Exhibitions

After six years, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is finally shining a spotlight on the transformative gift of over 3,000 African American quilts it received from the late collector Eli Leon in 2019.
“I wanted to think deeply about the role of quilts as portable objects,” exhibition curator Elaine Yau told me. “When quiltmakers are migrating and leaving the South, quiltmaking as a
set of craft skills and technical skills is moving with them.”
There are more than 100 quilts from the collection now on view in the show “Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California“, representing the work of approximately 80 named artists. Roughly a quarter are from the South, made prior to 1950. The rest were made in the Bay Area.
Far more than a celebration of craft, the exhibition explores how African American quiltmaking traditions migrated from the South to the West during the mid-20th century, carried by women whose textiles were both sources of warmth and acts of self-expression. The exhibition also represents years of work for BAMPFA, which overnight became the nation’s largest repository of African American quilts following Leon’s bequest—a gift that came with the immense responsibility of preserving and presenting these works, and explaining to audiences how the histories of art, labor, and movement are stitched together.
Eli Leon with his quilt collection. Photo: Randi Malkin Steinberger. Courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Who Was Eli Leon? 
A psychologist and a gay white man who lived in Oakland, Eli Leon (1935–2018) was a unique figure. Described in his New York Times obituary as “a highly discriminating hoarder,” Leon was a  passionate collector of knick knacks and antiques, such as the 30 meat grinders displayed in his kitchen.
He began collecting African American quilts, largely in the improvisational style—that is to say, created without a pattern in mind—in the 1970s. At the time, it was easy to find second-hand quilts at flea markets and thrift stores. Eventually, Leon amassed so many that he built a two-story climate-controlled annex to store his quilts, with the overflow stacked in piles up to two-feet high in the living room.
In 1989, Leon won a Guggenheim Fellowship to fund his quilt research, and bought a Winnebago to drive across the South, meeting with African American quiltmakers and taking meticulous notes about their work. He was dedicated to sharing this undersung textile art with the world, starting with the exhibition “Who’d a Thought It: Improvisation in African American Quiltmaking.” It debuted at the now-shuttered San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum in 1987 and toured to 25 institutions across the country.
Lee Wanda Jones at Berkeley Flea Market, 1988. Eli Leon Archive, BAMPFA. Photo: by Eli Leon.
Leon didn’t just collect historical quilts, but also the work of living quiltmakers, sometimes buying from them directly over a period of many years.
“In some cases, a patron and artist relationship would develop such that a quiltmaker would understand
the kind of taste that he had. And so there’s an interesting dimension to his story where the quiltmaking is shifting because of his collecting,” Yau said. “Some of the quilts in the collection may not have been used functionally and certainly had a thread—no pun intended—of art making entwined in them because of his role as a collector.”
Leon was the most invested in the work of Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006), a pseudonym he bestowed on the shy Effie Mae Howard, whom he met at an Oakland flea market in 1985. Over the next two decades, Leon bought every quilt she would sell him—more than 500 in total—sometimes even going into debt to pay for her latest masterpiece. In 2020, BAMPFA’s first show based on the Leon collection was the critically acclaimed “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective.”
Eli Leon interviewing quiltmaker Joanna Smiley (right) with her daughter in Sulphur Springs, Texas (1989). Eli Leon Archive, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Photo: by Helen Wallis.
It was a piece by Tompkins in a 1996 exhibition of black-and-white quilts from Leon’s collection at the Richmond Art Center, north of Berkeley, that first caught the attention of Lawrence Rinder, a BAMPFA curator who would go on to become the institution’s director, retiring in 2019.
Rinder curated Tompkins’s first museum exhibition for BAMPFA in 1997. He also included her in the 2002 Whitney Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. But despite Rinder’s prominent role in promoting Tompkins, Leon never let on that he was planning to leave everything to BAMPFA.
