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    Three Artists, Immersed In Far-Flung Residencies, Offer Unique Takes on Human Truths at New York’s International Center of Photography

    A new group exhibition at New York’s International Center of Photography showcases the work of three photographers produced during far-flung residencies. One journeyed to the islands of Guadeloupe, another to the borderlands of France, and the other to New Orleans. Each distinctly disparate project receives its own section, but the show has an overall cohesion. Although all three artists used different methodology and approaches, a throughline resounds; in his own way each was gracefully, soulfully reflecting the human condition and spirit.
    “Immersion” is on view until January 8, 2024, and documents Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan’s sojourns. “I think all of us are intuitive in terms of the way that we work,” Halpern said. “I was trying to respond to the feeling of the place.” Overall, the experience is a celebration of resilience, but it can also unflinchingly explore some hard truths.
    Vasantha Yogananthan, Untitled from “Mystery Street,” (2022). © Vasantha Yogananthan
    Yoganthanan delivered colorful childhood Louisiana reveries. Halpern reflected on the reverberations of the colonial period and the slave trade in Guadeloupe. Meeks’s somber and oddly beautiful, mostly black-and-white series delves into immigrant crossings (made during his own personal crossroads). He captures displacement and human desperation in landscapes and still lifes without portraying people. Some of his images are so abstract they look like the surface of the moon.
    One of Meeks’s abstract takes on landscapes in an Installation view, “Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan,” International Center of Photography, New York, September 29, 2023–January 8, 2024. Image: © Jeenah Moon for ICP.
    Meeks explained, “As photographers, as much as we read the world, I think we’re also projecting. I was always projecting my own state of mind.”
    Immersion is also the name of the French-American Photography Commission that sponsored the residencies created by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and presented in collaboration with ICP and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. At the heart of the project is unbridled creativity. “It’s very open,” said Laurent Pejoux, the director of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès at last week’s busy vernissage. “They’re totally free to choose the subject. We don’t want to impose the project to the photographer. La liberté is an important notion in France. That’s why we support projects like this where the liberty was total.”
    Halpern recreated a defaced bust of Christopher Columbus in this installation view, “Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan,” International Center of Photography, New York, September 29, 2023–January 8, 2024. Photo: © Jeenah Moon for ICP.
    Each of the photographers also included a sculptural element to their project. Halpern recreated a defaced bust of Christopher Columbus and included flickering video screens depicting an invasion of cruise-ship tourists, Yogananthan gathered his images into an elegant, large-scale 3-D assemblage, while Meeks powerfully punctuated his section with rusted barbed wire and makeshift campfire grills sourced from the borderlands’ camps. We caught up with each on the evening of the opening for a brief walkthrough.

    Vasantha Yogananthan
    “Mystery Street”
    Installation view, “Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan,” International Center of Photography, New York, September 29, 2023–January 8, 2024. Image: © Jeenah Moon for ICP.
    New Orleans is a subtle character in your series. The images don’t scream that locale. There’s no crawfish clichés here.
    I wanted to approach the city as a fictional space. I like that the pictures are very fragmentary. They don’t really show the landscape. For someone who knows New Orleans, maybe you feel the city—the colors, the light, the atmosphere. The project is about childhood. It can be from any place or anywhere in the world.
    What was your process?
    I picked the summertime to go because school was over and the children would be free all day long. There was a lot of boredom, as the days are longer. At first I was thinking that the project would be about playing. And then I got more interested about what happens before and after game time—these moments where the children are together it seems at first that nothing is happening, but maybe this is where everything is happening. After weeks being immersed with one group of kids, it almost felt dystopian, where the adults have left and the children are running the city and they’re free to do whatever they’d like to do. I really like that idea, of them owning the space.
    Vasantha Yogananthan, Untitled from “Mystery Street” (2022). © Vasantha Yogananthan.
    One image that is very striking is the child with the hula hoops on the stairs. 
    Yeah, this picture was shot in a summer camp. For five weeks I would go there in the morning and stay all day long. Most days, nothing worth photographing would happen. One has to be very patient in observing kids. At some point, if you’re patient enough, and if you’re kind, and if you care, something is going to happen. Henri Cartier-Bresson coined ‘the decisive moment,’ meaning, ‘Hey, I was there, like, at the exact right time, right place, and I clicked a picture that kind of summarized what the place is about.’ My feeling was the opposite, because I was there for five weeks in the summer camp and made maybe five good pictures happen. Meaning that most of the time, nothing happens. The photographer, by just being there—and most of the time not taking any pictures—is taking in a lot of information.

