Eliana Willis

Most of the pieces on view in the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s (MIA) new “In Our Hands” survey of Native photography from 1890 to now were lent directly by the artists who made them. That’s rare for museum shows like this one, which tend to rely on loans from public and private collections. Here, the condition speaks to a truth that goes beyond MIA: few institutions, if any, have a substantial collection of this kind of work. 
“In Our Hands” is not the first exhibition of Native photography, of course. Even if the show could somehow lay claim to such a title, it wouldn’t, explained Jaida Grey Eagle, an Oglala Lakota photographer who guest-organized the presentation alongside MIA’s in-house curators Ahlberg Yohe and Casey Riley. 
“I don’t look at this as a beginning,” Grey Eagle said, alluding to the colonialist logic of racing to be the first to put a name on something. “I look at it as an acknowledgment. There have been many people who have dedicated their lives to this medium and I don’t ever want to erase their work.” The show, she went on, is about “honoring the knowledge that has been there and that museums have failed to support.” 
View of the exhibition “In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, October 22, 2023 – January 14, 2024. Courtesy of MIA.
If the exhibition’s lack of loans speaks to a broader issue, it also underlines one of its central themes: community. Early one, Ahlberg Yohe, Grey Eagle, and Riley assembled a Curatorial Council of 14 artists and academics, most of Native heritage, who developed the list of participating artists and weighed in on the language used to describe their work.  
The group also shaped the show’s three sections, each conceived with an emphasis on the present tense, regardless of the historical work included. “A World of Relations” looks at Native cultures’ holistic—not anthropocentric—view of living things; “Always Leaders” recognizes longstanding indigenous efforts around issues such as human rights, sustainability, and land preservation; and “Always Present” celebrates Native photographers who have used their medium to convey the vitality of their cultures.  
“’In Our Hands’ was structured through conversations with Indigenous artists and scholars from its inception, so there never were ‘outside’ voices. This was a project that grew organically from our conversations with the folks who became our Curatorial Council,” Riley explained in an email. 
“Our reasons for this were simple: we knew that centering their voices would be paramount in correcting historical narratives that erased Native people’s expertise. This project is built upon the work of people who came before us, who have been doing this work for a long time and should be the focus of scholarship from here on.” 
Nadya Kwandibens, Tee Lyn Duke (née Copenace) Toronto, ON, March (2010). Courtesy of the artist and Red Works Photography.
Advisory committees like this have become increasingly common in recent years as museum workers grapple with the question of how to communicate cultural experiences beyond their own. That same question is what first drew Grey Eagle to photography as a reservation kid in South Dakota; it’s what pushed her to help develop the MIA show too. 
“Growing up, I experienced a lot of journalists coming in,” she said, referring to her home community in South Dakota. “These were journalists flying across oceans to tell our story. As I got older, I started to notice that the articles that were coming out about my home community failed to encompass the entire story. They were always coming in to talk about strife. They never seemed to talk about why.” 
To introduce readers to “In Our Hands,” Grey Eagle picked out several representative works to highlight. 

Benjamin Alfred Haldane, Self-portrait in Studio in Metlakatla (c. 1919–20) 
Benjamin A. Haldane, Self-portrait in Studio in Metlakatla (c. 1919–20). Courtesy of MIA.
Just the Facts: A foundational figure among Native and First Nation photographers, Benjamin Alfred Haldane made studio portraits of members of his Tsimshian community in Alaska at the turn of the 20th century. He often filled the frame with props that represented his subjects—an approach that imbued his work with a semiotic charge. He took the same tact for this expertly composed self-portrait from 1919 or 1920. 
Expert Insights: “He uses all of these props to represent himself—to say, ‘This is what I do in the community,’” said Grey Eagle. “But on his arm, he has propped up a model totem pole, which is his clan crest—the wolf clan. The intentionality of choosing to connect his body to his heritage is so powerful to me. It’s such a rooted statement of who he is as a Tsimshian man.”  

Faye HeavyShield, Clan (2020)  
Installation view of Faye HeavyShield’s Clan (2020). Courtesy of MIA.
