Eliana Willis

Although he is essentially synonymous with the New York underground scene of the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat also traveled frequently through Asia and Europe. On one trip to Modena, Italy, in 1982, he produced a group of eight new paintings for an exhibition with the dealer Emilio Mazzoli that never ended up happening.
Inevitably, with time, these works have made their own journeys across the globe. Just over 40 years later, they have all been reunited for the first time in a new show at Fondation Beyeler in the Swiss town of Riehen, near Basel.
The typically expressive works each measure at least six-and-a-half by 13 feet and tend to focus on one solitary figure who is, in some cases, accompanied by a cow or a dog. Lacking any of the common motifs of the metropolis that Basquiat liked to employ, they seem to reflect his new, more provincial location. Some of the compositions had been spray painted over old canvases discarded by the artist Mario Schifano, and all are easily identifiable thanks to the inscription of ‘Modena’ on the back. As such, they can be viewed as one cohesive body of work.
Basquiat was just 21 in 1982, but his star was rapidly ascending and that June he was the youngest artist to exhibit at Documenta 7 in Kassel. The year before, Mazzoli had given him his first solo show under his original alias of SAMO so, in early 1982, the artist gladly accepted an invitation from the Italian dealer to visit Modena and produce more works inside his warehouse studio.
Looking back on the arrangement some years later, however, Basquiat compared it to “a sick factory. I hated it. I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.” He was surely relieved, then, when Mazzoli had a disagreement with Basquiat’s New York gallerist Annina Nosei and the show was canceled. Nosei eventually sold the canvases, some of which went on to become his most renowned and highly valued.
“Basquiat: The Modena Paintings” runs until August 27. Preview works from the show below.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Guilt of Gold Teeth (1982). Photo: Annik Wetter, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artestar, New York.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982). Photo: Daniel Portnoy © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artestar, New York.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Field Next To The Other Road (1982). Photo: Adam Reic, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artestar, New York.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Woman with Roman Torso [Venus]) (1982). Photo: Robert Bayer, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artestar, New York.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Cowparts) (1982). Photo: Adam Reich, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artestar, New York.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Profit 1 (1982). Photo: Robert Bayer, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artestar, New York.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Devil (1982). Photo: © 2023 Phillips Auctioneers LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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I’m still quoting a joke that arts philanthropist Agnes Gund made six years ago. Speaking about her Black grandchildren, she mentioned a pillow she has embroidered with the words along the lines of: “If I knew grandchildren were this much fun, I would have had them first.”
The president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art delivered this line at an event at the New York institution inaugurating the Art for Justice Fund, a project of Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors that she generously supports and was created to fight the racist scourge of mass incarceration in America. With just 4.25 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. houses a fifth of the world’s prison inmates at an annual cost of about $81 billion. (Apropos of those grandchildren, Black minors are four times as likely to be incarcerated as their white counterparts.)
Julie Mehretu, Rubber Gloves (2018). Photo by Tom Powel. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery and Ford Foundation Gallery.
Now, the exhibition, “No Justice Without Love,” at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York celebrates the end of the six-year lifespan of the initiative, which focuses on bail reform, sentencing reform, and developing reentry opportunities for the formerly incarcerated.
It features major figures such as Titus Kaphar, Julie Mehretu, and Faith Ringgold, along with artists on the rise like Jesse Krimes and Sherrill Roland, as well as collectives like For Freedoms and the People’s Paper Co-op. Some of the artists, including Krimes and Roland, were formerly incarcerated; Krimes just launched the Center for Art and Advocacy, dedicated to mentoring those formerly incarcerated, with money from the Art for Justice Fund.
Bayete Ross Smith, still from How A White Mob Destroyed a City and Got Away With It, from the Red Summers 2021. Courtesy of the Artist and Ford Foundation Gallery.
Curated by Daisy Desrosiers, director and chief curator at Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, the show includes works that visualize the mass incarceration system and its wide-ranging effects in various ways. 
Some focus on infrastructure, at differing scales. At the show’s entrance, for example, is a video animation by Paul Rucker, Proliferation (2009), that shows the U.S. as if seen from a satellite, with glowing dots of various colors mapping the growth of the prison system, set to Rucker’s music. A 19-foot-tall print by Maria Gaspar reproduces the exterior of Cook County Jail at life size; next to it hangs a minimalist-looking sculpture by Roland that traces the mortar lines between cinder blocks that make up the walls of cells like the one where he spent more than 10 months for a crime he didn’t commit.
Other works address the situation more obliquely: for example, Titus Kaphar’s 2019 painting From a Tropical Space, in which two Black women appear with strollers with white spaces where the children should be, as if stolen from them. Krimes’s quilt Marion (2021), meanwhile, depicts an outdoor scene of the type to which an imprisoned person might wish to return, made partly from used clothing collected from incarcerated people.
The show partly aimed to answer the question, “How do you organize a show about a fund?” In partial answer is a “Call and Response” section, devoted to acknowledgements from cultural practitioners who have received support from the fund, in the form of letters, artworks, audio, and video. After the show closes, it will remain available on Art for Justice’s website.
See more images from the show below.
Jesse Krimes, Marion (2021). Courtesy the artist and Ford Foundation Gallery.
Maria Gaspar, Unblinking Eyes, Awaiting (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Ford Foundation Gallery. Photo by Sebastian Bach.
Sherrill Roland, 168.803 (2021). Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Ford Foundation Gallery.
The People’s Paper Co-op in collaboration with Kill Joy and PPC Fellows: Faith Bartley, Nashae Cooper, Tinika Hogan, Ivy Johnson, Janaya Pulliam, My Power Within (2021). Courtesy of The People’s Paper Co-op.