Rebecca Smith and Bettie Chaffold, Untitled (Shadow Star). Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust. Photo: Daria Lugina. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
A Gift With Strings Attached
Leon’s gift added a brand new dimension to the BAMPFA collection while increasing it by more than 15 percent. (The quilts are now nearly a fifth of the total holdings.) While it was thrilling to be the unexpected recipient of such largess, the collection was also nothing short of daunting.
The museum secured a $500,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation creating a curatorial position specifically to work with the new quilt collection. Yau, who was already a postdoc fellow at BAMPFA studying for her PhD in art history at UC Berkeley, was the perfect candidate. (She co-curated the Tompkins show and was promoted to associate curator and academic liaison in 2024.)
Pieced by Sherry Ann Byrd, quilted by Irene Bankhead, Cultural Merger at Crossroads, USA (1990). Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of Sherry Ann Byrd. Photo: Kevin Candland. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
The first step was assessing the quilts’ condition: though there were few structural issues, there were some signs of mold and insect damage. Each and every quilt needed to undergo conservation treatment before entering storage. Each piece must be sealed in carbon dioxide chambers for five to seven weeks, vacuumed, and sanitized—an extensive process costing over $1.6 million. The effort was jeopardized in May when a $40,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant for the project was suddenly revoked due to federal budget cuts. (The non-profit quilt research organization the Quilt Index was similarly impacted.)
In an even bigger blow, the museum also lost $220,000 in unspent funds from the Institute for Museum and Library Services earmarked for the quilts’ conservation when the agency was essentially shut down earlier this year. BAMPFA has appealed the grants’ termination, and is fundraising to try and make up the shortfall. It also rejects the government’s claim that preserving the quilts “no longer serves the interest of the United States.”
Eli Leon’s quilt collection preparing to undergo anoxia treatment in an enclosed tent as part of conservation work being carried out by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo courtesy of BAMPFA.
“The quilts are in fact the heritage and representative of the rich cultural resources of this country,” Yau said. “What you have is the artistic production of everyday ordinary Americans, and the kinds of storytelling, community care, and creative ingenuity that the quilts represent are all values that a lot of people would would rally around.”
The goal is to finish conservation by 2028, but even after that, the quilts will require considerable care and resources.
Refolding the quilts every two years is ideal to prevent deep creases, according to Yau, but with their size and quantity, the task would require four staffers working some 533 hours—or about 76 days—making it a major undertaking. BAMPFA is assessing whether this is feasible given current staffing. Storage is also a challenge: unlike Leon’s compact home setup, museum standards require quilts to be folded with acid-free tissue and stored in boxes, which will necessitate renting additional space beyond BAMPFA’s existing facilities.
“Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo courtesy of BAMPFA.
Unearthing a Story of Migration
Researching the collection has been a massive, at times overwhelming effort, as Leon never formally catalogued it. While inventorying the quilts in 2021, curator Yau identified around 500 makers and selected standout pieces for initial conservation and exhibition.
She described the experience of walking into the storage space and seeing the work of so many under-recognized makers for the first time as “sacred,” because “the quilts that you’re seeing are the surviving remnants and connections to a life and a name that we might not otherwise know about.” (The catalogue includes photographs and biographies of the show’s quiltmakers.)
Pieced by Laverne Brackens, quilted by Willia Ette Graham and Johnnie Wade, Untitled (Star put-together), 1994. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of Laverne Brackens. Photo: Kevin Candland. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
Migration soon emerged as a unifying factor among many of the quiltmakers, who had moved to the Bay Area from the South in the mid 20th century.
Yau was able to track down three living quiltmakers in “Routed West,” and is prioritizing identifying the relatives of other artists now represented in the museum’s collection. She was especially thrilled to bring together three generations of quiltmakers at the opening of the show, which featured works by Laverne Brackens, her daughter Sherry Byrd and granddaughter Bara Byrd-Stewart, as well as Brackens’s late mother, Gladys Durham-Henry.