Just the Facts: One of the exhibition’s best-known artists, Faye HeavyShield makes sculptures, installations, and other artworks that are minimal in design, but broad in valence. At the core of what she does is the interrogation of the relationship—physical, spiritual—between land and body. HeavyShield was inspired to create Clan upon discovering a 1920s portrait of her grandmother. The work comprises a set of inkjet portraits, as well as a series of hanging canvas dresses. 
Expert Insights: “She wanted to create this connection between her grandmother and her daughters and granddaughters that was beyond stories and memories,” Grey Eagle said, in reference to the portrait that inspired the artist. “I love Faye’s work because it’s sculptural, but it moves. There’s a lot of tactility within the show…It’s a way that I see Native photographers using [the medium] in this really incredible new way.” 
 
Eve-Lauryn LaFountain, You Are on Native Land (2020)  
Eve-Lauryn LaFountain, You Are on Native Land: Niibidoon (Weave) (2020). Courtesy of the artist and MIA.
Just the Facts: As part of a recent series, Eve-Lauryn LaFountain scratched the phrase “You Are on Native Land” across strips of found film that she had woven together. The artist then sent her creations to collaborator Cody Edison, who in turn printed them as contact sheets. Now, these images are available for purchase as postcards, which are, according to the artists, meant to “act not as souvenirs of places from the sender, but rather as a reminder to the receiver that America was founded on the genocide and stolen lands of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.” Proceeds from the project have been put toward supporting activists who were arrested in 2020 during a protest for the return of the Black Hills to the Lakota people. Three postcards hang in the “Always Leaders” section of the show. 
Expert Insights: For LaFountain, You Are on Native Land extends beyond the postcards, Grey Eagle pointed out: “[LaFountain] would research the indigenous histories of each recipient’s address and write about the land that the postcards were going to.” The examples in the exhibition acknowledge the Dakota people, original caretakers of the land on which MIA sits, the curator added. 
 
Jeremy Dennis, Door Prop (2018)  
Jeremy Dennis, Door Prop (2018). Courtesy of the artist.
Just the Facts: In this moody photograph, a white woman cowers before an encroaching group of Native men, all dressed in stereotypic garb. The shot belongs to Dennis’s “Rise” series, which appropriates horror movie motifs as a way of reframing America’s colonization, displacement, and genocide of Native peoples.  
Expert Insights: With Door Prop, Dennis reanimates “classic zombie movie aesthetics but replaces zombies with Native Americans,” Grey Eagle said. “He does that to frame white people’s fear of Native American people as this manifestation of [their own] wrongdoing. In his imagined uprising, Native people cannot be ignored. Their presence has to be acknowledged.” 
Fittingly, Dennis’s artwork lives in “Always Present,” the exhibition’s last section. “I love that we leave on that,” Grey Eagle added. “When people talk about Native people, they always use past tense language. I hate that we have to say, ‘We’re still here,’ because we’ve always been here and we’re always going to be here.” 
“In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now” is on view through January 14, 2024 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. 

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The first headlines came way back in 2014. British Indian artist Anish Kapoor was experimenting with Vantablack, a newly invented material said to be the blackest black ever made.
“This material is the blackest material in the universe. Blacker than a black hole. It absorbs 99.8 percent of all light,” Kapoor wrote in an email. (Artist Diemut Strebe actually created a blacker, 99.995 percent absorbent black with MIT scientists in 2019.)
A highly-advanced scientific discovery featuring a super dense field of carbon nano tubes grown in a lab and heated to super-high temperatures in a reactor, Vantablack was invented by the U.K. firm Surrey NanoSystems with military purposes in mind. But Kapoor believed in its artistic potential right from the get-go. So much so, that he signed a contract securing the exclusive rights to the new material’s use in painting and sculpture.
The move was immediately controversial, kicking off an art supply feud with an artist named Stuart Semple who has since dedicated himself to creating the blackest paints he can, as well as “the pinkest pink” and “the glitteriest glitter”, all available for anyone except Kapoor to use.
“Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
But Kapoor has long maintained that his agreement with Surrey was a necessary step in developing artistic applications for Vantablack. (It is exceedingly delicate and complicated to produce, and could initially only be made in tiny amounts.)
