Eliana Willis

On a frigid day last week, Tony Cox, the pro-skater turned artist turned curator behind Club Rhubarb—the sixth floor, shoes-off, cozy speakeasy of a Lower East Side art gallery with no website—was giving a tour of his new endeavor a few blocks down the street—a still intimate project with a grander scope. Cox has assembled “I Was Only Dreaming,” a group exhibition that serves as a truncated autobiography, a requiem for lost friends, and an art-world riff on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
It’s the debut show at 1 Ludlow, a compact 19th-century four-story trapezoid corner building set in the thick of Dimes Square, which is ironic as most of the artists come from the creative class who hung out in the area long before the restaurant Dimes started slinging salads.
An installation view of “I Was Only Dreaming.” Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
“It’s a family vibe. It’s the nineties, it’s downtown,” Cox said of the show as he mounted the stairs to the second floor where it begins. “It’s my coming to New York and landing at Max Fish and Alleged Gallery. I’m the common denominator between all these people. But everyone has a story and is connected. It’s not just random, like I’m just putting all my cool friends in the show. These people are serious about what they’re doing, have a real practice, and it all makes sense together.”
Cox assembled 70 artists and nearly 100 works (paintings, sculpture, design pieces, furniture) in the homey space. It’s a joyful assemblage, and one that resonates more knowing how from-the-heart the curation is. There is a red thread running through all of the artists, stitched through the neighborhood and connected to loved ones here and gone.
Lola Montes, Artichoke Candleholder Italy (2023). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
We ascend to what Cox has dubbed the “Renaissance Room.” “I wanted to have a serious room with ceramics,” he said. “The things I normally show are like ‘Tony World.’ So, I curated this whole room around this table by Lola Montes,” a compelling and intricate baroque tableau. The next floor is the “Play Room.” Felix Beaudry’s knitted nude grotesquerie The Glob Mother and Lazy Boy on Bed is accentuated by K8 Hardy’s painted maxi-pads, displayed on a yoga mat on the floor. Cox stops in front of a wall and explains the narrative he shaped with the artwork, eagerly pointing at it piece by piece like an over-enthused weatherman in front of a map.
“So, this is driving in,” he says beginning with a Quentin Debrey photo of the city skyline seen through a passenger side window and ending with works by Raina Hamner and Reza Shafahi. “Now, it’s getting trippy. This is the blotter paper. This is the acid. This is boots turning into vagina boots and then into the sweet potato vagina tree.” (Hamner’s intricate colored pencil drawings have the depth and feel of oil paintings). The narratives overlap and pile up on the various levels.
Raina Hamner, Limbo Bimbo (2021). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
Cox lived in Club Rhubard, over on Canal Street as well, until his landlord got wise a few months ago and tore down the sleeping loft (he’s since decamped to an apartment down the street). 1 Ludlow is operating on a similarly DL, need-to-know basis; potential visitors and collectors email or text him to book a visit. So far, it’s operating temporarily and is scheduled to run until January 28. Cox was able to launch his pop-up gallery after Adam Woodward, a passionate Lower East Side preservationist, donated the space to Cox temporarily after purchasing the building (it’s unclear what it’s going to become next but Cox said it will continue as a gallery or stay in the arts continuum, possibly as a residency).
In 1999 or 2000 (the exact year was lost in the subsequent ether), Woodward hosted a proto-show at his Bleecker Street apartment that was the round-about jump-off point for “I Was Only Dreaming” and Cox’s art forays.
No one remembers the title, either, but it was curated by Athena Currey, the best friend, model, and muse of the late fashion designer Ben Cho who passed in 2017. “It was, like, Ben Cho, Brian Degraw, Leo Fitzpatrick, Ian and Marc Hundley, Tara Sims,” Cox recalled. “Years later, I asked her why did you do that? And she said, ‘I wasn’t confident enough to be an artist myself, but I was surrounded by really talented artists, so putting on a show was a way I could participate.’ All this stuff subconsciously sunk in. We had to take our shoes off because the neighbors complained we were too loud. These things that I never even thought about, but went into Club Rhubarb. Showing art in a context where it’s more natural, you could actually see being around it or living with it.”
