Exhibitions

Grammy nominee and former Interlochen sculpture student Jewel is not one for standing still, in fact, she’s heading to Venice next year. The artist’s debut solo show, “Matriclysm: An Archeology of Connections Lost,” will open at Salone Verde on May 10 and run through November 22—aligning with the 62nd Venice Biennale. Crystal Bridges Museum of Art is presenting the show, which is organized by their curator-at-large Joe Thompson.
This won’t be Jewel’s first time working with Crystal Bridges. Last year, she debuted her revived art practice in “The Portal: An Art Experience by Jewel,” a group show at Crystal Bridges’ stunning Bentonville, Arkansas facilities that featured a portrait and a sculpture by Jewel alongside art by contemporary stars like Julie Mehretu and Fred Eversely.
Jewel behind the scenes with Heart of the Ocean (2024). Photo by Matthew Takes.
“Matriclysm,” however, will focus totally on Jewel. Per its title, the exhibition will explore feminine power, cataclysmic climate change, and the places where they overlap—with an emphasis on universality. “My hope is that the show reminds us what it feels like to be in closer harmony, inviting us to unearth ways to reconnect us to ourselves, each other, and the world around us,” Jewel remarks in press materials.
The exhibition will present new paintings, sculptures, tapestries, installations, and sound works. It all starts outside with First Mother, a massive plaster sculpture depicting a pregnant woman on her knees—an allegory for the Mitochondrial Eve, humanity’s common mother. Jewel collaborated with South African-based Congolese artist Patrick Bongoy to bring this goddess to life. Together, they wove her skin from hessian thread.
“While ‘Matriclysm’ is inherently tied to the feminine divine, it is with men that life is created,” Jewel wrote over email regarding her decision to work with Bongoy on this sculpture, which visitors can touch. “The process felt like a mending and a healing of the feminine and masculine; it felt like cooperation, community, and equanimity. It also felt important to embody the First Mother in Africa, the cradle of our species and whom we can trace our matriarchal mitochondria to.”
Jewel creating Seven Sisters at the Toledo Museum of Art’s glass-blowing studio. Photo by Ben Morales.
Inside “Matriclysm,” guests will enter a dark space illuminated by Seven Sisters—seven glowing orbs evoking the titular Pleiades star cluster. Jewel produced this piece in the glass blowing studio of Ohio’s ambitious Toledo Art Museum. She’s also converted open-source light wavelength data that NASA and UC Berkeley have gathered on the Seven Sisters into a 12-minute soundscape of seven women singing. Their “neuro-ceutical” chorus aims to alter visitors’ brainwaves. To that end, Jewel recruited Susan Mangsamen—the mother of the rising field of neuroaesthetics—to pen the introductory essay for the exhibition’s catalog.
Numerous oil paintings will surround Seven Sisters. Some, like a portrait of Jewel and her son, will celebrate motherhood. Others will celebrate divine femininity more generally, through portraits of notable women like Henrietta Lack (whose cervical cancer cells led to the discovery of the first human cell line) and mathematician Mileva Maric (who married Albert Einstein). Four large paintings from Jewel’s surrealist “Ceremony” series of menopausal women will also appear here, facing off with digital works portraying the upsides and downsides of birth control.
Jewel, Nepo Baby (2025)—an artwork from the “Ceremony” series set to debut in “Matriclysm”. Courtesy of the artist
The second gallery in “Matriclysm” will center on Heart of the Ocean, an eight-foot tall resin and steel sculpture animated by 60,000 dancing LED lights. Jewel devised a soundtrack for this sculpture, too, working with NASA, NOAA, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley to gather data on oceanic health metrics like temperature variations, migratory animal patterns, wave activity, and salinity. Historic and realtime fluctuations in these traits will be fed into “music algorithms” that Jewel created, generating a unique 12-minute soundscape that will sing on behalf of Earth’s oceans. A tapestry depicting a larger-than-life, green-suited girlboss will hang nearby, reminding viewers that gender equity and the environment are intimately related. We record feminism, after all, in terms of waves. More

Despite its remote location, the small, high desert city of Marfa in far West Texas is a destination that the art world eagerly makes a pilgrimage to, with an internationally recognized scene that entices visitors all over the world. At Ballroom Marfa, one of the city’s cornerstone art institutions, however, the exhibition “Los Encuentros,” on view through March 29 of next year, doesn’t seek to cater to these types of in-the-know national and international audiences, but instead one much closer to home.