Pieced by Arbie Williams, quilted by Irene Bankhead, Untitled (Overalls quilt) (1993). Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
Yau also connected with, Ophenia Parker, the granddaughter of the late Arbie Williams, one of the artists in Leon’s collection, and now a local quiltmaker herself who loaned a work to the show.
The museum has partnered with the African American Quilt Documentation Study Group Archive and Database, a nonprofit led by A’Donna Richardson that is documenting and preserving African American quilt history, to host days for the community to bring in their family quilts for study. Similar work is being done by groups like the Quilt Alliance and Quilt American Study Group, but Richardson saw a need to focus specifically on African American quilts.
“So much of the racial inequities and segregation of this country were replicated in the quilt world. And so A’Donna talks very eloquently about why her organization
is really stepping in to fill that need,” Yau said. “In the quilt world, these racialized lines still need to be reckoned with for the work to move forward.”
Are Quilts Art? 
Though there is a long history of quiltmaking in the U.S., dating back to the colonial era, quilts have been often been seen only as functional objects—as cherished family heirlooms, as historical artifacts, as women’s work, or as home decor, not art. Increasingly, however, many art museums and galleries are foregrounding the artistic merits of the textile practice.
The best-known example is probably the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, a community of Black Alabama women that has become known for its vibrant geometric quilts. (A stunning display was among the highlights at New York’s Armory Show last month; the Whitney had a big show back in 2002, the same year Tompkins was in the biennial.)
Quilts were historically made by women, often during social gatherings where experienced quiltmakers would pass along their skills to the next generation. Quiltmaking has long been a form of creative reuse, an often communal practice fueled by thriftiness. It is also linked to the history of enslavement, quilts made out of salvaged scraps by a community with few resources at its disposal.
Gerstine Scott, Untitled (Necktie quilt), 1989. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Photo: Kevin Candland. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
A quilt typically has three layers; the top layer with the piece-worked pattern, the insulated middle layer, and the back layer, quilted together with lines of decorative stitching. Leon would also collect finished top layers and hire other quiltmakers to complete them, such as Johnnie Wade, Willia Ette Graham, and Irene Bankhead, who finished hundreds of quilts by other artists for him.
The show illustrates a wide range of quilting techniques, like the neat layered concentric squares of the folded log cabin; the simple grid of the pinwheel, made from repeated half-square triangles, and, in the most show-stopping moment, the interlocking hoops of the double wedding ring, with an entire 1970s-era bedroom installation Leon purchased from Oakland quiltmaker Isiadore Whitehead.
Isiadore Whitehead, Double Wedding Ring Room installed in “Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo: Daria Lugina. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
While there’s lots of cotton, you’ll also spot velvet, corduroy, wool, flannel polyester, and rayon, among other fabrics. There is a simple design that Louise Hicks likely made from flour sacks around the year 1939 to Gerstine Scott’s maximalist 1989 quilt made entirely from men’s neckties, a recreation of one of her grandmother Laura Hall’s creations. (Some of the labels include small touchable samples replicating different textures, in acknowledgment of the perfectly understandable desire to interact with the quilts on a tactile level.)
Another highlight is a blue and white puff quilt, pieced from tobacco sacks sewn in puffy rectangles by Annie Crawford in Call, Texas, in the 1930s.
Annie Crawford, Untitled (Puff quilt with tobacco sacks), 1933–1940, detail. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
“There’s so much wisdom in how patchwork quilts come together, and I think people are really responding to these themes of creative reuse, of wanting to connect with their ancestry, and of being able to have a creative practice,” Yau said.
The show almost seems to vibrate with creative energy, these handmade textiles still infused with the love and care of their makers decades after their creation. The author Alice Walker once owned of the quilts in the show, pieced by Tompkins and quilted by Bankhead.
“I get under that quilt and I just feel real snazzy,” she is quoted in the museum wall label. “I can’t be depressed but so long, lying under that.”