    Gregory Halpern
    “Let The Sun Beheaded Be”
    Gregory Halpern, Untitled from “Let the Sun Beheaded Be” (2019). © Gregory Halpern
    What drew you to the island in the first place?
    As a 10-year-old, I went on a vacation to Guadeloupe. What I remembered was the total isolation from the place itself as a tourist. I’m fascinated by the idea of not doing that with this project and thinking about how this is a place of both tourism but also extreme pain, in terms of its history and its relationship to colonialism and the slave trade. I did a lot of research. I thought people would be very resistant to me as a white American, but they were incredibly welcoming. I talked about the thing that isn’t talked about. Tourists come here and don’t interact with the local culture. When the elephant in the room gets addressed, then people are very happy to talk to you as an outsider. People were like, ‘Oh, that’s so interesting that you want to talk about the actual culture and history and what it’s like to be here, not just as a tourist.’ In 1815, Napoleon abolished slavery, but then reneged on it, and in 1848 it was officially undone.
    Can you tell me about the video component?
    Tourists will come off of these cruise boats and they basically flood the main city, Pointe-à-Pitre, for like, three hours. They basically go and they photograph the locals who are selling vegetables and fruits, and then they get back on the boat. And to me it was like this guy, he’s photographing this woman. He’s sneaking up because she doesn’t want her photo taken. She’s holding up a bowl to protect her face. For me, it’s all about politics and battle and colonialism. And it’s also kind of about me, like a self-portrait, because I’m basically a tourist and outsider.

    Raymond Meeks
    “The Inhabitants”
    Raymond Meeks, Untitled from “The Inhabitants” (2022). © Raymond Meeks
    This was a very complex journey for you.
    Calais is the center of the refugee crisis in Europe. By the time I arrived, I found myself in a state of displacement. All of my stuff was going into storage, and a relationship of ten years had ended and I didn’t have a home. So going to France kind of put me in a state of searching and of longing and wanting to create a sense of place, some sense of home. I think it put me on a level of searching for discovery and empathy and a compassion for what that experience is. I was in southern France for three months; I was in northern France for three months. So it’s just trying to imagine these borderlands. I’m making pictures and then I’m bringing them back and I’m crafting a story. I’m trying to understand what the work is trying to convey, what the work wants to be, what it wants to speak of.
    Installation view, “Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan,” International Center of Photography, New York, September 29, 2023–January 8, 2024. Photo: © Jeenah Moon for ICP.
    There’s such brutalist imagery, like the cement with rebar poking through. It’s a rough landscape, but also beautiful. Nature seems to prevail. A lot of these structures look ancient. This work is about refugees, but none are depicted.
    I had planned on doing portraits. I volunteered with an organization called Care4Calais that provided basic needs to refugees who were holding in Calais. And by doing so I became friends with quite a few of them. At that point I realized I didn’t want to do portraits. Because as I was interacting with them I realized I’m looking at them as a subject, not engaging with them as a human being. And I’m missing out on so much by thinking about what a picture of them might bring to my project. And that just felt exploitative to me. So I decided just to be present and to sort of try to carry the essence of their stories with me as I make pictures.
    The installation of your show is so beautiful, from the excavation elements of found objects to the framing and how some photos are broken into grid-like quadrants.
    With the sponsorship of Hermès, I had ultimate possibilities. I could have large silver gelatin prints made and the best framing, which would be a dream. Like, all this was a possibility for me. But that possibility also created a lot of confusion. I realized I don’t need to buy anything. Coming from this experience where, where human beings are just trying to make do with the things that are left behind, that they find, that are handed down to them—I just thought, like, I don’t want to consume more things. The constraint was that I will make use of what I have, I will make use of the wood, I will make everything myself. It became part of petitioning or prayer or like a meditation—and also just being deeply engaged in the creative process.
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    See Inside a New Getty Museum Show on Medieval Graphic Design, Featuring Illuminated Manuscripts and Ornate Religious Texts

