Eliana Willis

Sofia Coppola’s seminal film “Lost In Translation” (2003) begins with a 33-second shot of Scarlett Johansson’s butt. And it is an iconic image—pulled directly from contemporary art. “It was based on a John Kacere painting,” Coppola told Rolling Stone. “His work all looks like that.”
Indeed, the Lexington, Kentucky-born Kacere became a star in the 1970s, collected by the likes of Sylvester Stallone. He was known for painting scantily clad bums of thin white women before photorealism had penetrated contemporary art. His work reads like the male gaze counterpart to late Chicago artist Christina Ramberg, simplified to focus on supple flesh and fabric.
John Kacere, Pascale (1987). Image: Gratin.
Kacere died in 1999, at 79, having produced 115 paintings. Those limited quantities, paired with backlash around his subject matter, have rendered it rare to witness Kacere’s work in person. (For his part, Kacere maintained that he made art about sexuality—not sex.) Louis K. Meisel staged a survey in 2020, but as Gratin gallery founder Talal Abillama told me, Meisel’s crowded SoHo, New York dealership doesn’t offer a traditional viewing experience. So, Abillama set out to organize an exhibition of Kacere’s work at his ascendant East Village gallery.
His exhibition, titled “Butt Can You Feel It?” features six large-scale works of oil on canvas, two smaller photos Kacere used as source imagery, and a sketch.
“Before I did the show, I would ask my friends, specifically girls, ‘what’s a painter or a painting that you like?’” Abillama recounted over the phone. Several mentioned Kacere. When Abillama finally got in front of a painting himself, he said, “it shook me.”
Every piece, except the film, is named after a sitter. Abillama said Kacere usually worked with models. He also did commissioned portraits—though not without incident.
John Kacere, Red Bikini (1975). Image: Gratin.
In 1972, for instance, Louisville’s Speed Art Museum acquired “Purple Panties” (ca. 1969). “Buying this painting was considered revolutionary,” Curator Miranda Lash later told Louisville Public Media. “They were so proud that they were able to, sort of, break past the traditional societal mores of being ‘prudish’ about sexuality.”
“Purple Panties” became a local icon. The Speed sold it on posters and matchbooks. But, controversy broke out in 2004. The work’s model, Eleanor Browning Coke—daughter of photographer Van Deren Coke—sued her father’s estate for forcing her to disrobe so Kacere, his friend, could paint her. Browning Coke was 24 at the time. Still, the conversation around consent’s relation to power dynamics persisted. Rather than shying away from the issue, Lash put “Purple Panties” back on view in 2018, with an enhanced wall label to add context.
John Kacere, Kristina (1991). Image: Gratin.
Such debates have not stymied demand for Kacere’s work. One of his paintings even appeared on a Supreme shirt in 2022. Abillama told me the admiration was palpable last Friday night as fashion folk, families, and fans descended on “Butt Can You Feel It?”
“Time is the best friend of great art,” he said.
Given Kacere’s limited oeuvre, Abillama had to chase a chain of collectors from New York to Paris to Tokyo, plying them to put their pieces on view or up for sale. Most of these artworks have never hung in the same room. The guy who consigned the show’s biggest work even considered taking it back after seeing it installed. Abillama convinced him otherwise by raising the price. Several works here cost six figures. By the time of writing, some have already sold.
John Kacere’s “Butt Can You Feel It?” is on view at Gratin Gallery until December 20, 2024. More

Over the past four decades, Marc Jacobs has introduced grunge to the catwalk, legitimized street art at Louis Vuitton, and plucked rising fine artists mid-ascent for collaborations with his eponymous line.
To celebrate his fashion house’s 40th anniversary, Jacobs has partnered with Tribeca-based agency ICNCLST to drop reimagined designs by some of those fabled talents. A survey of works by the artists who have collaborated with Marc by Marc Jacobs and the house’s new Gen Z-coded Heaven collection is also newly opened in Los Angeles.
Installation view. Image: ofstudio, courtesy of Control Gallery.
“Like many, the first time that I learned of Takashi Murakami, it was not through a gallery but rather through his iconic collaboration with Marc,” ICNCLST Founder Sky Gellalty,—who co-curated the forthcoming exhibition, titled “Just Like Heaven,” with the Heaven by Marc Jacobs team—remarked in press materials. “Marc essentially set the blueprint for all that I, and so many of my friends, do as a career.” Over the phone, Gellalty added that he met Jacobs on the board of youth empowerment organization Free Arts, and was impressed to learn that Jacobs is as good of a person as he a designer.