Pieced by Rosie Lee Tompkins, quilted by Irene Bankhead, Untitled (Half-Square Triangles, Nine Patch) (1986/87). Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
A Living History
“Routed West,” with its stunning quilts made in the Bay Area, raises the question of how many other thriving Black quiltmaking communities across the country remain unrecognized.
“I don’t think the research has really been done, in terms of having a methodical or scholarly approach to trying to document the presence and concentration of African American-made quilts in other places,” Yau said.
”And because the nature of quiltmaking as a family-based, community-based practice in both the making and in the circulation of quilts, it’s harder to track than say, the presence of abstract painters.”
Florine Taylor, Untitled (One Patch with borders) 1987. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Photo: by Kevin Candland. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
“There’s a larger story and larger history of African American people coming together to make quilts that is yet to be fully made known,” she added.
BAMPFA plans to tour “Routed West” with the Art Bridges Foundation, and hopes to work with other museums more broadly.
The stories told in “Routed West” are also ongoing. There are still thriving communities of quiltmakers around the country, many of them active in African American quilt guilds or organizations like artist Carolyn Mazloomi’s Women of Color Quilters Network.
Elizabeth Munn, Untitled (Roman Stripe Medallion), ca. 1951–52. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of the Elizabeth Munn Family. Photo: by Kevin Candland. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
The show also includes quilts from outside the collection made after 1980, on loan from local quiltmakers from the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland, to celebrate how the quiltmaking tradition is still going strong.
“Quiltmaking really is a living tradition,” Yau said. “People can begin learning right now.”
“Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California” is on view through November 30, 2025 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center Street Berkeley, California. A quilt documentation day with the African American Quilt Documentation Study Group Archive and Database is scheduled for November 23, 2025. More

A curious garden has sprouted under the glass dome in the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection.
For its new “Minimal” exhibition, five large, geometric forms by the 81-year-old artist Meg Webster, each made from a single natural material, sit spaced apart in the building’s central nucleus. Sculpted as though made from giant sand-toy molds, there’s a low, smooth mound of yellow ochre clay in a perfect circle; an arc-shaped wall of pungent, textured beeswax; an open, walk-in wreath of fragrant, mixed foliage; a bulbous half-sphere of cracking Mars-red soil; and a giant, shimmering cone of salt crystals pointing upward at the rotunda. On closer inspection, their sharp edges and sleek surfaces appear fragile, held together lightly. Dig your finger in—as is tempting to do—and they would deliciously crumble.
Conceived from 1988 to 2025 and made of locally sourced materials, these works are the exhibition’s centerpieces. Curated by Jessica Morgan, “Minimal” traces the global evolution of Minimalist practices since the 1960s, highlighting how artists across Asia, Europe, and the Americas challenged traditional display and compositional conventions.
View of the exhibition “Lygia Pape. Weaving Space”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.
With an economy of means and pared-down aesthetics, these creators invited viewers into a more direct, bodily engagement with the work, integrating space, material, and perception. From Japan’s Mono-ha and Brazil’s Neo-Concretism to Europe’s Zero and Arte Povera movements, and the U.S. Minimalists, the exhibition shows how geographically diverse approaches shared a common drive: to rethink the relationship between artwork, audience, and environment, expanding Minimalism beyond an American-dominated narrative.
For Webster, her works inspire a return to an imagined, primal state of things. They also question our relationship with the Earth. With titles like Mound (1988) and Mother Mound (1990), they share a common quest for something essential, sensual, and ultimately profound.
But the term “minimal” can be confusing. “Initially, the word ‘minimal’ was negative,” Morgan told me. While that perception has changed, even today, with figurative art making a comeback, some still bristle at the mention of the Bourse’s focus on minimalist art. Some see it as too stark, too non-narrative. Yet even Minimalist skeptics would do well to give Morgan’s vision a closer look. The Dia director is expanding whatever limited views surround these practices, maximizing them to include a variety of forms, geographies, and artists whose works resonate today.
View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.