Michael Hambouz, Stop! Sign (2023). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
Cox hopes to stage a Cho retrospective at 1 Ludlow. “He was a mentor and a jack of all trades that could do anything,” he said. “He inspired so many people on so many different levels. He changed the way that I saw everyday materials in terms of my own art practice. When I used to work for him, one time he sat down and he handed me 250 keys and goes, ‘I want you to make a keygle, an eagle that’s made out of keys.’ What in the hell are you talking about? Of course, I couldn’t do his vision. But this thing did get made. Ben sat down and produced an eagle that lays on your chest and goes around your neck. He was basically everyone’s life force at one point. He was DJ-ing, doing stick-and-poke tattoos, and super realistic drawings. On top of it, his clothes were way ahead of the time.”
Cho appears in images that adorn the walls of the exhibition and is seen throughout Leo Fitpatrick’s very personal contribution to the show, Record/Album, which consists of more than 600 personal images arranged in drugstore photo albums. It’s a remarkable and touching document of the scene and era. “It was the height of debauchery for everybody,” Cox says. “So many people are dead or sober in them now.” Cho is pictured tattooing Dan Colen while he eats a sandwich. A few pages later, fat rails of cocaine spell out “Titanic” in front of a toy boat.
Erik Foss, Toys R Us (2023) and Joe Roberts, WTC (2022). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
The top floor, “Future Freak,” was inspired by Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and Cox shifts the artworks around from day to day. We are sitting on Marc Hundley’s contribution; he made a lounge area (a sofa, bench and coffee table) for the show which has become a gathering place.
We flip through Fitzpatrick’s albums. Everyone looks pretty modern except for the skinny scarves. “No one was doing anything,” Cox said. “People then didn’t have a real art practice. They were just like, ‘I hang out and do cocaine and I’m young and cute.’ It was an amazing time, but it’s also what  ruined all these like kids. Except Ryan McGinley. Even back then he was a workaholic and worked his ass off.” A lot of It girls and It boys have come and gone. Travis Graves, a pro-skater who released wonderful and obscure music under the moniker Mt. Egypt is in many images. The show is co-dedicated him.
“He was one of my best friends,” Cox said. “He kind of gave up and disappeared and he died at the end of August from alcoholism. These are his ashes.” With that, he pushed a small bottle across the table with a label inscribed “Live well to benefit all and harm none, this time, this earth, this life.”
Alain Levitt, Untitled [Alanna Gabin and Patrick O’Dell] (2000). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
“That quote came from Nathan Maddox, who was in Gang Gang Dance. He wrote them on a job application at a health food store three days before he got struck by lightning on a rooftop on Broome Street and passed away. Leo interviewed Travis about 12 years ago and asked what would you want written on your tombstone?  And he said this quote from Nathan. So, each bottle of ashes has this quote.” The exhibition is also dedicated and inspired by agent and photo producer Alanna Gabin who died in 2021.
“She was a big part in starting people’s careers,” Cox said. “She was the one that said, ‘You’re an artist, you need to do exhibitions.’ At the same time, Alanna was a photographer who always put people in front of her instead of herself.” Gabin appears in multiple photos in the show.
Matthew Ronay, Doorbell (2019), Mamali Shafahi, Flocked Mask (2023), and Paul Kopkau, Post labor (2023). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
The top floor was formerly a photographer’s studio and has floor-to-ceiling slanted windows with a majestic northward view of the city. Joe Roberts’s WTC works two-fold—it depicts a cockpit aiming toward the Twin Towers as well as the Virgin Mary (depending on the viewer). It’s a heady experience in this neighborhood where one could see the towers fall and it became part of the barricaded zone afterwards. This subtext permeates a lot of this group of artists’ narrative.
A standout piece hangs on the red brick wall above the staircase. Ruminative and moving, it depicts two abstract amorphous shapes mid-embrace and it’s by Cox. Armed in Arms, hand-sewn from ponyskin, lambskin, and cording, is one of the last pieces he made before a 2019 sabbatical due to illness. He took a step back right as fiber art started to trend and is about to make a return.
Tony Cox’s Armed in Arms (2019) hangs above the stairwell in “I Was Only Dreaming.” Photo: Angela Kelley.