“I don’t really care that art world people, art world insiders love and embrace the show,” said exhibition curator Maggie Adler on a video call. Instead, she described the best compliment coming from a nearby gas station attendant who had watched the commission on the exterior façade as it was created day by day by artist Ozzie Juaras and was moved by it.
The work, Coatzomaki (2025), synthesizes street art from across Los Angeles with elements of Aztec culture to create a “Ballroom deity” that embodies the dichotomies between “earth and sky, instinct and creativity, gravity and joy.”
Ozzie Juarez, Eco Sin Voz (2025). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy of Ballroom Marfa.
“Even if she didn’t walk into the building, she had an experience with art that was for her,” said Adler.
The show brings together the work of five Latinx artists—Juarez, Justin Favela, Antonio Lechuga, Narsiso Martinez, and Yvette Mayorga—who each explore the intricacies and diversity of Latinx culture through very disparate practices.
While calls for more diverse institutional arts programming have intensified over the past five years, few institutions have managed to rise to the occasion fully. With this show, Adler, the artists, and the Ballroom team have homed in on the specificity of the locale and their audience: Marfa is located just an hour north of the Mexican border, and Texas’s population of Hispanic and Latinx hovers at around 40 percent. The result is a group show of uncommon clarity and vision.
Creative Synergy
“Los Encuentros” has been as much a passion project as an institutional program. Adler, who formerly spent more than a decade as a curator at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the Carter) in Fort Worth, already had a working relationship with Favela. The Carter had previously commissioned the artist for the installation Puento Nuevo (2019), inspired by Alexander Calder, nachos, and piñatas. Since then, Adler had been hoping for an opportunity to collaborate again.
Shortly after departing the Carter, Adler’s friend and Ballroom Marfa Executive Director Holly Harrison invited her to visit Antonia Lechuga’s studio. Adler described the experience as a type of “exquisite torture,” as she connected with his work, but no longer had an institution behind her.  The path to supporting the artist’s work wasn’t so straightforward.
But it did catalyze a realization, Adler said, “I’m not doing these projects and working with these artists and being their interlocutor because I was at the Carter, I’m doing them because I’m me at the Carter.” And the seed of an idea was born. Though Adler’s story is not explicitly linked to “Los Encuentros,” it parallels the theme of looking beyond institutional walls and engaging with the art, artists, culture, and community outside them.
Detail of work by Yvette Mayorga in “Los Encuentros” (2025). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy of Ballroom Marfa.
Both Favela and Lechuga share a penchant for employing everyday materials and transforming them into works that deliver cogent visual experiences through means counter to expectations of “high” art.  On the recommendation of Ballroom Marfa’s curatorial assistant Felix Benton, Juarez soon entered the mix. Juarez is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, which led Adler to Narsiso Martinez. Adler was already familiar with Martinez’s work, having made one of his first institutional acquisitions, Royal-ty (2021), a few years earlier.
With four artists who were men, Adler went in search of the “badest of badass women” to join the group. Enter Yvette Mayorga, an artist who coined the term “Latinxoco” in reference to her synthesis of Laninx culture and dramatic, visually delectable style.
“It was clear from that moment on that we had the right mix of artists and never looked back.”
Antonio Lechuga, My Flesh is Afraid, but I Am Not (2025). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy of Ballroom Marfa.
Medium Specificity
Arguably, the most compelling aspect of “Los Encuentros” is the material diversity. Despite drawing from parallel and even overlapping cultural and contextual references, there is little in the way of medium overlap—and each artist’s employment of medium speaks as strongly to their practices and overarching project as much as the purely visual elements. “That was really the raison d’être of selecting these artists,” said Adler, “that was the underpinning thread, the materials.”
Installation view of “Los Encuentros” (2025). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy of Ballroom Marfa.
Lechuga’s work falls somewhere between collage and tapestry. The Texas native uses various cobijas, fleece blankets with printed pictorial designs, which he cuts and reassembles to create new compositions that engage with themes of protection, comfort, and home. These types of fleece blankets are staples in many Latinx households; inexpensive yet warm and decorative, they are commonly found at everyday flea markets, shops, and marketplaces both in Mexico and across the American Southwest—which is where Lechuga sources them. The style and material were first popularized by the San Marcos brand, made in Mexico between 1976 and 2004, but imitations have proliferated, and they remain popular today.
Tapping religious, spiritual, and ancient cultural symbols, from a scene featuring St. Cristopher to fantastical portraits of animals like a panther, the visual tactility and, for many viewers, the visceral memory of the feel of the cobija are as much part of the weight of the work as the imagery itself.
Narsiso Martinez, La familia (2025). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy of Ballroom Marfa.
