, piles of old photographs,” per Donwood.
“They were literally sitting at the computer together. One person would have a go and then the other would have a go, erasing things or changing things,” Fritsch explained of the creative process that would come to define Donwood and Yorke’s practice.
The exhibition includes test prints from the project—jarring combinations edged by bleached streaks. They appear portentous and disjointed, but purposefully so. At that time, the look of the album “stuck out like a sore thumb,” Donwood said. “But then there were loads of things that looked like it afterwards.”
Notebooks and Faxes
Thom Yorke, notebook featuring lyrics for “Karma Police,” 1995. © Thom Yorke.
Turns out, not all is forbidding in Radiohead land. Donwood and Yorke’s collaboration is threaded with a sense of fun, revealed in previously unpublished notes, sketches, and writings they exchanged over the years. That collection of notebooks and correspondence numbered some 140 pieces, Fritsch said, of which a select number are on display. They offer “a feel of their relationship. It’s a very playful relationship, but at the same time it’s quite serious and very fruitful.”
Among them are faxed letters riddled with in-jokes, comic-like drawings, and a diagram of “Yorke’s worries.” Some of these doodles have even made it into Radiohead’s artwork, including the image of the sharp-toothed bear, now a mascot of sorts for the band; the humor has informed the band’s tongue-in-cheek marketing. Radiohead heads will also love the rare glimpse into Yorke’s notebooks, featuring his lyrics for songs including “Karma Police” and “Fitter Happier.”
The Disquieting Worlds of Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief
Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, Get Out Before Saturday (2000). © Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke.
Though often printed in a 12-by-12-inch format, Donwood and Yorke’s original artworks for Radiohead’s album covers were created on larger—and more—canvases. They’re also rich with references to our political and social realities. For Amnesiac (2001), for example, the duo produced a series of monumental, sinister landscapes, shaped by newspaper images from the Yugoslav Wars. Created with brushes, knives, rags, and sticks, the works depict ghostly figures against isolated planes in scenes of barely contained violence.
Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, Pacific Coast (2003). © Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke.
The paintings for Hail to the Thief, on the other hand, take the form of urban maps filled in with neat, colorful typography. Inspired by the blaring billboards of Los Angeles, the works are composed with phrases plucked from the album’s lyrics and whatever happened to be in the air. They form unsettling yet hypnotic readings such as “Stand / Like Flies / Time Is Up / Blind.”
These references in Donwood and Yorke’s art are also a mirror held up to a moment, noted Fritsch, who also pointed out the pair’s early use of the Mac and a page in their notebooks that mentions Dolly, the cloned sheep. “They reflect the zeitgeist of different times,” she said, “of the times that they were made in.”
The Linocut Art of The Eraser
Stanley Donwood, London Views (6 of 14) (2005–6). © Stanley Donwood
Besides Radiohead, the exhibition dedicates space to artworks devised for Yorke’s other musical projects, including Atoms for Peace and the Smile. Unmissable is the linocut Donwood created for the cover of his first solo record, The Eraser (2006). An extensive scene inspired by a 2004 flood in Cornwall, which the artists witnessed, it depicts London engulfed in dramatic waves, the city’s landmarks such as St. Paul’s Cathedral and the “Gherkin” being swept away. A lone figure stands with an arm outstretched, as if to hold back the waters.
Donwood’s original drawing for the cover, created in a style reminiscent of medieval woodcuts, is on view alongside the linoleum block fabricated for the project. The linocut concept was later developed for the cover of Amok, Atoms for Peace’s 2013 album, which captures Los Angeles amid an asteroid storm.
The Membranes Tapestry
Installation view of Membranes (2025) as part of “This Is What You Get” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the U.K. Photo: Min Chen.
Another medieval nod? A massive tapestry that reproduces one of Donwood and Yorke’s paintings from “The Crow Flies.” Created during the recording of the Smile’s Wall of Eyes, the suite of paintings was inspired by ancient maps and fittingly contained eerily textured topographies. The duo then experimented with transforming these canvases into textiles with help from Flanders Tapestries in Belgium. One of these, Membranes, now hangs in Ashmolean’s Music and Tapestry Gallery, offering what Fritsch called “a dialogue between the past and the present.”
It’s a striking sight—an arid terrain overwhelmed by an unwieldy blue form that’s filled in with curlicues and other wavy marks. Seen from afar, the work appears as an aerial map for a nonexistent landscape, made even stranger for being installed alongside a 17th-century tapestry depicting a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and historic musical instruments. It makes for a beguiling juxtaposition; chances are, Donwood and Yorke wouldn’t want it any other way.