    Anyone who has peered over the soft vellum pages of an illuminated manuscript will have marveled over its intricate and colorful designs, which range from stylized floral borders to decorated initials. A new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, titled “Graphic Design in the Middle Ages,” brings together manuscripts from different cultural traditions to show how these elaborate arrangements have long delighted readers and guided our interpretation of the texts.
    Working together by hand, a scribe and illustrator would usually start by devising a book’s overarching design before producing unique layouts for the individual pages within. Visitors to the show will note how many of these experiments have become blueprints for how we still organize text today.
    The first of four themes, “Designing the Medieval Page,” lifts the veil on some of the planning that went into the expensive and lengthy process of making a manuscript. Before putting pen to paper, the artists must strike the right balance between image and text, a decision mostly informed by the book’s message and its intended audience.
    “Text and Design,” recalls a time long before we could browse a drop-down menu of readymade fonts by revealing some of the first techniques for guiding the eye across the page. This included emphasizing initials at the start of a sentence and the use of color to highlight more important parts of the text, as well as more subtle visual cues like those used to mark out specific dates or introduce a paragraph break.
    Other means of communicating information that we may be more accustomed to seeing on a Powerpoint appear in their earliest forms in the section “Visualizing Information,” including diagrams, charts, and other methods for organizing and making sense of data. But not every design decision brought greater clarity. Some of the motifs included in the final section “Ornament and Abstraction” could almost be seen as a secret code, adding nuance or obscuring meaning to encourage thoughtful analysis and challenge even the most learned reader.
    “We tend to think of ‘graphic design’ as a modern thing, something that happens in primarily digital spaces,” said curator Larisa Grollemond. “Medieval books are masterclasses in delivering complex information in interesting and visually sophisticated ways.”
    Check out manuscripts from the exhibition below.
    Decorated Incipit Page illuminated by Malnazar and Aghap’ir (1637–38). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
    Canon Table from Gospel book (late 1200s). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
    Bifolium from the Pink Qur’an (1200s). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
    Office of the Dead from the Blandford Hours illuminated by Ricciardo di Nanni (1465–75). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
    Decorated Initial D in Psalter (1420–30). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
    Inhabited Initial D from Breviary (1153). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
    “Graphic Design in the Middle Ages” is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Dr, Los Angeles, through January 28, 2024.
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    El Anatsui’s Towering Site-Specific Installation Is Unveiled At Tate Modern—See It Here

    A spectacular site-specific installation by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui has been unveiled at Tate Modern in London, becoming the latest in an impressive array of solo museum shows opening across the capital in time for Frieze week. The latest Turbine Hall commission, Behind the Red Moon is the artist’s largest ever indoor artwork.
    Based between Ghana and Nigeria, the 79-year-old artist has become a globally recognized star for his monumental textile-style sculptural hangings made of used bottle caps, which he began in the late 1990s. These ubiquitous objects recycled from the real world inevitably represent consumption and waste, but also provide a way for Anatsui to refer to geopolitics and how commodities are shipped to Africa via a network of age-old colonial trade routes. Like all his work, this latest installation amazes with its sheer scale while also inviting viewers to delight in its myriad details.
    Divided into three parts, the visitor encounters the first piece The Red Moon as they enter the museum. Its rich red rendition of a “blood moon,” only visible during a total lunar eclipse, appears to billow like a sail in the wind. After this comes The World, in which ethereal forms intended to evoke human figures—or perhaps, spirits—swirl around each other in a sphere. Finally, is a breathtaking work called The Wall, a sheet of black metal cloth that cascades and ripples from a staggering height. The eye is guided across its vast expanse by a smattering of shimmering patterns, and viewers who venture behind will be met by a multi-colored mosaic on the reverse.
    “Anatsui is one of the most distinctive artists today. His highly innovative approach to sculpture and his unique choice of materials are instantly recognizable.” said Tate Modern’s new director Karin Hindsbo at the press conference on Monday, October 9. “He has responded to [the Turbine Hall] with remarkable ambition. His three extensive abstract compositions made from countless metal bottle tops and fragments dramatically cut through this huge space and transform it anew.”
    Each year, Tate’s Turbine Hall commission makes use of its vast post-industrial, hangar-like entrance to stage large-scale sculptural works, and Anatsui’s will remain on display through April 14, 2024.
    Check out more photos of the installation below.
    Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon installation view at Tate Modern. Photo: Lucy Green, © Tate.
    Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon installation view at Tate Modern. Photo: Joe Humphreys, © Tate.
    Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon installation view at Tate Modern. Photo: Joe Humphreys, © Tate.
    Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon installation view at Tate Modern. Photo: Joe Humphreys, © Tate.
    Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon installation view at Tate Modern. Photo: Lucy Green, © Tate.
    Hyundai Commission: El Anatsui: Behind the Red Moon installation view at Tate Modern. Photo: Lucy Green, © Tate.