Titus Kaphar, From a Tropical Space (2019). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
“No Justice Without Love” is on view at the Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 E 43rd St, New York, through June 30.

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A dozen drawings by Leonardo da Vinci will be on view in the U.S. for the first time in a show opening this summer in Washington, D.C. They come from the Codex Atlanticus, the largest collection of drawings and writings in Italian by the legendary polymath, which stretches across some 1,200 pages over 12 volumes.  
Leonardo maintained the Codex Atlanticus from 1478 to 1519, the year of his death, and it has been held in Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana since 1637.
An array of subjects are included in the collection, such as botany, flight, mathematics, musical instruments, and weaponry. Engineers and designers have found rich material for their work in its pages. Art historian and Leonardo expert Carlo Pedretti dubbed the codex, which spans the artist’s entire career, the most important of the master’s manuscripts. 
Leonardo da Vinci, Hydraulic pump and fountain within a building. ⓒ Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Mondadori Portfolio.
“Imagining the Future—Leonardo da Vinci: In the Mind of an Italian Genius” opens June 21 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, in Washington, D.C. 
Indicating Leonardo’s great ambition, one drawing explores the concept of perpetual motion without an external energy source, along with imaginative architectural studies. Another sheet testifies to the artist’s interest in underwater exploration, showing concepts for diving machines as well as water pumps. Another contains detailed diagrams and calculations exploring mathematical principles, such as the golden ratio, in their application to art and architecture.
Some drawings in the show can be tied to modern mechanisms, the organizers point out: Leonardo’s study for a digging machine provided inspiration for the excavating machines of today; his design for a self-propelling cart has echoes in our self-driving vehicles; and his diving apparatus influenced underwater exploration.
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Is it possible that the secret to successful public art is commissioning artists who don’t ordinarily make it?
That can roughly be described as the philosophy of Jacob King, the art advisor at the center of a new dual presentation of works by Charles Ray and Christopher Wool at the eight-acre commercial complex Manhattan West, owned and developed by Brookfield Properties.
“My whole pitch to Brookfield from the beginning was that if you’re going to be doing commissions with artists for public places, I think it’s really important to work with artists that don’t do a lot of these,” King told Artnet News. “There’s a lot of great artists that do a lot of work in lobbies but when you put an artist in a lobby that people expect to see there, they often just ignore it. I think it’s much more challenging, but also much more rewarding, to try to work with artists who haven’t done works in this context before.”
On June 5, the sculptor Charles Ray unveiled two stainless-steel, larger-than-life figures, titled Adam and Eve (2023), on the steps outside of the Manhattan West site. Hanging in the adjacent lobby is painter Christopher Wool’s monumental 28-by-39-foot mosaic made of Venetian stone and glass, which is visible from the street through large glass windows.
Detail of Charles Ray, Adam and Eve (2023) at Manhattan West. Photo by Timothy Schenck.
King, who has advised Brookfield on art for the past seven years, said that he thought Ray and Wool, stars of the contemporary art world, would be long shots for the commissions. But when he approached Ray a few years ago, the artist immediately agreed.
Ray said that the pandemic affected his approach to the sculpture, as did his own injuries, including a broken neck sustained during a recent car accident.
“At the same time, I was reading the Lost Books of Eden and a history of Adam and Eve,” Ray told Artnet News during an unveiling celebration. “As I was reading and thinking about it at the the height of the pandemic, older people were dying and it was horrible.”
The resulting work depicts an elderly man and woman, rendered in the artist’s signature stainless steel in a larger-than-life scale. “I’m very interested in this location and the civic quality,” Ray said. “I know they have to interact with the vitality. They had to look out, but not compete with the buildings, and hold their own.”
Installation view of Christopher Wool, Crosstown Traffic (2023). Photo by Timothy Schenck.
Wool’s mosaic, the aptly titled Crosstown Traffic (2023), marks the first time the artist has accepted a public commission. “It was such an exciting idea, to be invited and considered,” Wool said at the event.
It also marks the first time the artist—best known for his wry black-and-white text paintings and abstract canvases—has worked in the medium. “The challenge was the scale,” he said. “I had worked with silkscreen, which has allowed me to enlarge images, and right away I started thinking about different ways of blowing something up. Mosaic seemed perfect.”
Wool based the mosaic, with its swirls of red and black lines against a dark, cloud-like abstraction, on a drawing. “The drawing took a day and figuring out the mosaic took a month,” he said, plus another four months to fabricate it. (Artisan Fabrizio Travisanutto in Spilimbergo, Italy, just north of Venice, took “what little I said and went with it.”)
The finished work is comprised of 140 32-square-foot panels, interlocking pieces that were put together on scaffolding.
Artist Charles Ray at the unveiling of Adam and Eve (2023) at Manhattan West. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
Sabrina Kanner, head of development, design, and construction for Brookfield Properties, said that the company saw the Manhattan West site as an “ideal place” for art.
“If you look at the topography of the site, the way the grade sort of falls away as you’re going downtown, the grade of the plaza and this public areas created sort of a perch where you could easily see art as you’re driving down Ninth Avenue or as you’re coming across from Moynihan station,” Kanner told Artnet News.
L to R: Artist Christopher Wool, Sabrina Kanner and Jacob King at the unveiling of Crosstown Traffic (2023) at Manhattan West. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
“So while we had not at that point identified what the work would be,  we had committed to having a major piece of work there.”
“I give Brookfield so much credit,” added King. “They’re will to take risks. If you’re not willing to take a bit of a risk, you’re never going to end up with a really great artwork.”
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