“Just Like Heaven” opened on November 22 and remains on view through January 18 at Control Gallery, which Gellalty co-founded with Beyond The Streets creator Roger Gastman.
Artworks surrounding Alake Shilling’s Big Bossy Bear (2023) atop a cinderblock plinth. Image: ofstudio, courtesy of Control Gallery.
The show will feature about 20 original artworks from stars like Sofia Coppola, Damien Hirst, and Marilyn Minter—alongside younger names like photographer Petra Collins, tattoo artist Keegan Dakkar, and painter Alake Shilling.
“I think it is a rare opportunity for all of the artists, because without someone like Marc,” Gellalty told me, “they might not have a venue to exhibit together.”
The pieces on view will span several decades. Some will be original artworks that were later turned into designs. The eventual fashions themselves may also appear. A few participants—like graffiti writer Futura 2000, sketch artist Eri Wakiyama, and Pharell-approved creative Cactus Plant Flea Market (aka Cynthia Lu)—are contributing pieces made just for the show. Others, like musician Bladee (who appears on Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ re-release) are even offering works in unfamiliar mediums. And, in true Beyond The Streets style, there will be t-shirts and prints available in the exhibition’s gift shop.
A wall with three works by Futura 2000 in the center, and Damien Hirst’s Mickey (2012) on the right. Image: ofstudio, courtesy of Control Gallery.
Art and fashion have historically intertwined. Elsa Schiaparelli, whose avant-garde maximalism unseated Coco Chanel’s austere allure as the leading aesthetic after WWI, famously worked with Salvador Dali to devise her Lobster dress. Nonetheless, as Jacobs remarked in a recent conversation with Jerry Saltz filmed by Vogue, art has long been adamant about separating itself from craft. “When a fashion designer says ‘fashion is art,’ they are pretentious, arrogant” Jacobs remarked. “Like, ‘how dare you’ think you are a great artist? You work in cloth and you make fashion.’”
“I think that’s a shortcoming on the part of my world, that it tries to keep every other world at an arm’s length,” Saltz responded.
Gellalty hopes “Just Like Heaven” will inspire a larger institution to stage a retrospective of Jacobs’s pioneering efforts at this intersection somewhere down the line. More

Stainless steel, pandan leaves, and patent leather belts are some of the unexpected materials challenging the dominant legacy and traditional format of tapestries in Salon 94’s group exhibition “The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry” (through December 21, 2024). The show borrows its name from a celebrated 16th-century Flemish tapestry cycle, taking the works’ subject, technique, and lingering mysteries as points of departure. Expansive in both material and geographical scope, the featured works defy the looming legacy of the vaunted tapestry cycle to chart new futures for the medium.
The Mysteries of The Lady and the Unicorn
Housed in a special climate-controlled room at the Musée du Cluny in Paris, the Lady and the Unicorn is composed of six tapestries in the mille fleurs (“thousand flowers”) style. Showcasing a striking red background brimming with more than 40 different types of cultivated and wildflowers, each panel features a svelte and bejeweled woman flanked by domesticated, feral, and mythological animals. The tapestries were originally woven around 1500 in Flanders for the Le Vistes, a French family that held various political and administrative appointments at court. Rediscovered in the mid-19th century, the works were swiftly memorialized by acclaimed writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and George Sand.
A woman admires the newly restored “The Lady and the Unicorn” tapestries at the Cluny museum in Paris. Photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images.
Five of the six panels in the cycle are allegories on the senses. The subject of the sixth—featuring a woman inspecting jewelry—is still debated to this day. Fueling the mystery is an inscription reading À mon seul désir (“To my only desire”) woven into the background tent. Scholars have alternately interpreted the phrase as either a celebration of free will or a clandestine message hiding the initials of lovers. Both its secrets and its superlative craftsmanship have contributed to the tapestries’ continued historical relevance through the centuries, including their revival by William Morris for textile and wallpaper designs.
The Lady and the Unicorn found in the collection of Musée de Cluny. Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.