In 2025 the Kentucky Museum of Arts and Crafts will host a solo Cox exhibition of new and old work (Cox originally hails from Louisville; it’s a full-circle return). He will also curate the remainder of the space with Club Rhubarb artists. He said, “I have tons of ideas.”
“I Was Only Dreaming” is on view at 1 Ludlow Street (enter at 144 Division Street), through January 28, Thursday through Sunday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. For booking, email [email protected].

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A solo show at the Whitney is a major achievement for any artist, but in the case of Natalie Ball, whose exhibition “Bilwi naats Ga’niipci” currently occupies the museum’s first-floor gallery, the feat is extra impressive.  
Just over a year ago, Ball wasn’t making art at all. The 44-year-old artist—whose assemblages of Native relics and quotidian objects have earned her numerous grants, solo exhibitions, and an MFA. degree from Yale—was in the middle of a year-and-a-half hiatus from her studio, a break she took to focus on her duties as a newly-elected official on the Klamath Tribal Council in southern Oregon. The hiatus wasn’t necessarily planned, nor was the pivot to politics.
“I love my tribe, I love the spirit of our people, but I never saw myself being an elected official,” Ball explained with a giggle, as if still amused by the title. The charming artist laughs a lot, often at her own quirks, but there’s an edge to her humor that seems at odds with the starchy, buttoned-up vibe of most politicians.
Ball’s 2022 bid for the Tribal Council was inspired by her two youngest children, who had started to grow curious about aspects of territory life that once seemed like incontrovertible truths. “They had questions about why our resources were being taken, why our water was so sick,” Ball recalled. “And I was like, well, shit, I don’t have answers for them. Let me go find [them].” 
Suddenly, art was less urgent. “I just felt like there was an immediacy to council because of how connected we are to our territory, to our water and animals… It was more important,” she said. 
Installation view of “Natalie Ball: bilwi naats Ga’niipci” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.
Written in maqlaqsyals, the traditional language of the Klamath and Modoc peoples, “Bilwi naats Ga’niipci” translates to “We smell like the outside.” The title is a variation of a phrase popular in Ball’s corner of Oregon, where the piney aromas of the mountain air always seem to follow one indoors. But at the Whitney, she has a different meaning in mind.  
The artist identifies as Black and Native, but owning both ethnicities has, at times, left her feeling alienated from the communities of each. “To claim my blackness is also to compromise my indigeneity. I’m expected to feel that way, but I’m not doing that. I don’t do that in my life, and I don’t do that in my work,” she said. “I don’t walk that way.”  
The exhibition’s title, she explained, is a “gesture toward accepting and belonging and acknowledging”: you smell like the outside, but you’re welcome to come in. “Because you can’t tell me who I am. I’ll tell you who I am.” 
Natalie Ball, Sponge Bobby & The Fork-ed Horn Dancers (2023). Photo: by Ron Amstutz.
Ball’s sculptures are deeply personal, each a mishmash of found objects that are uniquely meaningful to her. Some materials speak to the artist’s Native or Black heritage; others to her home and family. In Sponge Bobby & The Fork-ed Horn Dancers (2023), for instance, artificial braids adorned with bone beads are tied to strips of elk rawhide and a pair of very stereotypical “Indian” action figures. It’s all mounted atop a dresser once used by her kids. 
The artist, who self-describes as a “hoarder,” is drawn to objects for any number of reasons—their aesthetic characteristics certainly, but also their texture, their history, their smell. For her, no material is off-limits‚ not even the pieces of cultural or sentimental value. Previous works have featured her father’s moccasins, her late auntie’s quilt tops. In the Whitney exhibition’s Dance Me Outside (2023), Ball’s own clothes are stitched to 19th-century newspaper clippings of the Modoc War—a violent fight against the U.S. army that saw hundreds of tribal members displaced from their homelands to Oklahoma. The casualness with which Ball cut up these old and fragile pieces of paper only sharpens her message. 
“Everything is sacred, but nothing is really sacred in the studio,” she explained. “Everything can be cut up and destroyed. Nothing is babied in there.”  
Natalie Ball, Dance Me Outside (2009/2023). Photo: by Ron Amstutz.