Maximalist Minimalism
The show is organized loosely by themes: Light, Mono-ha, Balance, Surface, Grid, Monochrome, and Materialism. More than 100 artworks by over 50 creators are often accompanied by sound pieces. Previously unsung artists of color, creatives from outside the U.S., and women are brought into the canon. They include Webster, who was taught by Richard Serra and Donald Judd. There is also work by Senga Nengudi, Merrill Wagner, long overshadowed by her husband, Robert Ryman, as well as Mary Corse, Michelle Stuart, Jackie Winsor, and Chryssa, among others.
Though not a cohesive, global movement due to differing geographic contexts, these creators tended to experiment with objects taken off the wall and placed directly on the floor, without pedestals. They sometimes left gestural marks with their hands or experimented with multiple mixed colors or monochrome. Many were obsessive about intricate detail. They also looked closely at the edges of things—the thin line where a form begins to emerge or slips back into nothingness, depending on a person’s perspective, the light, even the air in the room. The artists dug at the core of what an art object might be and why it can resonate with the slightest formal adjustment. To experience these nuances, the works must be seen in person, away from—and perhaps as a counteraction to—the chaotic frenzy of daily life.
View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.
“Minimal is a way to make something so essential and simple, but with material and form … that embraces your experience in a non-contact way. It doesn’t talk to you. It talks to many things and allows you to almost be non-verbal,” said Webster, 81, at the show opening. Her pieces encourage visitors to move in and around them, much like a garden landscape. It’s possible to stop and smell a work or explore the interior of another.
Nancy Holt’s captivating Locators with Loci (1972) also depends on our bodily presence. The work uses four differently angled steel pipes, each pointing to a black dot on the wall—three ellipses and one circle. Slight movements while looking through the pipes reveal a thin slit of light forming a circumference around a black void. The circle flickers in and out depending on the viewer’s stillness.
Lygia Pape Divisor , 1968. Performance at Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro – Brazil (1990) © Projeto Lygia Pape. Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape
Lygia Pape, the Brazilian artist who lived from 1927 to 2004 and a key figure in Neo-Concretism, has her own dedicated exhibition space. It includes performance art videos, a paper cut-out creation myth in solid geometric colors, woodcut prints, and her famous threaded filament installations. One installation, made of transparent, parallel strings woven in a corner like a spiderweb, is almost invisible. It emerges only when you move, and reflected light travels along the tightly strung threads. In another room, there is a monumental version of this same Ttéias series. Parallel ribbons of golden, copper wires stretch from floor to ceiling, traversing the gallery like beams of light breaking through storm clouds. Spot-lit in parts, they appear and disappear, floating in midair depending on where you stand.
To many of these artists, “encouraging you to train yourself to look with a greater sense of critical perception” was a political act, one that could extend to the world around them, explained Morgan, who hopes to revive that lost reading. It’s a compelling argument for an age when careful, slow examination can seem almost foreign. Perhaps it is time to exercise it.
“Minimal” is on view at the Bourse de Commerce until January 19, 2026. More

In the 1940s, Frank Lloyd Wright conjured a vision for Pittsburgh.
The architect imagined a striking residential block towering above the city’s downtown Golden Triangle, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers converge. To tackle the area’s chronic parking shortage, he dreamed up a spiral-shaped self-service garage. Boldest of all, he conceived a sprawling civic center, its futuristic, circular terraces encompassing arts venues, a sports arena, a planetarium, and open-air spaces. Ambitious and visionary, these designs, alas, were never realized.
Frank Lloyd Wright, bird’s-eye view from Mount Washington, Civic Center at Point Park for the Allegheny Conference (1947). Photo: The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York.
But they now anchor “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania: The Pittsburgh Projects,” an exhibition on view at the city’s 820 Gallery, featuring the architect’s original drawings alongside digital renderings. The show originated in 2023 at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania and traveled to Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum; its Pittsburgh stop, presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, brings Wright’s forward-looking proposals back to the place that inspired them.