However, some more recent experts have argued that celebrating the unicorn cycle as the apogee of tapestry arts crowds out the importance of other textile traditions across the globe. In her 1965 treatise “On Weaving,” the late artist Anni Albers lauded the unicorn tapestries as “great works of art” but also advocated for a simultaneous and equal appreciation of Andean textiles. Similarly, Fabienne Stephan, the curator of the show at Salon 94, notes that “works in the exhibition may not all have the scale of 16th century tapestries, yet they are proof that centuries after its creation, the medium of weaving can be used to tell new epic stories and inspire an ideal future.”
Beyond the Loom
Installation view, from left to right: Porfirio Gutiérrez, Paquimé, (2024); Gutiérrez, Trails of Tears (2024); Margaret Rarru Garrawurra, Dhomala (Sail), (2024). Courtesy of Salon 94.
Several works in “The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry” underscore the importance of inherited Indigenous knowledge in weaving and textile arts. The California-based Zapotec artist Porfirio Gutierrez uses materials ranging from pecans to pomegranates to dye his fibers, transforming the flora of the mille fleurs from a background decision into a foundational element of the entire work. The senior Yolngu artist and master weaver Margaret Rarru Garrawurra used parts of the pandan tree (also known as the screw pine) to dye and weave a towering sail, emphasizing her practice’s position at the juncture between ancestral knowledge and quotidian goods.
Other artists in the exhibition tackle the industrialized process of tapestry creation itself. Kyoto-based Mitsuko Asakura’s sculptures, which resemble half-finished tapestries on bamboo looms, address the region’s long historical tradition of dying and weaving kimonos. In some cases, Asakura weaves the wooden supports themselves into her works, unraveling the hierarchy of production.
Installation view of Sagarika Sundaram, Night Creeper (2024) and Sight Unseen (2024). Courtesy of Salon 94.
Sagarika Sundaram’s wool sculptures bypass weaving altogether. Describing her work as a combination between papermaking, collage, and sculpture, she creates pressed felt “blind,” building a backwards palimpsest of pigments on wool obtained from locations as various as Oaxaca and the lower Himalayas. She notes that her broad sourcing of materials echoes that of classical European tapestry producers, as indigo and many of the other materials commonly used to dye have their own wide “geographical footprint.”
“My process mirrors the complexity, ferocity, and savagery that exists both in nature and in our human nature,” Sundaram tells Artnet News. Comparing the wound-like openings in her sculptures to eyelids, she says their “visceral quality” ensures “they feel like membranes, they feel like skin and bones,” while their overall “edible quality” means the work “hits the register of the mouth.” Here, the senses serve as connection points between the tapestry cycle and her sculptures: compressed, embodied, and exhumed.
Weaving Desire
Installation view of Adeline Halot, Sankai (2024). Courtesy of Salon 94.
Multiple artists in “The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry” interrogate the yearning inherent in the unicorn tapestries—including the yearning for money and power that has shaped the history of the medium. For instance, during the French Revolution tapestries and furnishings in the royal collection were burnt for their gold and silver threads to help finance the state amid the turmoil.  Using stainless steel and flax linen, Adeline Halot creates gleaming metallic sculptures whose gold and silver tones allude to the destructive potential of material desire. Of Halot’s materials, Stephan says “it is rare to see an artist developing a craft that is her own, based on history and looking into the future. In a moment when we are constantly shown AI-powered, illusionary images, Halot’s work glitches reality by weaving and sculpting metal thread with linen.”
Qualeasha Wood, bed rot (2024). Courtesy of Salon 94 and the artist.
Qualeasha Wood directly engages with the accelerated pace of desire in the contemporary digital world. Referring to textiles “as a bridge between the analog and the digital,” she has woven the pieces in this exhibition from a computerized loom, then further transformed them through hand embroidery and beading—a process that combines impersonal precision with, in her words, “the intimacy and imperfection of handcraft.” Endemic to her approach is an acknowledgment of weaving’s central yet underappreciated role in technological innovation; the jacquard loom, for instance, is widely considered a predecessor of early computers due to its interchangeable punch card system.
“I am interested in how platforms and technologies thrive on desire: the desire for interaction, affirmation, and escape, but also the darker, voyeuristic desire tied to surveillance and control,” Wood says. Her tapestries center her identity among these digital fragments to critique how “Black women’s bodies are often surveilled, consumed, and commodified, both online and offline.” Her digitally mediated threads also offer a contemporary update to Albers’s claim that “threads were the earliest transmitters of meaning.” Ultimately, Salon 94’s exhibition shows that textiles and weaving remain essential media for communication, whether they are untangling the allegorical and technical mysteries of The Lady and the Unicorn or expressing other personal and cultural histories that deserve to be seen just as clearly. More

French painter Henri Matisse first came into contact with ukiyo-e woodcut prints in the early 20th century, when various world fairs brought Japanese art to Europe. Struggling to get his own career off the ground (his first solo exhibit at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in 1904 was far from successful), Matisse took a liking to the prints, which offered a whole new way of looking at the world.