The union of Ball’s found items isn’t always elegant either. At the Whitney, materials are stacked and draped, held together with visible twist ties, clamps, or rope. This sense of tenuousness animates her arrangements, but makes them feel tender too, as if the mix of cultural experiences that define the artist are only tethered by a thin thread. 
Nothing about Ball comes off as tenuous. She is strong-willed and confident, wholly comfortable with who she is. But she has learned the importance of showing the seams in her work. “In quilting,” she said, “you’re taught to hide your stitches. But I think that’s where the beauty is—all the stitches and the space and the labor of it. I’m not trying to hide anything. I want you to see how hard I worked!” 
Ball returned to the studio in earnest last year, partly because she had to prepare for the Whitney exhibition and others, but also because her ongoing experience with the Tribal Council motivated her to do so. “Art is faster than an MOU. It can work harder and faster than any meeting where you’re shaking hands,” she said. “I have a lot more respect for my studio and my practice now. I just feel like I honor it a bit more.” 
Ball’s search for answers led her to politics, but politics reopened her to the power of the personal in her work. “I just know that I have to say things louder and harder,” she said. “It’s important that I just get straight to point. I feel like my work is needed. I feel like it’s important. I don’t really know if I understood that before.” 
“Natalie Ball: Bilwi naats Ga’niipci” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, through February 19.

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The Winter Show has again returned to the vaulted vastness of the Park Avenue Armory, on New York’s Upper East Side, to delight and dazzle spectators, professional and not, with a plethora of curious art and design objects that stretch back centuries. They hail from all corners of the world; however, the theme this year is Americana.
Now in its 70th year, the show has corralled 70 international exhibitors (those matching numbers were, apparently, just a coincidence). Newbies include Jill Newhouse Gallery (New York), which presents 19th- and 20th-century European drawings and paintings; Jon Szoke Gallery (New York), experts in Old Master material; Peter Harrington (London), showcasing rare books and manuscripts; and Galerie Léage (Paris), who, sharing a booth with Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz (Paris), is showcasing exceptional 18th-century objects and furniture.
With so much to see at the Winter Show—which benefits the East Side House Settlement in the Bronx, as it always has—we’ve put together the primer below with all the treasures that leapt out at us as we perused the aisles during a preview. That’s followed by the booths where we spent large amounts of time in deep conversation with the exhibitor.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana of the Tower (1899), azure vase by the studio of Artisti Barovier, and a diamond bee brooch from A La Vieille Russie.
A sensational azure vase by the studio of Artisti Barovier at Glass Past (New York) begged a touch, though we dared not. Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana of the Tower (1899) at Lillian Nassau LLC (New York), originally designed as a gilt bronze weathervane for Madison Square Garden’s tower in 1891, would have been very busy had it been placed outside on this frigidly windy day. Contemporary master woodworker Michael Coffey’s elaborately carved wood partition, from Maison Gerard (New York), stands sentry in the front, beautifying the bag check line. A stucco Buddha head dating from the 3rd to 4th century, found at Tambaran’s (New York) booth, is a sight to behold. And the New York gallery A La Vieille Russie’s 10-karat diamond bumble bee brooch (ca. 1870) with ruby eyes is deserving of all the buzz it gets.
Now on to the booths…

Bernard Goldberg
The Maene-Viñoly concert grand piano. Asking price: $525,000, with all proceeds going to the Viñoly Foundation. Courtesy of Bernard Goldman.
There’s so much to absorb chez Bernard Goldberg, a Winter Show stalwart, that it’s hard to know where to begin. One obvious contender is the statement-making centerpiece of the booth: a sumptuously elliptical grand piano that juts out into the front entrance—one of two made by the Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly (who designed the residential skyscraper at 432 Park Avenue) along with Chris Maene. Non-architectural works by architects are the theme here. Don’t miss a cypress-wood Frank Lloyd Wright chair (ca. 1940s) from his C. Leigh Stevens House in South Carolina; a Jacques Lipchitz bronze sculpture, Standing Figure (1916), with the artist’s thumbprint at the base (a limestone version can be found at the Guggenheim Museum in New York); and a laidback bench by I.M. Pei that once sat in the lobby of Dallas’s City Hall, a concrete 1970s brutalist structure that the architect also designed. 