“This is What You Get: Stanley Donwood | Radiohead | Thom Yorke” is on view at the Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford, the U.K., through January 11, 2026. More

As the busiest season for art in London heats up, impressive pieces of public art are taking over the city. Last week saw the launch of the annual Frieze Sculpture outdoor exhibition, with artists like Elmgreen & Dragset, Erwin Wurm, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith filling the rolling green grounds of Regent’s Park’s English Garden. Further east, in Bromley-by-Bow, legendary 90-year-old conceptual artist Rasheed Araeen debuted a new addition to The Line public art trail. His new site-specific installation provides a welcome pop of color to the surrounding industrial cityscape.
The Frieze Sculpture selection of 14 new or recent works for its 13th edition, which runs through November 2, has once again been assembled by star curator Fatoş Üstek. Her chosen theme, “In the Shadows,” plays with sculpture’s literal, multidimensional presence, which casts shadows, as well as the term’s metaphorical possibilities, touching on absence, obfuscation, or our shared ancestry. For each work, guiding audio interpretations are offered via Bloomberg Connects.
Rasheed Araeen, Untitled The Line installed on The Line in East London. Photo: Angus Mill, courtesy of The Line.
“Darkness mostly stands for an anticipation of fear and pain,” said Üstek, but she nonetheless encourages us to step bravely into the shadows. “These shadows are deeply buried in our psyches, in our ways of being, and ways of existence,” she added. “Let’s get together and pull the veil of reality, to look underneath at what is actually happening here and now.”
With this mission in mind, the thought-provoking show never shies from complex political, ecological, and social issues. In this carefully constructed arena for deep contemplation, engaged audiences will find themselves suspended at the threshold between darkness and light.
Erwin Wurm, Ghost (Substitutes) (2022), presented by Thaddaeus Ropac at Frieze Sculpture 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has gained a cult following for his absurdist works, which invite new ways of seeing everyday objects. Ghost (Substitutes) (2022) is a painted, larger-than-life aluminum cast of a blue suit, a portrait of a person by way of their “second skin,” Wurm’s term for our clothing. The sculpture alludes to the presence of a human inhabitant but, ultimately, amplifies their absence with its rumpled, slack form. The sculpture connects this to the illusionistic nature of cast sculpture dating back to antiquity, when majestic subjects like goddesses or warriors were “defined by a very thin layer of metal and were empty inside.”
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, King of the Mountain (2024–25), presented by Garth Greenan Gallery and Stephen Friedman Gallery at Frieze Sculpture 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
The trailblazing Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith died at the start of the year, so it is fitting to see her representing at this year’s edition of Frieze Sculpture. King of the Mountain (2024–25), from her recent “Trade Canoe” series, belongs to a wide-ranging practice that also included printmaking, drawing, and painting. The bronze statue of a buffalo standing on a boulder in a canoe is a tribute to Big Medicine, a real albino buffalo that was born on the artist’s reservation in Montana in the 1930s and was believed to have healing powers. Suitably, the monument is raised on a plinth.
“In my art and life, I really strive to reverse the adage that what you see is what you get,” said Smith. “If I can be coyote and practice my sneak up, I can engage the viewers from a distance with one image and lure them in for exposure to another layer, which changes the initial view into quite a different reality.”
Abdollah Nafisi, Neighbours (2025), presented by Dastan at Frieze Sculpture 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
Tehran-born, U.K.-based artist Abdollah Nafisi’s strange, painted construction of salvaged steel, Neighbours (2025), finds a harmonious balance among its various colorful elements. The two large horn-like forms use the wind to make sounds, imbuing the intricate structure with a surprising ephemerality.
“Even though the steel feels heavy and grounded, I’ve built the work to feel like it’s holding its breath, like it could shift at any moment,” said Nafisi. “That tension invites something more fragile, like presence or silence or even memory.”
David Altmejd, Nymph 1 Nymph 2 Nymph 3 (2025), presented by White Cube at Frieze Sculpture 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
Three frolicking nymphs by Canadian sculptor David Altmejd are caught in motion, clothes twirling and limbs kicking out in a moment of joyously free expression. The beautiful folkloric spirits known as nymphs have an affinity with nature, and Altmejd captures something of their carefree whimsy. As they slip past our eye, we can only wonder if what we thought we saw was real of imagined.