As it happens, Matisse’s lifelong fascination with, and indebtedness to, traditional Japanese printmaking is the focus of an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland. Titled “The Art of Pattern: Henri Matisse and Japanese Woodcut Artists”, it compares the French Fauvist’s use of color, composition, and pattern to three Japanese printmakers: Kikugawa Eizan, Keisai Eisen, and Utagawa Kunisada.
Part of “The Art of Pattern” exhibition. Photo: Baltimore Museum of Art.
“There is a clear visual connection between the patterning of Matisse and Japanese woodcut artists of the previous century,” the exhibition’s curators, Katy Rothkopf, director of the Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies, and Frances Klapthor, associate curator of Asian Art, told Artnet News.
“While Matisse placed his models in staged theatrical settings in his studio, Japanese artists similarly engaged with artifice and illusion, but for different purposes. Their depictions of women conveyed ideals of feminine beauty, exclusivity, and sexual allure, while overt references to known brothels, tea houses, and restaurants were deliberate advertisements.”
Henri Matisse, Standing Odalisque Reflected in a Mirror (1923). Photo: The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection © Succession H. Matisse Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The exhibition also highlights stylistic differences related to taste, culture, and history. Where Matisse typically placed his models in an indoor setting, either undressed or in revealing, sensual clothing, Japanese artists generally depicted female figures in public places, wearing elaborately patterned kimonos that commanded as much attention from the viewer as the individuals wearing them.
By contrast, Matisse often saved his patterns for the dreamlike, colorful interiors his subjects inhabited, like in his 1953 oil painting Pink Nude. If Japanese artists, whose work served a commercial as well as artistic purpose, were interested in representing the material reality of their society,Matisse went the opposite route, treating his everyday surroundings as abstract and transcended. Similar visual sensibilities; different outcomes.
Keisai Eisen, Mt. Fuji from Izu Province; The Courtesan Kisegawa of the Owariya Brothel (Early 1830s). Photo: The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift from the Estate of Julius Levy.
“Matisse, who collected textiles and decorative items with patterns throughout his career, found that patterning added depth and interest to his compositions,” Rothkopf and Klapthor explained. “The inclusion of decoration allowed him to dazzle the eye of his viewer, and encouraged a focus on the entire composition rather than just the main subject.”
“The Japanese artists included in ‘The Art of Pattern‘ used ornament and decoration to draw the viewer’s gaze toward their subjects in compelling and seductive ways,” they added. “Unlike the textiles depicted in Matisse’s works, the patterns depicted in the Japanese prints had additional symbolic meanings, which would have been easily discerned by a contemporary Japanese audience.”
Part of “The Art of Pattern” exhibition. Photo: Baltimore Museum of Art.
Matisse was hardly the only European artist at the turn of the 20th century to take inspiration from Asian art. Painters like Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin were likewise enamored with Japanese woodblock prints, and how different they looked from the western art on which they had been raised and educated. Rather than merely copying the works of Eizan, Eisen, Kunisada, and their contemporaries, Matisse drew on various sources of inspiration to create a style that was all his own, and remains singular to this day.
“The Art of Pattern: Henri Matisse and Japanese Woodcut Artists” runs until January 5, 2025 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Dr, Baltimore, MD 21218. More

During lockdown in 2020, British-Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah captured a world in crisis, enlisting friends and family to document their lives at home in black and white imagery. The resulting three-channel video installation, Five Murmurations, offers a profound reflection on a world in turmoil, blending pandemic-era realities with the global reckoning sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement.
On view through August 2025 at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., the film’s crowdsourced footage offers a haunting snapshot in time and is something of a departure from the cinematic, high-resolution film projects for which Akomfrah is known.
John Akomfrah. Photo by Taran Wilkhu, courtesy of British Council.
The difference between this work and his other films could clearly be seen when Five Murmurations opened in 2023, at which time his 2017 film Purple was on view just down the street at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, marking a rare simultaneous showing of a single artist across two Smithsonian museums. The latter is a soaring meditation on climate change featuring stunning shots of gorgeous landscapes in Alaska, Greenland, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, among other locations. The production was nothing short of epic in its scale.