Robert Simon

Giovanni dal Ponte, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saint Anthony Abbott (ca. 1420). Asking price: $500,000. Courtesy of Robert Simon
Over at Robert Simon, the gallery has installed an exquisite altarpiece by Giovanni dal Ponte, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saint Anthony Abbott (ca. 1420). It is in splendid condition, retaining its brilliant colors, including its original gilding. As Simon explained, other works of the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods in Florence were painted with layers upon layers of gold leafing. It’s always a curious treat to see Renaissance works on U.S shores, so don’t miss the opportunity. This piece was featured in a recent exhibition at the Accademia in Florence. 

Peter Harrington
Winston Churchill, The Entrance to the Gorge at Todhra, Morocco (1935–36). Asking price: $395,000. Courtesy of Peter Harrington.
Pom Harrington, owner of the London-based rare book seller Peter Harrington (his father), beamed when describing his remarkable selection of objects belonging to Winston Churchill. They hail from the collection of Steve Forbes, who famously auctioned off a stash of Churchill memorabilia in 2010 at a Christie’s sale which just so happened to be attended by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. This new stash includes books and letters that Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, either wrote or read, often inscribed to important people in his life, such as his military mentor Ian Hamilton. Among the literary treasures, however, another prize stands out: the artwork, The Entrance to the Gorge at Todhra, Morocco, which Churchill himself painted in 1935–36. He was a keen artist, first taking up the brush in 1915 as a form of art therapy and continuing until his death. That’s pretty heavy, sure, but not as heavy as a hulking wood desk on view, part of his private office in his Hyde Park Gate home and used while writing his war memoirs. 

Joan B. Mirviss
Fujino Sachiko, Imagery ’23-1 (2023), left, and a red ceramic sculpture (2023) resembling a bag by Tanaka Yū’s. Courtesy of Joan B. Mirviss.
This eye-popping booth from Joan B. Mirviss—an American dealer and scholar on the au courant topic of Japanese ceramics—looks at the modern and contemporary clay art of 20 female Japanese artists spanning three generations. These women, according to the gallery, “overcame social and cultural barriers to express both eloquence and strength.” Especially eloquent are Fujino Sachiko’s Imagery ’23-1 (2023) and Tanaka Yū’s red trompe l’oeil glazed stoneware sculpture (2023) resembling a knotted wrapping cloth. Anyone interested in this genre should check out “Radical Clay: Contemporary Japanese Women Artists,” currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, featuring works by many of the same artists.

Peter Finer
Kentucky rifle by George Grace. Courtesy of Peter Finer.
Specialists in antique arms and armor from around the world—Bronze Age to the 19th century—with a London gallery on historic Duke Street, St James’s, Peter Finer was especially keen to talk about a rifle. Not just any rifle, but an elegant Kentucky rifle made in the year the country was formed, 1776. It is an elegant and clearly important piece made by gunsmith George Grace (about whom little is known) that one might not associate with the rifles of the Revolutionary War. Finer noted that no other American weapon is more evocative of this period than this gun, perfected in the American colonies by immigrant German gunmakers.
The Winter Show is on view at Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave, New York, January 19–28.
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Daniel Clowes’s new book Monica recounts the life of its titular character from cradle to grave, but in ways so strange and sardonic that it could only come from the mind of the singular cartoonist. Typical of a Clowes joint, the graphic novel bears his signature blend of pathos and pitch-black humor, woven through with his evocative, shadowed detailing. It’s art that lends the proceedings narrative layers and an uneasy mystery, right down to the book’s otherworldly climax. “The book,” he said, “is in part about dealing with chaos.” 
After garnering raves since its release last October, Monica is now getting the gallery treatment. From January 24, Galerie Martel in Paris will stage a show of more than 30 works, featuring panels and sketches in ink and colored pencil that Clowes created for his latest release. The exhibition, Clowes’s second with the gallery, will also consist other pieces pulled from the artist’s storied oeuvre. 
Daniel Clowes self-portrait. © Daniel Clowes. Photo courtesy of Galerie Martel.