“This material was made for the defense industry, so I had to gently persuade the company to work with me,” Kapoor said. “It has now been over 10 years since we started our project. This material is highly technical in its application—it is not a paint.”
It wasn’t until 2022, during the Venice Biennale, that Kapoor finally unveiled the fruits of his labor, showing his first Vantablack works at a dual-venue show at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia and Palazzo Manfrin.
“Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
Now—on the heels of the release of Semple’s Black 4.0 paint, which claims to be just as light-absorbent as Vantablack—these works are making their U.S. debut, in a show at New York’s Lisson Gallery. Kapoor did not answer questions about Semple, or whether he would ever consider allowing other artists to get their hands on Vantablack now that he’s mastered it.
We tried to get Kapoor to share some details about the long period of trial and error that made his Vantablack sculptures possible, but he was frustratingly tightlipped about the process. He ignored our questions about failed experiments with the material, and about whether collectors need to ensure any special conditions to properly care for Vantablack paintings or sculptures—the prices of which have not yet been disclosed.
When asked how he applied Vantablack to his work, and if the process differs from work to work, Kapoor said only that “the reactor used takes the process to very high temperatures so the objects need to be made appropriately.”
“Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
What attracted the artist to Vantablack was his fascination with the void, and his efforts to create the illusion of bottomless depth.
“In the Renaissance, there were two great discoveries: perspective and the fold. The fold is a representation of being as we know. If I put this material [Vantablack] on a fold, it would not be seen,” he wrote. “The fold becomes invisible—like Malevich, I claim that this takes the object into a four-dimensional space and time, and beyond being.”
Kapoor, of course, is perhaps best known for the beloved Chicago public sculpture Cloud Gate, popularly called “The Bean,” which has a wonderful mirrored surface that creates warped reflections of the viewer and the city, which shift as you walk around it. One could argue that you haven’t really been to a proper art fair unless you have seen one of his mirrored disk sculptures and marveled at the way your reflection flips and reverses as you approach.
“Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
The artist’s dual interests in reflectivity and light absorbency, and their opposite effects in a work of art, seem to be working in opposition, as well as being two sides of the same coin. (We asked Kapoor if it was one or the other, and he simply responded “yes.”)
“The mirror works are concave and are hollow spaces full of mirror; the black works are filled with darkness,” he said. “They are opposite and equal.”
“Anish Kapoor” is on view at Lisson Gallery, 504 and 508 West 24th Street, New York, New York, November 2–December 16, 2023.
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Strolling through the door of a what appears to be a typical East London apartment, which has been transported onto the grounds of Tate Britain, visitors are met with a familiar domestic scene. A teenage daughter is lying on her bed listening to music, while her brother takes a bath. In the living room, their father is slumped in front of the television next to a baby resting in its cot, while their mother hovers near the kitchen. If anything is amiss, it could only be that the entire family is made out of meringue, cookies, and cake… and visitors are welcome to have a slice.
No, this is not an episode of The Great British Bake Off. It is a recreation of An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, originally done in 1976 by the performance artist Bobby Baker. Like many women artists of her generation, Baker decided to lift the curtain on everyday life within the domestic sphere, but as always through a playful lens.
Documentation of preparation by Bobby Baker of An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976). Photo: Andrew Whittuck.
Using her own home in the working-class neighborhood of Stepney, Baker recreated a typical family using fruitcake for the father, coconut cake for the baby, garibaldi biscuits for the son sprawled in a murky bathwater of chocolate cake, and meringues to make the daughter. The mother, meanwhile, was represented by a pink dressmaker’s mannequin with an elegantly feminine silhouette but a teapot in the place of her head. Her abdomen was hollowed out to make compartments containing snacks. Locals were welcomed to come in and eat slices of the cake family while Baker politely served cups of tea.
Son in the bath from Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976). Photo: Andrew Whittuck.
Aged 25 at the time that she made the original, Baker was inspired by works like The Store (1961), by Claes Oldenburg and his then-wife Patty Mucha. Instead of selling through the gallery system, the couple made a mock storefront offering painted plaster sculptures of pastries and other food items. As for Baker’s use of real cake? Since 1973, she had been hand-piping her Meringue Ladies World Tour, a band of women characters who perform and dance with Baker before meeting an untimely end. “It was my own language,” she recently recalled in an interview with curator Gemma Lloyd. “It was humble, and pathetic, and it got destroyed. It felt subversive and anarchic.”