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    See Highlights From a New Show of Spike Lee’s Vast Personal Archive—From Prince’s Love Symbol Guitar to a Stunning Kehinde Wiley Portrait

    Walking through “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” at Brooklyn Museum, what emerges most plainly about the filmmaker is his avid, omnivorous collecting appetite. The exhibition brings together more than 450 objects from his personal collection in a massive showcase of his sources of inspiration. It’s a hoard that is as wide as it is deep. 
    The show is split into seven broad themes that have shaped Lee’s long career in film and defined his personality. The opening section on Black history and culture is comprised of objects as varied as posters created for Malcolm X (1992), Tim Okamura’s 1993 portrait of Toni Morrison and a Virgil Abloh-designed ensemble. There’s an entire room housing Lee’s trove of vintage movie posters—among them the French new wave film Breathless (1968) and the Steven Spielberg blockbuster Jurassic Park (1993)—and an even bigger space is dedicated to his sports memorabilia. 
    Installation view of “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” at Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Paul Abreu Pita.
    “Spike’s collecting is 360-degrees,” said Kimberli Gant, the exhibition’s co-curator, at the show’s preview. “We’re trying to create a narrative to make sure our visitors have a story that they can hopefully recognize as I did when I first encountered the collection. Patterns, faces, and ideas come up again and again in different sections. They’re all so connected.” 
    While a portion of Lee’s collection was included in a 2022 showcase at the Academy Museum, “Creative Sources” delves further into the director’s specific obsessions. For one, his love for photography is evident throughout the show and concentrated in a gallery that includes names like Weegee, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Andy Warhol. Gant called it “a mini-education [in] photo history of the 20th century.” 
    “Fruit of Islam Members” from Malcolm X (1992). Photo: © David C. Lee.
    The personal nature of Lee’s collected objects comes to the fore in the show as well. A good number of artifacts bear autographs and inscriptions to the director, making them all the more intimate. Cases in point: a tennis racket once owned and signed by Serena Williams, a Public Enemy poster with a note from Chuck D, and quite bizarrely, a huge printed ad for American Express featuring Martin Scorsese, who signed it “in admiration.”  
    “I love the images of his family too—that moment of vulnerability,” Gant said, adding that the specific section centered on Lee’s family has been painted in fuchsia in a tribute to his mother who loved the color. 
    Installation view of “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” at Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Danny Perez.
    Of course, fans of Lee’s films will recognize props, costumes, and photographs from his productions, as well as clips that are dotted throughout the show. The honors the director has received—a BAFTA, two Academy Awards, and entries into the Library of Congress—are also included here as a mark of his own creative achievements.  
    “We only ever see a very small side of him or his persona,” said Gant. “This was an opportunity to add to visitors’ knowledge of Spike, giving them a very different view, perspective, and understanding.” 
    Below are six unmissable highlights from the exhibition.

    1. Michael Ray Charles,(Forever Free) Bamboozled (1997)
    Michael Ray Charles, (Forever Free) Bamboozled (1997). Collection of Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
    Best known for his complex body of work that confronts the misrepresentation of African Americans in popular culture, Charles served as a visual consultant on Lee’s 2000 movie Bamboozled. The artist’s 1997 canvas was included in the film and in his telling, pretty much inspired the comedy on modern-day Black minstrelsy. “Spike denies it,” Charles has said, but “there was no Bamboozled before my work.” 

    2. An African National Congress flaginscribed by Nelson and Winnie Mandela
    Nelson Mandela’s inscription on an African National Congress flag in Spike Lee’s collection. Photo: Min Chen.
    Described as one of Lee’s most prized possessions, the flag was gifted to the director during the making of 1992’s Malcolm X, which briefly featured Nelson Mandela. That period also marked the final chapter of apartheid; in a few years, Mandela would sweep the country’s first democratic elections. “Victory is in sight,” Winnie Mandela wrote on the flag. “We shall be free!”

    3. Prince’s Love Symbol Guitar
    Musical instruments in Spike Lee’s collection, including Verdine White’s bass guitar and Prince’s Love Symbol guitar. Photo: Min Chen.
    Lee and Prince go way back. The pair first bonded in 1986 at the late musician’s Paisley Park studios and since then, Lee has directed Prince’s video for 1991’s “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night,” while Prince has supplied songs for the soundtrack of Lee’s Girl 6 (1996). So, yes, of course the filmmaker owns one of the songwriter’s Love Symbol guitars, in addition to a heap of other Prince memorabilia. 