In Ballroom’s entry gallery space, a series of works by Martinez showcases a similar approach to material content. Using found commercial fruit, vegetable, and grocery store packaging—like cardboard produce boxes used to transport oranges, squash, or apples, plastic containers for lettuce or clementines, Whole Foods paper bags—as a support, he draws portraits and populated vignettes of the farmworkers who are primarily responsible for harvesting crops that feed millions of Americans.
Narsiso Martinez, Los Dos Amigos (2025). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy of Ballroom Marfa.
Placing renderings of these farmworkers on one of the basic materials of their work essentially collapses the distance between producer and consumer and highlights a populace that, despite how vital they are to society, is frequently exploited, marginalized, and, in the current political climate, persecuted.
The materials also give insight into the artist’s own history, as Martinez himself worked as a farmworker, which he illustrates in Los Dos Amigos (2025), which includes a self-portrait of the artist alongside one of his coworkers. It’s a poignant testament not only to oft-overlooked farmworker communities but the deeply human experience of community building and connection.
Yvette Mayorga, La princesa (Ride or Die) (2024). Photo: A. Olsen.
Cultural Context
There are two vehicles—albeit of sorts—in the exhibition, one by Favela and the other by Mayorga.
Mayorga’s La princesa (Ride or Die) (2024) is a feminine visual delight. A vintage station wagon has been painted bubblegum pink and carefully “frosted” like a celebratory cake. Within, pink shag covers nearly every surface, and the dash too has piped acrylic “frosting.” A variety of additional objects, like a pink Tamagotchi, pink rosaries, an iPhone in a pink case, Hello Kitty stuffies, and more, are placed throughout the interior.
When the show first opened, the car hadn’t been installed yet; customs had stopped it at the Mexican border (ultimately, its engine had to be removed to pass through). But the unplanned journey and delay of the work ended up contributing another contextual layer to the exhibition.
Installation view of “Los Encuentros” (2025). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy of Ballroom Marfa.
Adler noted, “So many people make that daily commute as labor for Texas, and the difficulties of crossing the border as a human, it wasn’t easy, but the fact that the car made it through is a type of statement in and of itself of the permeability of the border for objects versus humans, it’s really a whole other layer of complexity and nuance for the show that I think is important to point out, and exactly why I wanted to do the show near the border opening July 4th. That was very purposeful.”
Surrounded by several more equally elaborate works by Mayorga, including a life-size figurative sculpture of a man and woman wearing a combination of historical European and contemporary Mexican styles, including Mexican pointy boots on the man and extravagantly detailed nail set on the woman, the gallery space is transformed into a vibrant almost surreal other world, one where women’s labor, feminine aesthetics, and histories of colonization and oppression have been fully reclaimed.
Favela’s car, Gypsy Rose Piñata (II) (2022), is at the scale of an actual car, but hangs from the ceiling in Ballroom’s North gallery and is made in the manner of a piñata, covered in tissue paper frills and swaying with the ambient movements of the air in the gallery space.
Installation view of “Los Encuentros” (2025). Photo: Alex Marks. Courtesy of Ballroom Marfa.
While the connection to Latinx culture can be traced through the materials and form, Gypsy Rose Piñata (II) also conceptually connects to Marfa’s history, and the work of John Chamberlain, an American mid-century artist best known for his sculptures made of crushed car parts. Chamberlain’s works are permanently on view at the nearby Chinati Foundation.
Other works by Favela continue the links to the artistic juggernauts who historically left their mark on Marfa. Untitled (Maiz) (2025), made from fluorescent tube lights in the shape of an ear of corn, pays homage to Dan Flavin; 1,095 Tamales (2010) evoke the metal cubes made by Donald Judd; Untitled (In Memorium Mr. Spanish) (2025) a larger-than-life cigar box, recalls the oversized sculptures of everyday objects by Claes Oldenberg.
The walls of the gallery space, too, have been meticulously covered in piñata-style fringed tissue paper, with the color paralleling that of a workroom at the Judd Foundation.
“I use the medium of piñata to express myself in a different way,” said the artist, “The installations are about these spaces where people expect me to be representative of my culture. Not only is [my work] about identity and nostalgia, it’s also about my navigating the art world, showcasing my identity, and the complexities of that.”
Justin Favela, Untitled (Maiz) (2025). Photo: A. Olsen.
Encounters
“Los Encuentros” doesn’t shy away from the complexities of Latinx culture, sociopolitical issues, or history. Instead, each artist, in their own way, digs deeper, using recognizable, everyday objects and materials to challenge commonly held assumptions about not only what art is or can be, but also who it is for.