“These unrealized projects feel especially resonant today, as Pittsburgh once again embraces bold ideas in urban design,” Anastasia James, director of galleries and public art at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, said in a statement. She highlighted the forthcoming Arts Landing, an outdoor civic space set to feature rotating artist installations, opening not far from where Wright pictured his potential Pittsburgh.
“What a great way to talk about the future,” Scott Perkins, curator and senior director of Fallingwater, told me over a video call, “and also talk about the past.”
Project for Civic Center at Point Park for the Allegheny Conference, digital illustration (2023) by Skyline Ink Animators + Illustrators, designers. Based on an unrealized design by Frank Lloyd Wright (1947) and created by permission of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, all rights reserved.
What Frank Lloyd Wright Planned for Pittsburgh
Wright’s designs for Pittsburgh were commissioned by department store mogul Edgar J. Kaufmann between the 1930s and ’50s. A civic-minded patron of the arts, Kaufmann sought to revitalize the industrial city with culture and architecture. He hosted exhibitions at his massive flagship store and recruited artists to create murals for its interior, while playing a key role in the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD). Perkins called him a “tastemaker,” who was “very progressive in bringing art, fashion, and design to Pittsburgh.”
Frank Lloyd Wright. Photo: Bettmann Archive, Getty Images.
One of the creatives Kaufmann seized on was Wright, who he commissioned to design his store’s executive offices and, most famously, Fallingwater, the residence that transformed Wright’s fortunes. Kaufmann continued to enlist the architect in his plans to revitalize downtown Pittsburgh through the ACCD. Among these efforts was his 1940s presentation “Pittsburgh in Progress,” which aimed to address the city’s congestion and pollution with schemes for efficient land use and sustainable design.
“This exhibit,” read its accompanying booklet, “has been prepared on the premise that there will be an expansion in the civilized use of intellect, heart, science, and technology and that the atomic age will be an era of construction.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, view from the northwest, Point View Residences for the Edgar J. Kaufmann Charitable Trust (Scheme II) (11 April 1953). Photo: The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York.
In that spirit emerged Wright’s proposals, though they ultimately went unbuilt. His design for the civic center was envisioned for the ACCD—”it allowed him essentially a blank canvas of the Triangle in Pittsburgh,” per Perkins—but was later rejected for unknown reasons. The innovative parking garage, meant to adjoin the Kaufmann’s department store, went similarly unrealized.
Meanwhile, the Point View Residences project, a triangular structure perched on the side of Mt. Washington, was designed for the Edgar J. Kaufmann Charitable Fund. But it was abandoned by Kaufmann in 1953 after his associates warned him of its financial risk (facets of the apartment building’s design can be glimpsed in Wright’s Oklahoma skyscraper, Price Tower).
Project for Point View Residences for the Edgar J. Kaufmann Charitable Trust, digital illustration (2023) by Skyline Ink Animators + Illustrators, designers. Based on an unrealized design by Frank Lloyd Wright (1953) and created by permission of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, all rights reserved.
Going Inside Wright’s Mind
At “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania,” however, these designs have been brought to life with digital models and animated videos. Created by Oklahoma-based design firm Skyline Ink, the computer renderings offer both three-dimensional and fly-over perspectives of Wright’s plans. For an even more immersive viewing, there’s a section of the exhibition that features three large screens playing room-sized animations. The models are also period-accurate, Perkins said, right down to the streetlamps.
“You’re almost surrounded by this vision of what Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pittsburgh would have looked like in the 1940s,” he said. “You see different viewpoints from all three buildings: you’re at the parking garage looking up the hill at the apartment building, or on the balcony of the apartment building looking down at the civic center. It does have the feel of being inside Wright’s mind.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, Perspective view from Smithfield Street, Self-Service Garage for Edgar J. Kaufmann (1949). Photo: The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York.