    4. Patrick Martinez,Fight the Power (Chuck D) (2018)
    Patrick Martinez, Fight the Power (Chuck D) (2018). © Patrick Martinez. Collection of Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee. Photo: Michael Underwood. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
    Martinez’s stunning neon and plexiglass sculpture is part of the artist’s project to celebrate and immortalize the work of rap heroes—in this case, Chuck D of Public Enemy. The group’s track “Fight the Power” is of evident significance to Lee: it soundtracks a key scene in Do the Right Thing (1989) and is represented in the Music segment of the exhibition, in a poster printed with an evocative verse from the song.

    5. Carrie Mae Weems,Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee (2018)
    Carrie Mae Weems, Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee (2018). Photo: Min Chen.
    While photographing Lee for Time magazine following the release of BlacKkKlansman, Weems captured this tender moment between the director and his wife of 30 years, offering a portrait of a loving marriage. “I’m a lucky man,” Lee has said of his relationship with the producer. Weems and Lee’s ties also go beyond this photo commission: the artist’s work was most recently included in the Netflix adaptation of She’s Gotta Have It. 

    6. Kehinde Wiley,Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia (2005)
    Kehinde Wiley, Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia (2005). Collection of Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee. © Kehinde Wiley. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
    Wiley was commissioned by Lee to paint this portrait of Jackie Robinson, which is an absolute showpiece in the Sports section of the show. In it, the baseball legend—the first Black player in the Major League Baseball—is depicted resplendent in his Dodgers 42 jersey (which Lee donned in Do the Right Thing), in a stance befitting of sports royalty. “Imagine the pressure,” Lee once wrote of Robinson. “The entirety of African American progress is on your shoulders.” 
    “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, October 7, 2023—February 4, 2024.
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    London’s Design Museum Will Dive Into Mattel’s Archives for a Major Barbie Exhibition in 2024

    London’s Design Museum has been granted special access to Mattel’s Barbie archives in California for a new exhibition scheduled to open at the institution in July 2024. The announcement follows in the wake of “Barbiemania” inspired by this summer’s blockbuster Barbie movie.
    While the Barbie doll is one of the most recognizable toys in the world, the pleasure of playing with Barbie is making use of her extensive accessories collection that includes iconic outfits, hot pink convertibles and of course Dreamhouses. That’s why the this exhibition will explore the story of Barbie through a design lens that encompasses fashion, architecture, furniture and even vehicle design.
    “We look forward next year to displaying a whole range of eye-catching objects, some familiar but many never seen before, to showcase the evolution of design across the decades of Barbie’s world,” said Tim Marlow, director and CEO of the Design Museum.
    According to the Design Museum, the exhibition has been three years in the making and coincides with the 65th anniversary of the creation of the Barbie brand. Curated by Danielle Thom, the show will map the Barbie legacy that started when Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler invented Barbie for her daughter, Barbara, in 1959.
    The doll has long been a cultural touchstone, there has been a surge of interest in the toy in the aftermath of Greta Gerwig’s hit film, Barbie, which led to a “pink wave” in pop culture when it was released in theaters this summer.
    Artists such as the duo Drift have embraced “Barbiemania” as inspiration for new work. In July, Drift melted down one of the dolls and deconstructed her into an abstract sculpture. Meanwhile, the artist Stuart Semple has released Pinkie – The Barbiest Pink, a new pigment created to protest Mattel’s trademark of “Barbie Pink.”
    Additionally, the National Toy Hall of Fame announced last month that Ken, Barbie’s companion, is one of 12 finalists for induction in the hall.
    “[T]his may have been the year of Barbie at the box office, but perhaps Ken will share some of the spotlight by getting inducted into the hall?”  Christopher Bensch, vice president for collections at the Strong Museum, said in a news release. “Only time will tell!”
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    In Town for Frieze Week? Here Are 5 Must-See Exhibitions to Add to Your Calendar

    Though London boasts a world-class offering of exhibitions year-round, its museums put their best foot forward each autumn as the capital is overrun by art lovers during Frieze week. It seems to be the season of solo shows, with a mix of rising stars and members of the old guard stepping into the spotlight.
    Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy (until January 1, 2024), which is, shockingly, the museum’s first solo dedicated to a woman artist, has already been the talk of the town for some weeks now. Another long-awaited show is Philip Guston at Tate Modern (October 5—February 25, 2024), which was controversially postponed to buy the curators more time to contextualize sensitive content addressing fraught race relations in the U.S. during the 1960s.
    Elsewhere, Tate Britain is dedicated a retrospective to Sarah Lucas. Also much anticipated will be painter Nicole Eisenman’s show at Whitechapel (until January 14, 2024), on tour from the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, which offers contemporary spins on art historical classics.
    Below, our European team have picked out five shows that they have penciled into their calendars.