For a cartoonist who found his niche in the 1980s alternative comics space with a darkly zany vocabulary, Clowes has managed to land squarely within mainstream acceptance. He’s been showered with awards and courted by brands, his comics have been adapted for the big screen, and he’s emerged as one of America’s foremost graphic storytellers. 
Which is not to say his work has lost any of its edge: the biting humor of his early series Eightball (1989–2004) can still be located in his later works such as Ghost World (1997) and Wilson (2010), just as his narratives have grown in depth and offbeat daring, as in David Boring (2000) and Patience (2016). 
Daniel Clowes, Monica back cover sketch (2023). © Daniel Clowes. Courtesy of Galerie Martel.
In many ways, Monica marked a new creative height for Clowes—his friend, filmmaker Ari Aster, called the book the artist’s “magnum opus.” Five years in the making, the work sees Clowes visually tip his hat to genre comics, balancing tones from horror to romance as he unfurls the backstory of Monica’s birth. Color schemes throughout the book draw connections, narrative or otherwise, between its nine chapters. 
“I feel like the point of art is to express things that we don’t understand and we don’t know how to express in words,” he told NPR in 2023. 
Daniel Clowes, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron large cover sketch (2017). © Daniel Clowes. Courtesy of Galerie Martel.
Also on view at Galerie Martel is a curated selection of Clowes’s part art, notably original drawings from David Boring and Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1993), and previously unseen sketches for Eightball. His commissioned illustrations for the New Yorker and the Criterion Collection (for Shock Corridor and Ghost World) are included too.  
The show is only the latest to bring Clowes’s work from the shelf to the gallery. Following his first exhibition in Los Angeles in 2003, the artist most prominently was feted by the Oakland Museum of California with a 2012 retrospective that spanned more than 100 works from drawings to gouache art.  
But it’ll also be a rare outing for an artist whose dedication remains to the page. “I never thought of myself as a museum artist who’s doing work for the wall,” he told the New York Times in 2012. “For me, the book is the final result.” 
“Daniel Clowes” is on view at Galerie Martel, 17 Rue Martel, Paris, France, January 24 through February 24. 

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Berlin- and Amsterdam-based, Israeli-born artist Yael Bartana and Ersan Mondtag, a theater-based artist who was born and based in the German capital, will be headlining the German pavilion titled “Thresholds” at the upcoming Venice Biennale, organizers announced this week.
In addition to the German pavilion at the Giardini, the event curated by Çağla Ilk, co-director of Baden Baden Kunsthalle, and conceived by the pavilion’s commissioner Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), will also feature fellow Berlin-based artists Michael Akstaller, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok, and Jan St. Werner in an extended exhibition located on the island of La Certosa in the Venetian lagoon.
“‘Thresholds’ stands for the present as a place where no one can stay and that only exists because on thing has occurred and another still awaits,” organizers said in a statement. “For people with biographies characterized by migration, the temporal perception of the present as a threshold between the retrospective and the prospective is paired with a fundamental spatial and physical experience of living at the intersection of different belongings.”
Bartana, who works across film, installation, photography, and performance, will consider “a world on the brink of total destruction,” according to the press release and “search” for a way out, imagining “possibilities of future survival through a multifaceted work poised between dystopia and utopia.” For his part, Mondtag, an award-winning artist known for performances and interdisciplinary theater works, will explore other possibilities of the future by bringing history back to life in a dramatic setting that will contrast the monumental nature of the  nation’s pavilion.
“Thresholds” on the island of La Certosa will emphasize “the idea of passage through a threshold space.” It seems the element of sound will play a key role connecting the practices of the four artists featured in this exhibition: Akstaller is an artist who focuses on sound and space, L’Huillier is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher who explores sounds and vibrations, Lippok is a musician and visual artist, and St. Werner is co-founder of music group Mouse on Mars.
The Venice Biennale will open to the public from April 20 to November 24.
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The late British painter Harold Cohen once joked that he could be the only artist to have a posthumous show of new work. He had after all created a generative art system, one so autonomous that it could theoretically produce work indefinitely, outlasting its maker. His remark was intended a mere quip, but turns out, it’s quite a prophetic one.  