In a walkthrough of the exhibition, Harrison remarked that the opening was one of the highest attended in Ballroom’s history, and for many, it was their first time at the venue, perhaps because it was the first time they felt a show was specifically for them. While each artist’s work independently delves into the intricacies of their personal experiences and perspectives, when considered holistically, the show presents a poignant tribute to identity and community—and what can be achieved when thinking beyond museum walls. More

This morning, fashion leaders including Anna Wintour, Thom Browne, Vera Wang, and Michael Kors gathered for the announcement of the Spring 2026 Costume Institute exhibition. “Costume Art” will debut on May 10, 2026, and inaugurate the Met’s new 12,000-square-foot space dedicated to the fashion department.
Designed by the Brooklyn-based husband-and-wife team Peterson Rich Office (PRO), the new Condé M. Nast gallery, named for the late founder of the media company, will be on the ground floor off of the Great Hall.
“It’s so momentous for our department,” the Costume Institute’s Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton told me after the press conference. “It’s a recognition of the work we’ve all done over the years. Fashion is so central to the museum. It’s the only art form that connects every single department and gallery in the museum. There’s not one gallery in which dressing the body isn’t represented. So, it makes sense that this art form that’s common to everybody in the street has this central place in the museum. It’s a recognition both of fashion—the role of fashion within the Met, but also the role of fashion within culture and art.”
Curator Andrew Bolton delivering remarks at The Met’s Costume Art press conference Image: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, BFA.com/Matteo Prandoni.
As for the exhibition, “Costume Art” will feature artworks from across the Met’s collections in dialogue with garments from The Costume Institute. The exhibition’s main sponsors are Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, with additional support by Saint Laurent and Condé Nast. The press materials state that the show will focus “primarily on Western art from prehistory to the present” and that it will be organized into a “series of thematic body types that reflect their ubiquity and endurance through time and space.”
“’Costume Art’ will present a dynamic and scholarly conversation between garments from The Costume Institute and an array of artworks from across The Met’s vast collection,” said the museum’s director Max Hollein, “elevating universal and timeless themes while bringing forward new ideas and ways of seeing.”
The event took place in the Met’s Patio from the Castle of Vélez Blanco, a soaring 16th-century Spanish Renaissance courtyard carved from luminous Macael marble. Once the heart of an Andalusian fortress, later reinstalled in a financier’s mansion, and eventually gifted to the museum, the space still radiates transported grandeur—arcades, mythic carvings, and a cloistered stillness that make it one of the Met’s most dramatic interiors.
(L) Hans Bellmer, La Poupée (ca. 1936). © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (R) Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Ensemble, fall/winter 2017–18. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A sampling of what was in store was on display, including Rei Kawakubo’s autumn/winter 2017–18 Comme des Garçons ensemble, which would bulbously distort the wearer, positioned next to Hans Bellmer’s La Poupée (ca. 1936). Part of his broader Poupée series, Bellmer not only sculpted the uncanny figure but also staged and photographed it, using documentation as an extension of the sculpture itself. With its rounded, swelling forms, the piece even evokes the prehistoric Venus-type fertility totems. Elsewhere, Walter Van Beirendonck’s 2009 spandex bodysuit, which would make anyone look jacked and statuesque, stood guard over a 1503 Albrecht Dürer engraving of Adam and Eve. This just hints at what the show will encompass, and this is a lot to chew on, incorporating the broad history of fashion and art.
Objects from The Naked Body (left) and The Classical Body (right) on display at The Met’s Costume Art press conference. Image: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, BFA.com/Matteo Prandoni
“It was exhausting,” Bolton admitted of putting “Costume Art” together. “Like literally sleepless nights. Sometimes I started from the fashion and sometimes I started from the artwork. What helped was when I began to think about the exhibitions as types of bodies and focusing on particular bodies that we come across in the museum. Some are pervasive, like the ‘Classical Body.’ Some are less pervasive, like the ‘Pregnant Body.’ There could be a hundred more different bodies that somebody else would do and could do.” Other sections are “Naked Body,” “Anatomical Body,” and “Mortal Body.”
But fashion, by its nature, requires a focus on the present. “I wanted it to reflect the diversity that’s happening in fashion,” Bolton explained, “but also the commonality of our lived experience. Half of the show will be focusing on the diversity of bodies. And the other one will be focusing more on the commonality of bodies, what we all share. So skin, aging, dying. I wanted to show the full spectrum of our sort of lived experiences.”
Objects from The Abstract Body on display at The Met’s Costume Art press conference. Photo: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, BFA.com/Matteo Prandoni.