Wright’s philosophy of organic architecture—of harmonizing the manmade and the natural—also holds true in his urban imagining, Perkins noted. The forms and materials of the architect’s Pittsburgh designs carry traces of the biological.
He pointed out how Point View seems to “erupt out of the ground” and how the civic center appears like an “explosion” of abstracted, fractal elements of nature. The exterior of the parking garage, which Perkins dubbed “a weird little thing,” takes the form of a shell, not unlike that of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which Wright was designing at the same time.
Wright’s many drawings of the projects (more than 100 for the civic center alone) weren’t always so detailed, though. Perkins recalled Skyline Ink inputting the plans into AutoCAD, only to find some floor lines didn’t meet or a parking ramp not connecting to a building. “It was just a strange way of designing a building,” Perkins said, “like he was still thinking of it as parts and not really about, does this actually connect?”
Project for Self-Service Garage for Pittsburgh, digital illustration (2023) by Skyline Ink Animators + Illustrators, designers. Based on an unrealized design by Frank Lloyd Wright (1949) and created by permission of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, all rights reserved.
Yet, perhaps, it sheds a rare light on Wright’s broader vision in motion.
“I think he was so overtaken by the presentation of it and the possibility of it—all that [detail] was going to be sorted out later. He probably went through that with other buildings, like the Guggenheim: it’s hard to have that building in your brain and then try to get it onto paper,” Perkins explained. “I am always amazed by how much architecture he could have in his head.”
“Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania: The Pittsburgh Projects” is on view at 820 Gallery, 820 Liberty Ave, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 24, 2025–May 10, 2026. More

James Turrell’s largest Skyspace to date opens at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark in June 2026.
The dome-shaped Skyspace frames the sky underground, inviting reflection on light, vision, and perception itself.
Delayed by financial setbacks, the massive installation anchors ARoS’s new subterranean art expansion, The Next Level.

The largest Skyspace installation ever built by the artist James Turrell for a public institution will open at Denmark’s ARoS Aarhus Art Museum on June 19, 2026—just in time for the summer solstice.
The work, called As Seen Below – The Dome, takes the form of a vast underground room with a view of the sky, housed within a grassy mound. Just how big is the piece? At more than 50 feet high and 130 feet in diameter, it is roughly the same size as the Pantheon’s fabled dome in Rome. “With As Seen Below, I’m shaping the experience of seeing rather than delivering an image,” Turrell said in a statement. “The architecture holds the sky close, so you recognize that the act of looking is the work itself. Here, light isn’t description, it’s the substance you stand within.”
James Turrell, As Seen Below – The Dome (2025). Photo: Mads Smidstrup © ARoS, 2025. From James Turrell’s visit in As Seen Below, June 2025.
To reach the Skyspace—a term Turrell coined in the 1970s to describe his chambers fitted with apertures that frame the sky— visitors will pass through a light-filled tunnel that connects the main museum to a partially subterranean expansion called The Next Level. This includes an underground exhibition space called the Salling Gallery, which opened earlier this year, and a new permanent outdoor exhibition space, which also opens in 2026.
“The artist’s most significant Skyspace to date is an extraordinary work that invites visitors to slow down, look up, and experience light, time, and space in profoundly moving ways,” Rebecca Matthews, the director of ARoS, said in a statement. “This is not only a monumental addition to ARoS but also a gift to the public.”
Turrell’s dome was first announced in 2015 as part of a collaboration with the expansion’s architects, Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, but there have been some bumps along the road. The project was originally due to open in 2023, but has faced financial and technical setbacks, including when the supplier of the lid for the large dome went bankrupt earlier this year. Back in 2016, the expansion was estimated to cost €40 million (then around $47 million), but more recent reports in Danish media noted that an additional 6.7 million kroner ($670,000) in funding had to be found this year.
An artist’s impression of the James Turrell dome at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum. Photo: courtesy Schmidt Hammer Lassen.