At an upcoming exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Cohen’s A.I.-powered art-making program, AARON, will be revisited—and revived. The show, titled “Harold Cohen: AARON,” will explore how the artist built the program in phases beginning in the late 1960s, and feature paintings and drawings that AARON has previously generated. It will also produce new work: the software, linked to pen plotters, will demonstrate its drawing process live in the galleries. 
For Christiane Paul, the museum’s curator of digital art, this view into an early form of machine-powered art-making is newly relevant at a time when A.I. tools are increasingly prevalent. More so, it underscores art’s long engagement with A.I. through Cohen’s decades-spanning experimentation with the technology. 
“AARON invites us to rethink what constitutes art and the intentionality of art in comparison to the current A.I. models,” she said over the phone. “At its core is this freehand line algorithm that Harold created. It really is a continuation of his work and at the same time, a radical break with painting and a shift to something entirely different.”
Harold Cohen, AARON KCAT (2001). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Digital Art Committee 2023.20. © Harold Cohen Trust.
While Cohen thrived as a painter in the early 1960s—he represented the U.K. at the Venice Biennale in 1966—he swiftly grew frustrated with his practice. Out of curiosity, he picked up coding with the thought of creating “a program to do some of the things human beings do when they make representations,” he recalled in 2004. 
Cohen’s burgeoning interest in programming coincided with his 1968 move to California, where he took up a professorship at the University of California, San Diego. There, he first conceived and built out a rule-based drawing software, programmed to autonomously create “evocative” images. It was coded, Paul explained, “as an art-making program that has external knowledge of the world and the objects in it, and internal knowledge on how to represent these objects.” 
The artist called his creation AARON after the biblical figure who served as a mediator for Moses. In a similar way, the program would be Cohen’s creative broker. 
Harold Cohen, AARON KCAT (2001). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Digital Art Committee 2023.20. © Harold Cohen Trust.
From 1973, Cohen would create increasingly complex iterations of AARON as his algorithm grew in sophistication to include compositional rules and other drawing strategies. Where the early models could only generate black-and-white shapes, the 1980s versions could create figures in a visual space and the 2000s editions abstract floral patterns. These works have since been collected by museums from the V&A to the Tate. 
Since 2017, with the launch of the Whitney’s acquisition committee focused on digital art, Paul has sought to collect variations of the AARON software, which number around 60. “What I would like to do is create for the Whitney an archive of the [program’s] crucial phases,” she said.
So far, the museum has acquired the more well-known KCAT version, which Cohen created in partnership with scientist Raymond Kurzweil’s CyberArt Technologies in 2001, and another from its so-called jungle phase around 2002. The institution has also just collected the 1960s iteration of Cohen’s freehand line algorithm, long before it was named AARON, which produced the artworks he exhibited at the 1972 show, “Three Behaviors for the Partitioning of Space,” at the L.A. County Museum of Art. 
Harold Cohen, AARON Gijon (2007). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Digital Art Committee 2023.21. © Harold Cohen Trust.
At the Whitney exhibition, two plotters will be creating from the KCAT software in black-and-white and from the 1960s program, which was restored, Paul said, using code that was discovered in one of Cohen’s notebooks. Originally written in BASIC, the code had to be recreated in Python. “As Harold’s son Paul Cohen put it,” she said, “we resurrected a dinosaur from three different skeletons.” 
Also resurfacing at the show are “questions of authorship and agency in the collaboration with machines,” Paul added. They’re issues that similarly entangle conversations about A.I. today. But, as she pointed out, where contemporary text-to-image generators work off a database of questionably scraped material, AARON has been coded entirely by Cohen and its outputs are a result of their partnership. 
So, an argument could be made that Cohen could never have his quipped-about posthumous show of new work—alas. “What AARON entails is Harold Cohen as an artist, the software itself, and the collaboration between the two, that constant back-and-forth,” said Paul. “That, of course, does not exist anymore.” 
It’s something that Cohen himself conceded in 2011, acknowledging that “AARON will end when I end” since probably nobody would want to pick up his collaborator where he left off. “People,” he added, “should build up their own other selves.”
“Harold Cohen: AARON” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, February 3 through May.

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