One might assume with the brand-new space that Bolton will pull out all the stops for scenography (PRO will also helm that design). “It’s funny because when I look back at something like the Alexander McQueen show [“Savage Beauty”], which I was really proud of, there’s something that seems a little old fashioned about it,” Bolton said. “I’ve always loved doing shows where the scenography carries a narrative of the exhibition. And this particular one, I wanted the opposite. I actually wanted the art to shine and the connections to be sort of what visitors engage with. So in a way, there’s an absence of space. I’ve actually used very traditional sort of exhibition furniture, like pedestals and platforms, but I’ve slightly played with the rhetorical sort of aesthetics behind that. Normally when you go through the museum, pedestals are used to show hierarchy and status and significant value. I’m sort of playing around with what those have meant traditionally within our museums.” It turns out the museum’s vast collections have always had a shared language—the body. Now, they get to show it off.

“Costume Art” will be on view from May 10, 2026, to January 10, 2027. More

In 1582, the first Japanese diplomatic mission bound for Europe set off from Nagasaki. Conceived of by Jesuit missionaries, the Tenshō embassy was composed of four young Japanese noblemen who over the course of the decade would meet various kings of Europe and a newly coronated Pope Sixtus V. In 1585, it arrived in Venice to great fanfare and its leader, Mancio Itō, was dressed up in crimson velvet and painted by Domenico Tintoretto.
Striking, playful, and somewhat artificial, it captures a pivotal moment of two world’s encountering one another for a first time. This painting will feature in an exhibition at the British Museum next year that promises to tell the 1,000-year saga of the samurai and explore how their image and myth was created.
Domenico Tintoretto, Ito Mancio (1585). Photo: courtesy Foundation Trivulzio
So much of the samurai story, including the word itself, was reworked long after their power had waned—a myth enriched and confused further by its modern presence in film, manga, and video games. “The samurai dominated Japan’s history for centuries, but the reality of their lives was often quite different from popular understanding,” Rosina Buckland, curator of Japanese collections at the British Museum, said in a statement. “This is the first exhibition to interrogate the myth, right through to the present day.”
A set of samurai armour recently purchased by the British Museum. Photo courtesy British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Spanning armor, woodblock prints, paintings, clothing, ceramics, and contemporary media, “Samurai” will bring together 280 objects, drawing from the both the British Museum’s own venerable collection and a host of U.K. and international lenders. Due to the light-sensitivity of works, many are being shown in the U.K. for the first time. One highlight is a 17th-century suit of armor, which was recently acquired by the British Museum. It’s fitted with an earlier helmet and golden standard of iris-shaped leaves that were designed to make the samurai “identifiable and fearsome.”
Katsushika Hokusai,Minamoto no Tametomo on the Isle of Demons (1811). Photo courtesy of the British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
This suit, in some ways, matches the standard image of the samurai, a warrior class known in Japan as musha or bushi, that gained political dominance in the 1100s from their involvement in protracted conflicts between feudal lords, called daimyo. In the long era of peace that arrived with the Edo period (1603–1868), they served as government workers, scholars, and patrons of the arts. Women formed half of their number, receiving education and holding positions of power. A vivid illustration is a bright red woman’s firefighting jacket and hood which was worn by women who served Edo Castle. It’s woven with anchors and waves, watery motifs that seek protection from fire that was commonplace in the wooden city of Edo, modern-day Tokyo.
By the end of the 19th century, the hereditary status of samurai had been eliminated, in its place the myth of bushidō, a code of honor promoting patriotism and self-sacrifice, emerged. This formed the basis for the archetype so often depicted in modern media, from the films of Akira Kurosawa to video games such as Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, which are showcased in the exhibition.
The show, Buckland added, “will introduce visitors to Japan’s rich cultural history by exploring the samurai’s multiple roles, the ways they represented themselves and have been shown by others.”
“Samurai” is on view at the British Museum, Great Russell St, London, February 3–May 4, 2026. More

A choreographed fleet of more than 600 drones brought some of David Hockney’s best-known paintings to life in the night sky over the city of Bradford, northern England, on November 13.
Thousands gathered in Bradford’s Roberts Park to watch as works such as A Bigger Splash (1967), Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71), and A Year in Normandie (2021) were created by synchronized LED drones. The spectacle took place as part of celebrations surrounding Bradford’s status as the U.K. city of culture for 2025 and was a grand gesture in honor of the region’s most famous living artist.
The event was orchestrated by Skymagic, a drone light show company based in the nearby city of Leeds, that previously circled choreographed drones above the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022, the King’s Coronation Concert in 2023, and Coachella in the same year. The Bradford show marked the first time that drone swarm technology has been used to create a light painting in the U.K. It was also the first time Hockney’s work has been created by drones and also included The Old Guitarist from The Blue Guitar (1976-77), Tennis (1989), and Dog Days.