In Five Murmurations, Akomfrah—who represented the U.K. at this year’s Venice Biennale—was limited to more intimate scenes, of people at home. The film is choppy, a series of frames made from high-resolution DPX files and still photographs, rather than seamlessly shot on top-of-the-line video cameras. Its crowdsourced footage offers a haunting snapshot in time.
“The first 10 minutes of the film are literally what we were all experiencing, what it felt like at the start of the pandemic. There’s a lot of hand wash washing, and you’ll see spinning COVID cells,” senior curator at the Museum of African Art Karen E. Milbourne said in a tour of the exhibition.
The film debuted at London’s Lisson Gallery in 2021, and appeared at the Utrecht Centraal Museum in the Netherlands in 2022. It is made up of five chapters, or “murmurations,” inspired by the way flocks of birds come together in flight as a defensive measure against predators.
John Akomfrah, Five Murmurations (2021), still. Photo courtesy of Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery, London.
“In a murmuration, the birds sort of fly apart and come together. So the first coming together of all of these disparate elements, if you will, is the murder of George Floyd,” Milbourne said. “It’s everybody staring at their cell phones, looking at their laptops, watching what happened. We were all in these moments. And that really propelled this global response to the Black Lives Matter movement. So you start to see footage of that as well.”
In addition to images of these swirling avian formations, Five Mumurations includes details from art historical masterpieces The Conjurer (ca. 1502) by Hieronymus Bosch and The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ (ca. 1483) by Andrea Mantegna, as well as archival images of the execution of Che Guevara. Akomfrah also intersperses shots of printed text dissolving in liquids, with words and phrases like “living with danger,” “the audacity of love,” and “hope.”
Milbourne noted that the artist’s signature style is working with montage, a technique with which in Five Murmurations he’s “really been able to do is take these crises of postcolonial legacies and issues of social justice and tap into this essential core of them, showing the intersections between race and violence and the global pandemic.”

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The film culminates in chilling ending, the imagery on screen becoming more abstracted with blooms of flashing light, as Akomfrah plays the audio recording of Floyd’s agonized final moments as he was strangled by the police.
“It really is the power of what art is. He’s able to capture what we all felt and bring the footage together. It is painful because it was a painful time, but it’s also a chance for us to recognize what one another went through,” Milbourne said. “It brings this utter clarity to the injustice we all recognize and need to change. For me, this piece is about what is the future we want to build.”
“John Akomfrah: Five Murmurations” is on view, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 950 Independence Avenue, SW, Washington, D.C., October 14, 2023–August 24, 2025.
“John Akomfrah: Purple” was on view at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Ave and 7th Street, Washington, D.C., November 23, 2022–January 7, 2024. More

There’s a longstanding practice of an era’s great Shakespeare actors to have their portraits documented by their painterly peers. William Hogarth depicted David Garrick as Richard III on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth. Thomas Lawrence captured John Philip Kemble spotlit and wrapped in a toga disguise as Coriolanus. And, perhaps most famously, John Singer Sargent presented a disturbing vision of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, her eyes haunted, her flowing dress dappled and glittering.
An exhibition at Red Eight Gallery near the Royal Exchange in the City of London picks up on the tradition, but updates it for our digital age. Here, the stage’s great actors are also its stars of television and film. The result is uncanny, playful, and futuristic.
Actress Juliet Stevenson. Photo: courtesy Stage Block.
“The Shakespeare Portraits (Act I),” which runs through January 10, 2025, features 10 living actors in digital portraits that are anything but static. In a form not dissimilar from Harry Potter’s living portraits, their gazes shift subtly and their expressions slowly morph through a catalog of emotions.
The portraits are the product of Stage Block, a technology studio set on creating a new type of collectable. Just as in the past, the actors arrived at a studio and posed to have their portrait taken (each one took roughly 80 minutes), only they were captured not by brush but by a state-of-the-art camera with most of the work taking place in post-production.
Patrick Stewart, center, alongside Adrian Lester, left, and Derek Jacobi, right. Photo: courtesy Stage Block.
The kicker? At a click of a button, these eerily alive actors pronounce a Shakespearean soliloquy of their choice. Ian McKellen delivers “all the world’s a stage” from As You Like It, Derek Jacobi offers up Hamlet’s “to be or not to be,” Harriet Walter’s turns to Prospero “Ye elves of hills” from The Tempest, David Suchet performs Macbeth’s infamous lines on the futility of life “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” (a role Suchet has never played).