    Claudette Johnson: “Presence“The Courtauld GallerySeptember 29, 2023—January 14, 2024
    Claudette Johnson, Standing Figure with African Masks (2018). Tate, London. © Claudette Johnson. Photo: Tate.
    Johnson’s first solo at a major public gallery in London marks a significant moment for one of the founding members of the Black British Arts Movement, which emerged in the 1980s as part of the BLK Art Group. This exhibition raises important questions about the role of Black artists within the British art establishment. The artist’s journey, as well as the broader narrative of the art world, is poignantly symbolized by a career overview in the distinguished and historically exclusive halls of the Courtauld Gallery.
    Johnson’s monumental and evocative drawings, featuring friends, family, and herself, play with pose, gaze, color, and scale, creating a soft yet profoundly impactful effect. She aspires to “tell a different story about our presence in this country,” she said.
    —Naomi Rea

    Trevor Yeung: “Soft ground“GasworksSeptember 28, 2023—December 18, 2023
    Trevor Yeung, “Soft ground” research image, London, 2022–23. Courtesy the artist.

    “This is not an exhibition to be experienced during the opening,” Trevor Yeung said at the opening of “Soft ground” at the non-profit Gasworks in London’s Vauxhall. Indeed, the usual chatter and banter at crowded gallery openings are not the best fit for this particular show, the Hong Kong rising star’s first solo show in the U.K.
    Rather than calling this an exhibition, “Soft ground” is perhaps more appropriately seen as one immersive work that requires the audience’s full attention and engages all of their senses to experience it fully. Inspired by the artist’s research on London’s gay cruising areas during his residency at Delfina Foundation, the experience of exploring this dimly lit gallery space is an artistic exploration of the social and emotional complexities of this hidden cultural phenomenon. In the dark, you may encounter a familiar scent that reminds you of a former lover, a sound resembling something you might have heard, and the sight of a large tree trunk, like the notorious one in Hampstead Heath known as an embodiment of sexual desires. As one of the finalists of the Sigg Prize this year and the representative of Hong Kong at next year’s Venice Biennale, Yeung has crafted a poignant work to savor.

    —Vivienne Chow

    Frank Walter: “Artist, Gardener, Radical“Garden MuseumOctober 4, 2023—February 25, 2024
    Frank Walter, Man Climbing a Coconut Palm and View of Red Canoe and Boat in Harbour (undated). Courtesy Frank Walter Family and Kenneth M. Milton Fine Art.
    Anyone in need of a break from London’s grey skies will discover that the vibrant landscapes of Antiguan artist Frank Walter possess an almost transportive power. This new retrospective at the relatively unsung Garden Museum features over 100 paintings and sculptures, most of which were created later in Walter’s life when he had withdrawn to a remote studio, dedicating his time to creative endeavors until his passing in 2009.
    The museum utilizes these richly evocative works as a lens through which to explore the artist’s environmental and social activism. In addition to his prolific artistic output, Walter made history as the first Black man to manage a sugar plantation in Antigua. He was also a dedicated writer of political manifestos advocating for progressive policies, such as police training and support for small farms and fisheries.
    —Jo Lawson-Tancred

    Hiroshi SugimotoHayward GalleryOctober 11, 2023—January 7, 2024
    Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lightning Fields 225 (2009). Photo: Sugimoto Studio.
    Though the Japanese artist and architect recently made headlines for adding his 69-feet-tall “Point of Infinity” to the San Francisco skyline, he is best known for his photography. These striking, predominantly black-and-white works were produced over half a century using methods inspired by the very earliest 19th-century techniques and have been brought together for a new show at the Hayward Gallery. Among the subjects captured by Sugimoto are eerily lifelike wax figurines, modernist architecture, lightning, old-school cinemas, seascapes, and the eternally serene aura of the Buddha statues affixed to a 12th-century temple in Kyoto.
    —Jo Lawson-Tancred