The exterior of Bobby Baker’s An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976). Photo: Andrew Whittuck.
Portrait of Bobby Baker with An Edible Family in a Mobile Home recreated in 2023 at Tate Britain. Photo: Madeleine Buddo, © Tate.
Feeling like an outsider would in some ways be liberating for Baker. “I’d abandoned the traditional art world because I found it elitist, sexist, and had discovered performance art where I was welcomed and free to do what I wanted,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to make work that people see in and around their own environments. I was living in an area surrounded by families and young children that I wanted to acknowledge.”
Inside Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home recreated in 2023 at Tate Britain. Photo: Madeleine Buddo, © Tate.
Though Baker’s original was made single-handedly over the course of a month, a big team came together to recreate the work for Tate Britain, using cake from the bespoke bakery Lili Vanilli. Just like in the original, the walls are pasted with newspapers, teen magazines, and comic books from the year 1976, and these were covered in line-drawings made with hand-piped icing. Over the course of each of the exhibit’s two runs, this fall and next spring, visitors are invited to eat their way through the cake family, after which the mother will continue to provide pre-packaged snacks.
Baker’s edible family home accompanies Tate Britain’s new exhibition “Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the U.K. 1970–1990,” which opened November 8 and runs through April 7. A riotous celebration of second-wave feminism as expressed through painting, photography, writing, posters, and film, it also spotlights how many artists made visible the experiences of women of color, queer, and trans women, and campaigned for equal rights.
Inside Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home recreated in 2023 at Tate Britain. Photo: Madeleine Buddo, © Tate.
Installed on Tate Britain’s South Lawn, Baker’s edible family is free to visit and is open to the public for the first four weeks of the exhibition (through December 3) and again for the final four weeks (March 8–April 7, 2024). After this, the work will be given to Idle Women, an arts, environment, and social justice collaboration based in Lancashire, northern England, which will repurpose the structure. “I didn’t want it to end up in a sculpture park,” Baker explained, “it’s got to be used for women living now.”

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Artist Alexander Reben is getting his first major retrospective at the Crocker Art Museum, on the heels of becoming the first resident artist at OpenAI, the company behind image generator DALL-E and chatbot ChatGPT.
“AI Am I? Artificial Intelligence as Generated by Alexander Reben” at the California museum brings together deeply conceptual works from across Reben’s practice, which, since about 2012, has seen him co-create alongside A.I. More so, the show aims to unpack what it means to collaborate with algorithms, following the artist’s lead in exploring how human-machine symbioses might lead to creative breakthroughs.
“I let the conceptual idea drive the direction of [the work],” Reben said. “Even if new technology comes out, it might not be the best tool for a particular idea. But when I see new things come out, I tend to come up with new ideas as well, so they tend to come in parallel.”
Reben, who has a background in robotics and math, added he can “digest and interface” with the newest technologies at a programming level, something that gives him control over the outcome that other artists without that background might not achieve.
Take for instance, The Sentinel of Memory in the Valley of Vulnerability (2023), a bronze sculpture that’s a centerpiece of the show. Reben created the work by prompting an A.I. model to describe “a sculpture” before feeding the visual description into DALL-E, allowing the image generator to conjure up the work. He then commissioned an anatomy professor to translate that image into a 3D file which he took to a foundry to 3D print. That form was then cast in bronze.
“It looks like a classic male bust but as you circle around the sculpture, you can see the different elements come to life from the A.I. generated image,” said Francesca Wilmott, the museum’s associate curator. “That work encapsulated so many of the ideas in the show, the back and forth with A.I. as well as his interest in the history of technology.”
The museum has acquired the piece, making it the first A.I.-generated work in its collection.
Alexander Reben, The Sentinel of Memory in the Valley of Vulnerability (2023) Crocker Art Museum, Gift of the Artist and OpenAI
For Reben, another highlight of the show is an interactive piece that invites the public to co-create with him and the A.I. The piece, titled Speak Art Into Life, invites visitors to talk into a microphone, which causes an image to be generated from whatever was spoken. The image compounds with what others have generated into what Reben likened to “an A.I. exquisite corpse.” Visitors will further receive a paper receipt with a QR code that allows them to view the generated image from home later.