David Hockney’s Garrowby Hill (1998) created by drones. Photo: courtesy Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.
David Hockney, Garrowby Hill (1998). Photo: courtesy Prudence Cuming Associates Museum of Fine Arts.
You sense Hockey, who was born in the city in 1937 and attended Bradford School of Art, would have appreciated seeing his swimming pools, self-portraits, and beloved dachshunds materialize in the Yorkshire sky. The 88-year-old artist has long championed the use of new technologies beginning with the Polaroid camera and Xerox fax machine in the 1960s, before his experiments with the Quantel Paintbox, an early computer graphics software, in the 1980s.
Recent decades have seen Hockney make work using a host of Apple products, most famously the iPad, with his paintings created on the tablet selling for millions. In 2023, his “Bigger & Closer” opened London’s new immersive venue Lightroom.
“Having embraced the latest digital technology in his work for many years,” Bradford 2025 U.K. City of Culture said in a statement. “This is a homage to Hockney’s lifelong exploration of new mediums, now reimagined in light by Skymagic.”
David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) created by drones. Photo: courtesy Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.
The drone light show appeared above the village of Saltaire, a Victorian model village comprised of textile mills, public buildings, and workers’ housing from the second half of the 19th century that is a UNESCO World Heritage site. One of these mills, Salts Mill, now houses one of the largest permanent collections of works by Hockney. The building has also appeared in some of the artist’s paintings, including Salts Mill, Saltaire, Yorkshire (1997).
A second night of the drone display, planned for November 14, was cancelled due to bad weather.
David Hockney’s Diner Dog (1994) created by drones. Photo: courtesy Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture. More

“This is the story of how I wound up on death row and stayed in that prison for nearly 42 years,” wrote fiber artist Gary Tyler in the prologue to his new memoir, Stitching Freedom, published by Simon and Schuster in October. The book recounts the harrowing experience Tyler went through as a Black teenager living in the recently desegregated South in the early 1970s, when he was falsely convicted in the shooting of a white boy, and Louisiana’s deeply racist court system sent him to the state’s infamous Angola prison. “I went into Angola as an adolescent and emerged as a man. I achieved things others would never have thought a person could accomplish in prison.” 
Among those achievements was learning to quilt, a skill Tyler picked up while working in the prison’s hospice program, where he also built the deep well of empathy and compassion he openly draws from today. Finally released from prison in 2016 at the age of 57, Tyler has dedicated his time to advocating for others who have suffered from injustice, in part through the art he creates. His quilts depict scenes and figures from his life, like the Angola Prison Rodeo, or symbols of freedom and redemption, like butterflies and birds. A selection is now on view in his first gallery show in Los Angeles, “Illuminations from a Captured Soul,” at Official Welcome in MacArthur Park, through December 20. 
Gary Tyler, Fernanda’s Touch (2025). Photo courtesy of Official Welcome.
Ariel Pittman, who opened Official Welcome in May after working at Vielmetter and Various Small Fires, met Tyler through a friend, curator Allison Glenn, who organized his first solo show at Detroit’s Library Street Collective in 2023.
“That was the first time that I heard Gary’s story, and I was just blown away,” Pittman said. Her reaction was not just because of the injustices Tyler faced for most of his adult life, but the way he never allowed them to break his spirit or his resolve to do something positive with his life. “In a way, he arrived in this situation which he never accepted, he never stopped trying to get out of, but he also was able to be present with other people and contribute to a community and make beautiful things… it really inspired me.”
Pittman, who has been involved in her own community outreach following the California wildfires, also remembered hearing a story about a performance Tyler set up during a fundraising event for the organization Safe Place for Youth in Pasadena, where he worked after his release, helping to keep unhoused young people off the street. At that event, Tyler had a performer set up outside the venue dressed as a panhandler, so that patrons would walk past him as they entered. Later on, that same performer joined the fundraiser and revealed that he was a talented musician, singing on stage—and describing how he was treated by the guests. “I was like, this is the most profound, socially engaged institutional critique artwork that I’ve heard of,” Pittman said. 
Gary Tyler, Convict Poker (2025). Photo courtesy of Official Welcome.
Being able to empathize with the plight of others, while not being afraid to call out the prejudices that keep people stuck in straitened circumstances, is what sets Tyler’s work apart. “Not only is he just this wonderful, creative guy, he knows how to call people into this empathetic space,” Pittman said.