Installation view of “The Shakespeare Portraits (Act I).” Photo: courtesy of Stage Block.
The 10 portraits are unique, one-off collectables (they are “on-chain” i.e. recorded on the blockchain) that Stage Block hopes will appeal to both individuals and institutions. The London-based company calls the portraits, “a new chapter in the convergence of portraiture and performing arts assembling some of the most revered actors of our time.”
Stage Block collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s honorary associate director Ron Daniels for the project and as suggested by the show’s title — Act I — Stage Block is planning to create a second round of Shakespeare Portraits in 2025.
The founders Sattari-Hicks and Francesco Pierangeli, whose backgrounds span finance, entertainment academia hope to replicate the template of “The Shakespeare Portraits” to other artistic disciplines. More

Like so many other works of art produced in the twilight years of the Renaissance, Domenikos “El Greco” Theotokopoulos’s painting Pentecost (ca. 1600) is based on a story from the New Testament. Specifically, it depicts the Holy Spirit descending upon Mary and the apostles in the form of a white bird.
Originally made as part of an altarpiece for the Colegio de Dońa María de Aragón seminary in Madrid, Spain, Pentecost is more than a straightforward illustration of religious narrative or dogma. Through his creative choices—for example, replacing the fiery wind described in the text with the aforementioned bird, or using himself as a model for one of the apostles, looking out directly at the viewer—El Greco is not just giving shape and form to the divine, but also exploring his own relationship to that concept.
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Pentecost (c. 1600). Photo: Archive. Museo Nacional del Prado.
Giving shape and form to the divine also happens to be the focus of “Living with the Gods: Art, Beliefs, and Peoples,” an ongoing exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. Open until January 20, 2025, it explores how artists from different cultures and time periods have represented concepts integral to their belief systems, including life, death, afterlife, pilgrimage, and—as the title suggests—the gods.
“Living with the Gods” is curated by none other than Neil MacGregor, renowned art historian and former director of both the National Gallery and the British Museum. The exhibition’s subject is dear to his heart, having previously hosted a BBC radio show of the same name in 2018, followed by a bestselling book in 2018.
Bedu Mask from Nafana, Kulango, or Degha peoples, Côte d’Ivoire or Ghana (1948–62). Photo: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston / D. and J. de Menil.
As the Guardian wrote of this book, which covers everything from French secularism to the mythology of the Yup’ik tribe of Alaska, “Living with the Gods is neither a history of religion, nor an argument in favor of faith, nor a defense of any one belief. Rather, it is an attempt to define the nature of belief, the way it influences people and the countries they inhabit, and to show how fundamental it is in explaining who we are and where we came from.”
The Houston exhibition is more expansive still. It brings in art and artifacts from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, the royal residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur in India, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to name only a few.
Buddha Enthroned, Thailand (Khmer), Angkor period (c.1180–1220). Photo: Kimbell ArtMuseum.
“Living with the Gods” moves far beyond Christian iconography. Aside from El Greco’s Pentecost, visitors can admire a wooden statue from 13th century Japan of Daiitoku Myōō, a Buddhist guardian deity also known as the Wisdom King of Awe-Inspiring Power, with inlaid crystals for eyes. There’s also a red sandstone statue of a standing Buddha, made in India sometime during the late 5th century.
Perhaps the most impressive item from the exhibition is a conch shell with engravings of human skulls from Veracruz in northern Mexico, dated to between 900 and 1521 AD, but probably made before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.
John Biggers, The Stream Crosses the Path (1961). Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Mandell © 2024 John T. Biggers Estate.
In addition to ancient artefacts, “Living with the Gods” also devotes space to a selection of contemporary paintings with religious undertones, notably The Stream Crosses the Path by John Biggers, an African American muralist whose work, which blends religious symbolisms with critiques of economic, social, and racial injustice across U.S. history, rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance.
“This exhibition is about how people everywhere have made beautiful things to negotiate their place in time and in the world,” MacGregor has said, “and how we use works of art to think about how we relate to each other. Putting art into that context allows for a different conversation. In museums, many great objects can lose their original purpose, which was spiritual. An exhibition of this kind can give that purpose back to them, allowing a new and deeper approach to great and familiar works.”  More