    El Anatsui’s Hyundai CommissionTate ModernOctober 10, 2023—April 14, 2024
    El Anatsui in the studio. Photo: Ofoe Amegavie
    Of all the things happening during Frieze week, the annual Hyundai commission at the Tate Modern is kept mostly under wraps until its grand unveiling during the busiest week in the October art world. Naturally, we are excited to check it out. Finding a way to intelligently fill the industrially scaled Turbine Hall is an artistic feat, though Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui—who was recently interviewed on Artnet News—should be more than capable of executing a powerful takeover. Known for gigantic and shimmering artworks crafted from recycled materials that envelop walls or spill across gallery floors, these triumphantly sized pieces are typically delivered to museums without instructions. Anatsui seeks full creative collaboration with his hosts, leaving it up to them to decide how to install them.
    —Kate Brown

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    Need a Fast Pass to Serenity This Frieze Week? An Art-Filled Chapel in London Offers an Oasis of Calm

    The busiest week of London’s art world calendar is almost upon us. As everyone gears up to take on Frieze’s big white tents and a buffet of blockbuster museum shows, they may wonder when they’ll ever be able to have a break. The insider tip is to visit All Saints Chapel, an oasis of calm just off Oxford Street that boasts magnificent decorative features, including a sweeping crucifixon fresco and stained glass windows by the Victorian artist John Richard Clayton.
    This unique 19th-century space is being used to stage the intimate exhibition, “Living Memory,” which presents sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and paintings by Israeli artist Gideon Rubin against a soothing soundscape by French musician Nicolas Godin. The show explores how each artist has been informed by memory, and foregrounds their ability to morph materials into strangely familiar, human forms.
    Installation view of “Living Memory” at All Saints Chapel in London. Photo: Richard Ivey.
    Adapted for all-women convent, Clayton’s crucifixion scene is unusual for only depicting women attendants. These dutiful figures are explicitly echoed in new paintings by Rubin, which were modeled on stills from the German film Mächen in Uniform (1931) by female director Leontine Sagan. Almost life-size, they have a commanding presence, but without faces and dressed in plain white dresses they never overwhelm their ornate surroundings.
    “Gideon has always used found photographs from flea markets that are completely anonymous to him, and he’d reimagine their lives,” said the show’s curator Beth Greenacre. “Its very much about time passing and the loss of detail.”
    Stealing the show, inevitably, are the three sculptures by Bourgeois, two of which belong to her “Personages” series from the 1940s. These tall abstracted forms are a masterclass in how little detail is needed for a composition to be richly suggestive. Brother & Sister (1949), which takes centre-stage in place of an altar, consists of two curved slabs of woods that merely brush against each other but instantly communicate familial affection.
    “She had just left Paris and was an emigré in New York,” said Greenacre. “She talked about these as memories of the families and friends she’d left behind. They’re totems of characters and they become what we want them to be as well.”
    Installation view of “Living Memory” at All Saints Chapel in London. Photo: Richard Ivey.
    As in Rubin’s work, much can be read into a single gesture, post or tilt of the head. “In that space between abstraction and figuration, what is possible?” said Greenacre. “Its interesting to think of Bourgeois’ history of psychoanalysis and how she uses her art as a way of releasing challenging moments from her past.”
    Leaping forward many decades to Bourgeois’ later life, Arch of Hysteria (2000) is a splayed naked body, somehow simultaneously limp and taut, and roughly stitched together with scraps of unnaturally pink fabric. Suspended from the ceiling, the small doll slowly spins on its see-through string. The work is inspired by the idea of the “hysterical” (presumed female) patient confined and studied by the male neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, about whom Bourgeois felt both critical and curious.
    Though in some sense, references like these might feel out of place in a chapel, the space’s unique capacity for peaceful contemplation feels entirely appropriate for artworks that, much like the religious art that came before them, speak to universal themes of remembrance, loss, spirituality, and transformation.
    “Living Memory” is open Monday to Saturday until 6pm at 82-83 Margaret Street in Fitzrovia through October 27. There will be a special late opening on October 12 for Frieze. It is supported by Galerie Karsten Greve.
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    María Magdalena Campos-Pons Shows Her Santería-Influenced, ‘Poetic Surrealist’ Art at the Brooklyn Museum, a Long Overdue New York Survey