On top of that, the quilts he creates are objects that draw on an art historical and social tradition of “finding ways to record and write stories and histories that would be very purposefully erased in our society”—from the narrative quilts created by African American communities during and after slavery, to the work of fellow artists Faith Ringgold and Bisa Butler. His work also allows him to reclaim his own image and story—something he couldn’t do in prison, when he had to rely on lawyers, journalists and activists to speak for him—and those of other incarcerated men and women. “He gives them dignity and light and respect,” Pittman said.
For example, several of his quilts on view at the gallery recreate scenes from the Angola Prison Rodeo, an annual event in which death row inmates take part in dangerous competitions for relatively little money that would allow them some small comforts from the commissary. Others depict prisoners involved in Angola’s drama program dressed as knights for a performance, who seem exhausted from fighting the unfairness of their situation.
Similarly, a limited edition print issued by Official Welcome with the local publisher Ollin Editions, is based on a self-portrait quilt Tyler made from a photo taken of him outside the prison, showing him as a young man in handcuffs, who nonetheless keeps his head held high. The title of the work is Defiant, 1976—the year Tyler was scheduled to be executed, at the age of just 18. That same year, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s death penalty laws were unconstitutional, and Tyler’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. It would take him another four decades to secure his release. 
Gary Tyler, Blackburn – Horse Soldier (2025). Photo courtesy of Official Welcome.
Creating such inspiring imagery out of so much hardship also serves as “a powerful rejoinder” to things like Confederate monuments, which glorify “the worst of our history,” Pittman said. It also raises important questions: “Who writes history, who memorializes things? What do we remember? What do we save?”
“Illuminations from a Captured Soul” is on view at Official Welcome, 672 S La Fayette Park Place, Suite 46, Los Angeles, California, through December 20, 2025. 
Artist Gary Tyler will be speaking about his book, Stitching Freedom, at the Black Police Precinct and Courthouse Museum in Miami, Florida, December 7, 2025, 1:30–3:00pm. RSVP required. More

Chuck anything into the rarefied light of a white-walled gallery and that “thing” becomes art. This is not a new idea. More than a century on from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), it’s a necessary conceit for anyone entering a space that shows contemporary art. Arguably what has changed over the past 30-odd years is the willingness of collectors to pay gut-curdling sums of money for said objects.
And so enter David Shrigley’s Exhibition of Old Rope, a work that—as described—arranges 10-tons of salvaged rope on the immaculately polished floors of Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. The price? £1 million ($1.3 million).
Over the past year, Shrigley (and presumably a few assistants) have scoured the shoreline and rummaged through rubbish in search of lost, unloved, and generally moribund lengths of old rope. As the aforementioned tonnage suggests, they found quite a lot. There is thick-as-your-arm rope used to moor cruise ships, as well as skinnier cousins that once fixed buoys and lobster pots. There’s old cord taken from climbing schools, tree surgeons, offshore wind farms, and window cleaning companies. Basically, if it was old and no longer properly functional, it was treated, cleaned, and assembled into a rather expensive pile.
Shrigley spent months looking for unwanted lengths of rope. Photo: Lucy North/PA Images via Getty Images.
As the gallery helpfully explains, the U.K. has a storied tradition of rope-making, from the hemp and jute varieties used by fishermen and the Royal Navy, to their synthetic modern analogs. Rope is also difficult to recycle and poses a “major environmental issue.” Is the pile some commentary on Britain’s disappearing manufacturing sector, a wink at its long-lost Imperial power, or else some blunt visual symbolizing the ecological cost of capitalism? Sure, if you want it to be. But it’s first and foremost a joke that plays off the English idiom “money for old rope.” In short, Shrigley is sticking his toe in the murky waters of the art market and testing its temperature.
“The work exists because I’m interested in the value people place on art, and the idiom gave me an excuse to explore that,” Shrigley said in a statement. “I think £1 million is a fair price, partly because of the idea and partly because it is quite a lot of rope.”
The adage dates to early 19th-century Britain in which a ship’s old rope had a ready resale value and was an easy way for someone to make a small amount of money. This playful reimagining is typical of an artist who has made his name by pairing bright, simple images with wry captions written in a child-like hand—one he deploys in the neon sign that advertises the show from the gallery’s streetside window.