“At first their grace draws you in, but up close their rough, pitted texture reveals a raw and tactile energy,” said Üstek. “But nymphs are wild, unstable forces caught between creation and disintegration.”
Assemble, Fibredog (2025), presented by Plinth at Frieze Sculpture 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
The biggest and perhaps most memorable work included in this year’s Frieze Sculpture is Fibredog (2025), a playful sculpture of a scruffy dog made by the London-based collective Assemble. With ritual central to their practice, the group gathered spare wood and thatch from Regent’s Park and its surroundings and its charmingly makeshift appeal brings to mind ancient ceremonies and folklore. Now, it stands proudly as a spot that welcomes people to gather.
“Inspired by a dead tree trunk, they have bound together branches of straw, thatch, and timber into a totem-like form or effigy,” said Üstek. “It has the feeling of something mythic, like it has always been there, waiting to be noticed.”
Frieze Sculpture 2025 is on view at the English Garden in Regent’s Park, London until November 2.  More

The complete U.S. Constitution has gone on display for the first time in history.
While the National Archives Museum in Washington D.C. permanently exhibits the four pages of the Constitution together with the Bill of Rights, it is currently showing the rarely displayed fifth page. The display leads off the museum’s celebrations of America’s upcoming 250th anniversary in 2026.
Sometimes known as the Letter of Transmittal, it was essentially a cover letter that outlined the Constitution’s purpose and explained how it was to be ratified and implemented by the states. It was signed by George Washington, then president of the Constitutional Convention, and dated to September 17, 1787.
The U.S. Constitution, page 1. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.
The documents will be shown surrounded by the 17 constitutional amendments inside the Rotunda of the National Archives. The display will run until October 1 with the museum extending operating hours in anticipation of high demand. The fifth page was previously exhibited for the 225th anniversary of the Constitution in 2012.
“As we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, the National Archives is playing a major role in the coast-to-coast commemorations by providing the American people access to their history,” Jim Byron, senior adviser to the acting archivist, said in a statement. “This extraordinary installation welcomes all Americans to celebrate the bedrock of our national life: our Constitution.”
The Bill of Rights, 1789. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.
The celebrations don’t stop there for the National Archives Museum. In October this year, it’s concluding a $40 million renovation of the museum, the first in two decades. Included in the project is “The American Story”, a new permanent exhibition space, and a discovery center in which K-12 visitors will learn about American civics.
The redevelopment will include an A.I. element with the museum uploading two million records (from the Archive’s collection of more than 13 billion) to digital kiosks placed throughout the museum. Upon entering, visitors will digitally select topics that are of interest. Then, while exploring the 10,000-square-foot galleries, A.I. will display documents related to those subjects at the kiosks. It’s the first museum on the National Mall to use A.I. in its displays, which Byron has called “technologically innovative and cutting edge.”
The National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. Photo: Robert Alexander / Getty Images.
The museum is also hosting “Opening the Vault”, an exhibition that features a changing display of artifacts connected to the people and moments that shaped America.
Museums across America have grand plans for the country’s 250th anniversary. The New York Historical is pairing historical paintings with the work of contemporary artists such as Lady Pink and Fritz Scholder. The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts are teaming up to display more than 1,000 works by American artists including Mary Cassatt, Horace Pippin, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is staging “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness,” which features 250 objects from American history. More

For 15 years, the art collective 4heads was a mainstay of Governors Island, helping make the former Coast Guard base an unlikely arts destination in New York Harbor. Now, they are bringing their magic to Rockaway, staging a new edition of their group show “Portal,” with 35 artists showing in a repurposed military warehouse at Fort Tilden, a former United States Army installation right on the beach.
“We were really sad that the island did not have us back,” 4heads co-founder Nicole Laemmle told me. “We took a one-year hiatus—a leap year.”
Then she and co-founder Jack Robinson, her husband, started looking for a new place to stage an exhibition. They landed in Rockaway last year thanks to Christopher Saucedo, a past 4heads artist who is a board member of the Rockaway Artists Alliance, which operates the space.
“It’s just like Governors Island. We’re surrounded by water, and it’s a pain in the ass to get to,” Robinson joked.
Caleb Nussear, R~mr #2 (2016) at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
A Celebration of Art in All Mediums
A tessellated mirrored sculpture by Caleb Nussear is among the works displayed on the lawn in front of the building, greeting visitors who make the worthwhile trek.