Speak Art Into Life also happens to utilize every type of A.I. technology offered by OpenAI, where Reben’s residency is likely to last three months. The artist had been using these OpenAI products since they entered beta testing in 2020, according to the company’s Natalie Summers, and has had significant input into the company’s offerings.
Reben hopes he can help steer the residency program in a way he finds “interesting” and beneficial for future artists. Summer, in turn, praised Reben for being able to address concerns surrounding A.I. in an educational way.
“Artists do much more than advocate on behalf of other artists. They really do make sense of the world around you. Artists help stand in for humanity as a whole I think no other real field does,” Summers said.
“With ultra-contemporary art like A.I. and generative art, it changes continuously,” Reben added. “From a cultural standpoint, this art form is starting to become more mature and accepted. In a meta way, that’s what this show is doing.”
And how should visitors approach his works on view?
“The most important thing: come with an open mind,” he said. “The show has more questions than answers, which is good. I think there’s a lot of assumptions made by A.I. and creativity. I think this subverts some of that.”
See more images from the show below.
Alexander Reben, The Mechanical Swarm (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
Alexander Reben, A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night (2020). Courtesy of the artist
Installation view of “AI Am I? Artificial Intelligence as Generated by Alexander Reben” at the Crocker Art Museum. Photo courtesy of Crocker Art Museum.
“AI Am I? Artificial Intelligence as Generated by Alexander Reben” is on view at the Crocker Art Museum, 216 O Street, Sacramento, California, through April 28, 2024.
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Talk about a week of honors. Legendary songwriter and longtime Elton John writing partner Bernie Taupin is in New York this week for his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at Barclays Center, alongside other superstars such as Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, and Missy Elliot.
However, amid those career-capping festivities, Taupin also found the time to add another accolade to his busy schedule: the opening last night in Soho of his solo art show at Chase Contemporary. The show, titled “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory,” features a selection of compositions centering on the American flag, a motif that emerges from his reflections on family history—his father fought in WWII—and patriotism (“you would be hard pressed to find one having a more far-reaching effect on the psyche of the world than our own Stars and Stripes,” he writes in the press release.) 
This is not the first time Taupin has shown such works. Previously, his flag-inspired canvasses were featured in a show called “American Anthem” at the Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas. And, while painting is not what he is best known for, it has been a lifelong passion for Taupin. “My inspiration for the visual arts started at a very young age looking through picture books with my mother of works by J.M.W. Turner—especially the heroic battle scenes—and the works of Van Gogh,” he explained via email.
Installation view of “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” at Chase Contemporary in Soho. Image courtesy the artist and Chase Contemporary.
He first began painting in earnest at his ranch some 20 years ago. While Taupin says that there is not a real relationship between his songwriting and his visual art, they are connected in at least one way: It was the international success he had with Elton John that allowed him to have the exposure to art that inspired him to paint.
“During our travels in the music world, I frequented most of the major museums, refining my eye and my taste,” Taupin said. “On our first trip to America in 1970, I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York where I discovered and was amazed by the Abstract Expressionists, particularly De Kooning and Hans Hoffman.”
Other figures that impressed Taupin include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wassily Kandinsky, Anselm Kiefer, and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of these influences you see in canvasses featuring guitars stuck to the surface, vibrant colors, and scrawled text. He appreciates art, he said, that is “more from the heart and the brain than for the eye.”
Installation view of “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” at Chase Contemporary in Soho. Image courtesy the artist and Chase Contemporary.
Taupin said that he appreciated that the audience would probably come to “Ragged Glory” based on his celebrity—he is literally in the pantheon of Rock and Roll now, after all—but hoped they would find something deeper in the paintings. “I suspect most visitors to the exhibition may arrive with our songs and even with Elton’s melodies playing in their heads,” he wrote. “I hope people will experience another form of expression—a most personal statement from me.”
“Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” is on view at Chase Contemporary, 413 West Broadway, New York, through November 19, 2023.
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