“Exhibition of Old Rope disrupts the conventions of a commercial gallery,” reads the statement issued by Stephen Friedman. This is not really true. The convention of a gallery is to sell art and this work—put forward by a commercially successful artist who is duly receiving media attention commensurate with that success—will, in all likelihood, sell. Punny and a little bit irreverent, yes, but far from original. More

America hasn’t had a major Etruscan exhibition since 2009, when Dallas’s Meadows Museum hosted “New Light on the Etruscans.” That changes in May 2026, when San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum unveils “The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy,” a sprawling show of 180 Etruscan antiquities from 30 international museums—many of which have never been seen in the United States. The exhibition will culminate 10 years of research and elucidate how this enigmatic Italian civilization shaped the Roman culture immediately after theirs.
Terracotta Caeretan hydria attributed to Eagle Painter (520–510 B.C.E.) On loan from The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
The Etruscans are one of Europe’s lesser-known entities. Rome is partly to blame. The Etruscans dominated central Italy throughout the 1st millennium B.C.E., until the formidably unified Romans conquered their comparatively isolated cities one by one throughout the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C.E.—claiming numerous Etruscan innovations as their own along the way.
“They needed to have somebody pleading their cause, especially in America where so many people had not heard of the Etruscans,” Reneé Dreyfus, one of two ancient art curators at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the mastermind behind this show, told me on a video call. “The timing is so right for this exhibition, because many museums now have new Etruscan galleries.”
Bronze balsamarium (perfume jar) in the shape of a female head (late 3rd to early 2nd century B.C.E.) On loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
Historians also haven’t encountered many written records from the Etruscans. “They wrote plenty, both about themselves and their history,” Dreyfus said. “It was lost because they wrote, primarily, on impermanent material like linen.” That left the Greeks and Romans to tell their story, and “they didn’t always look kindly on the Etruscans,” Dreyfus noted.
The Etruscan language presents another puzzle. Like the Etruscan people, no one knows for sure where it came from. But, in the decade since Dreyfus started working on this exhibition, scholars have grown more adept at translating Etruscan inscriptions—the longest of which will make its U.S. debut at Legion of Honor. Meanwhile, new excavations like those at the spa village of San Casciano dei Bagni continue providing new revelations around Etruscan life.
Bronze appliqué depicting the Sun God Usil (500–475 B.C.E.). On loan from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
Fewer than 10 of the objects in this May’s exhibition will hail from Legion of Honor’s own collection. Dreyfus joined forces with leading Etruscologist Richard Daniel De Puma to source the rest. “We went searching through storage areas in museums to uncover objects that are not currently on view,” she said. “We wanted people, even those who are experts in the field, to know about some of these unknown or little known objects.” She wants the catalog to serve as the new definitive resource.
“The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy” will really begin with an extensive treasure trove from the Regolini-Galassi tomb, one of the most luxurious Etruscan burials ever exhumed, courtesy of the Vatican’s Gregorian Etruscan Museum. Sites like these have proven so useful to scholars “because [the Etruscans] included so much in their tombs,” Dreyfus said. These burials weren’t just lavish sendoffs rife with frescoes and terracotta portraits—they were eternal parties.
Bronze funerary vase in the shape of a female head (225–175 B.C.E.) On loan from the Musée du Louvre. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
The exhibition’s crown jewel, however, will be a cache of bronze sculptures recently unearthed from San Casciano dei Bagni. “To have anything from there represents a coup for this museum,” Dreyfus said. Etruscans often left tributes to their gods, which overlapped with the Greek pantheon, while visiting this sacred town. Archaeologists regularly find relics there featuring both Etruscan and Latin inscriptions—concrete proof of Roman-Etruscan coexistence.
The rest of the chronological show will feature thematic sub-sections, highlighting the Etruscan’s evolving beliefs about the afterlife, the exotic goods they imported from the Phoenicians and Greeks, and more. “We’ll have a section on the opulent gold jewelry that’s going to blow people away,” Dreyfus beamed. It will include a drinking cup decorated with 250,000 gold granules, on loan from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
Gold-plated silver and gold finger Ring with the Ambush of Achilles (550–500 B.C.E.) On loan from The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
Metal generated most of the Etruscans’ wealth. Their land was rich in iron, copper, and tin. They became master bronzesmiths and exported their raw materials throughout the Mediterranean. But, their contributions to the region go even deeper. “They were the ones who first learned how to cultivate grapevines and produce wines on the peninsula,” Dreyfus said. “The system of counting that we talk about as Roman numerals was Etruscan numerals.” The Etruscans taught the Romans how to drain marshes and play gladiatorial games. They even gave women the right to own property, run businesses, and retain their last names.
“There’s so many things that we want the world to know about the Etruscans that have been secrets they’ve kept for millennia,” Dreyfus said. Now those secrets are coming to light.
“The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy” is on view at Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave, San Francisco, May 2–September 20, 2026. More