Inside, Robinson and Laemmle have put together a compelling mix of painting, sculpture, photography, and video work, selected via an open call.
A few works were familiar to me. Kate Clark‘s unnerving sculptures of human faces, transformed with animal hides and with the bodies of anthropomorphized deer, have been shown widely at museums including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Work by Kate Clark in the foreground, with Bianca Abdi-Boragi in the center and Robert Lach on the back wall at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
“She’s kind of a big deal—I was surprised she was so psyched to show with us,” Robinson laughed.
And I remembered the life-size, newsprint-covered Coney Island beach goer sculptures by Will Kurtz—a “Portal” veteran I first encountered on Governors Island in 2014—from an excellent booth at the 2024 Spring Break Art Show.
Will Kurtz, Adorra and Just Do It at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
Also thematically on point was another Spring Break favorite, from 2025, by Bianca Abdi-Boragi, who coated the inside of suitcases with sand she collected in the Bahamas, Martinique, and the Sahara, and used them as shelves to display cast bronze sculptures of fruits turned into telephones. (The artist did the Midnight Moment video for Times Square in August.)
“Portal” exhibitions tend to excel at finding artists working with unconventional materials.
Robert Lach, crutch wheel I (2013) and wrapped l (2015) at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
A circular, mandala-like work mounted on one wall, on closer inspection, turns out to be made entirely from salvaged crutches that Robert Lach collected off the streets of New Jersey over a period of about three years. Its surprisingly spare beauty is paired with another work by the artist inspired by his former day job as an art handler, made from foam and cardboard tape roll interiors, bound together by packing tape in cell-like accumulations.
And then there’s Cynthia Reynolds, who has two works in the show: a tidy bundle of bubble wrap, displayed in wavy layers in the window to catch the late summer light, and a large trailing sculpture of pink packing peanuts strung together in a surprisingly delicate arrangement.
Cynthia Reynolds, Cope (anti-static): The Rest of Venus (2025). Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
“At our opening, the artist actually wore the artwork. What she eventually wants to do is walk into the ocean with it because the packing peanuts dissolve,” Laemmle said. “It’s really beautiful when she wears it.”
On the other side of the coin are excellent paintings, including a shrine-like display of colorful animal works by Viktoriya Basina.
Work by Viktoriya Basina at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
More subtle were Jamie Orr’s canvases mixing acrylic with walnut ink, coffee, and saltwater to create gorgeous, swirling abstractions reminiscent of landscapes with a delicate shimmer.
There is even documentary photography, from Stephanie Keith, who has captured harrowing views of ICE agents at work, detaining immigrants and separating families as part of the current crackdown on the undocumented.
Stephanie Keith, ICE Detention at 26 Federal Plaza, NYC (2025). Photo: courtesy of the artist.
A New Era for a Beloved Organization
Robinson and Laemmle miss some things about Governors Island. The exhibition, originally dubbed the Governors Island Art Fair, adapted crumbling officers’ houses into makeshift galleries, displaying art on kitchen counters, spilling out of ovens and dusty cabinets.
That unique vibe was recaptured in John Buron’s Living Room Incursion, a life-size installation of a recliner chair, television (with working screen), living room window, and baseboard radiator all crafted from cardboard, rope, and fabric, painted entirely in white. The objects, mounted on a platform in the corner of the gallery, are shown askew, an ironing board disappearing into the wall as if being suctioned off into some alternate dimension.
John Buron, Living Room Incursion. Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
And the artists have made good use of the space’s soaring ceilings, hanging works from the aesthetically pleasing beams. From across the room, semicircles of orange and yellow macramé by Ellie Murphy face a site-specific Erin Turner sculpture made of countless copies of her own photo on newsprint, woven together over a chickenwire frame into a massive, twisted ring-like form.
It’s the second year in the barn-like gallery for “Portal,” and the plan is to make it an annual event that can grow to partner with other cultural organizations in the area.
Erin Turner, How to fall while floating (2025) at “Portal: Rockaway.” Photo: courtesy of 4heads.
“We’re hoping next year to have a big art month here for August in Rockaway,” Laemmle said.
“We love it here,” Robinson agreed.
“Portal: Rockaway” is on view at the Rockaway Artist Alliance, Studios 6 and 7 Galleries, Fort Tilden, Gateway National Recreation Area, Far Rockaway, New York, August 23–September 21, 2025. The closing reception is September 21, 3 p.m.–5 p.m. More