    You may not know the name María Magdalena Campos-Pons yet, but the Cuban-born artist—who draws on the global legacy of colonialism and her own family history—has long built up significant art-world credentials outside of New York.
    In addition to appearing in prestigious international exhibitions such as Documenta 14 and the Sharjah Biennial, she has also had her work acquired by institutions including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Just this week, she was named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, an honor that comes with a $800,000 grant.
    Now, those pieces are all on loan to the Brooklyn Museum—which added Campos-Pons to its own collection earlier this year—for the 64-year-old artist’s first museum survey show since 2007 (at the Indianapolis Museum of Art), and her first major New York exhibition.
    “María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold” at the Brooklyn Museum with her sculptural installation Spoken Softly With Mama (1998). Photo by Paula Abreu Pita.
    The first work on view, an ambitious installation titled Spoken Softly With Mama, “is just art history canon, period,” Carmen Hermo, associate curator at the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, told me during a recent tour of the exhibition.
    First shown at MoMA in 1998 and now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, the piece combines video projection, sound, cast glass sculpture, and hand embroidery in a moving tribute not only to the artist’s female relatives, but the broader history of Black women’s domestic work, both for their own families, and in the employ of white ones.
    “In the videos, you see Magda kind of performing these poetic surrealist type of evocations of that labor,” Hermo said.
    María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Secrets of the Magnolia Tree (2021). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo ©María Magdalena Campos-Pons.
    Hermo organized the show with Mazie Harris, a curator at the Getty, where the show will conclude a tour that includes stops at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina, and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, bringing together a selection of more than 50 works that engage with complex subjects such as motherhood, racial identity, the legacy of slavery, police brutality, and the migrant crisis. (A tribute to Breonna Taylor is on loan to the Brooklyn Museum from the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.)
    A photographer, painter, sculptor, and performance artist, Campos-Pons was born in 1959, the year Fidel Castro came to power. In defiance of the official state atheism of her youth, the artist taps into her spirituality in her work, often referencing Santería, an African diasporic religion with roots in West Africa’s Yoruba faith that has influences from a wide range of cultures, including Catholicism.
    María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Red Composition (1997), from the series “Los Caminos (The Path).” Collection of Wendi Norris. Photo ©María Magdalena Campos-Pons.
    Campos-Pons’s grandmother was a Santería priestess; her father, an herbalist. Key to many pieces are Santería’s pantheon of Orishas, seven deities said to have traveled to the Americas during the slave trade to safeguard their people.
    One self-portrait depicts Campos-Pons as Yemaja, the mother of all Orishas, naked from the waist up save for blue body paint of the ocean waves. The artist is posing with two baby bottles of her own breast milk and a hand-carved wooden boat, symbolizing the goddess’s nourishing of her people even as they are forced to leave behind their homes.
    María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Untitled (Breast and Bottle Feeding) (1994), from the series “When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla.” Collection of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth. Photo ©María Magdalena Campos-Pons.
    A significant portion of the exhibition is dedicated to the artist’s large-scale Polaroids, 20-by 24-inch prints she began creating as part of a multi-year residency with the photography company in the 1990s. Campos-Pons uses the individual images to create unique multi-panel photographs that are monumental in scale and look like performances frozen in time.
    “That idea of the combination of the fragments coming together as one is so crucial to the work. She also describes it as the topography of diaspora,” Hermo said. “This idea that you’re taking multiple experiences and dislocations and geographies and connections and sort of combining them all together.”
    María Magdalena Campos-Pons, When I Am Not Here/Estoy Allá, Tríptico I, (1996). Photo ©María Magdalena Campos-Pons.
    Forced to leave an increasingly unstable Cuba following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Campos-Pons moved first to Canada before settling in Boston. (She’s called Nashville home since 2017.) Unable to visit her family for years, the artist imbued her work with a sense of homesickness and loss, but also a rootedness in her identity and family history, as well as her physical body.
    The 1990 mixed-media wall-relief sculpture Soy una Fuente (I Am a Fountain), just acquired by the Detroit Institute of Arts at Christie’s in March—where it sold for four times the high estimate—illustrates many of those themes and Campos-Pon’s strong feminist underpinnings.
    María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Soy una Fuente (I Am a Fountain), 1990. Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Photo ©María Magdalena Campos-Pons.
    “It has these elements of the body fragmented again, but effusive, leaking,” Hermo said. “There’s menstrual blood, there’s shit, there’s tears, there’s breast milk, there’s a little fetus floating there in the center, and then what Magda describes as the most potent output of a woman—which is her words, coming from the mouth. It’s this idea of the artist defining herself, as a body, as a creator of life, but then also specifically as a Black woman.”
    “María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, September 15, 2023–January 14, 2024.

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