Inspired by his Quaker upbringing and experiencing the vast canvas of the sky as a pilot, Turrell installed his first Skyspace at the Panza Collection in Varese, Italy, in 1974. Over the past half century, the series has grown to include around 90 unique installations across the globe. Most recently, Turrell has installed Skyspaces in a Coloradan mountainside, within a park in Monterrey, Mexico, and at a Quaker school in Manhattan.
Turrell continues to work on his magnum opus at Roden Crater in Arizona, where the artist is transforming a volcanic cone into a space for people to observe light. The project has been in development since 1977 and remains without a scheduled opening date. More

Fabric, bronze, fake flowers, feathers, wire, wood—sculptor Nick Cave has wielded a host of materials to build monuments to resilience. Now, he’s turning to a new medium, unveiling his first virtual reality work as part of an exhibition in Detroit.
“Seen/Scene” is now running at the Shepherd, a new arts center housed in a former Romanesque-style church. With V.R. glasses, visitors to the show will get to take in Cave’s massive sculpture, which is perched 26 feet high, underneath the church’s dome. Its presence in the venue, he told me over a video call, offers “a nice shift in medium within that space.”
The sculpture is part of Cave’s 2024 “Amalgams” series, a run of bronze sculptures that merge human and natural forms. In one, a host of branches sprouts out of a seated figure, while another sees a garden plot blooming atop two prone individuals. They embody growth and perseverance even, and especially, amid oppression.
Nick Cave at the opening of “Until” at Carriageworks in Sydney, Australia, 2018. Photo: Mark Metcalfe / Getty Images.
His new V.R. work, Amalgam (Inflate), depicts a pair of crouching legs holding up a cornucopia of biotic elements, their surfaces rendered to look like shimmering bronze. At first glance, the human half seems weighted, almost burdened, but Cave sees “inflated opportunity” in it too.
“I was thinking about how the body takes up space, how the body becomes this abstract form that feels like it could inflate and then float and elevate within air,” he said. “It’s this idea of elevation and how do we rise above it all.”
The piece anchors the larger exhibition at the Shepherd. Co-curated by Cave and Laura Mott, “Seen/Scene” draws from the private collection of philanthropist Jennifer Gilbert; it also offers an echo of “Here Hear,” Cave’s epic 2015 solo show at Michigan’s Cranbrook Art Museum, which Mott curated (the artist is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art). “It was a really wonderful moment to honor that project,” Mott told me.
Installation view of “Seen/Scene” at the Shepherd. Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
This time round, Cave and Mott have homed in on portraiture, gathering works by 36 artists, including Henry Taylor, Jeffrey Gibson, Helen Frankenthaler, Olafur Eliasson, and Rashid Johnson, to explore ways of seeing. The pieces, while centered on the act of looking, also urge us to look.
“The portraits are seeing each other, you’re seeing yourself, and you’re seeing the audience as well,” Mott said. “What’s really amazing about the exhibition is this dynamic act of looking at each other and looking at oneself and looking at community.”
Barkley L. Hendricks, Yocks (1975). Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
Here, Barkley L. Hendricks‘ dynamic dual portrait Yocks (1975) hangs out alongside Tom Wesselmann‘s Great American Nude #9 (1961) and Ewa Juszkiewicz‘s Untitled (after Anton Einsle) (2016), which individually challenge the traditions of female portraiture. Doug Aitken‘s EVERYTHING (flag) (2015), with its fractal mirrored surface, offers an opportunity for reflection, while a self-portrait by Kerry James Marshall shares the same space as Cave’s VR piece.
Installation view of “Seen/Scene” at the Shepherd. Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
Cave’s sculptures, of course, are nothing if not portraits of individual identity and collective strength. His celebrated Soundsuits proposed “suits of armor,” crafted out of found objects, that shield their wearers from surface judgements; his 2024 series of assemblages, “Graphts,” captured the labor and aesthetic of the Black community in its evocation of needlepoint and quilting techniques (a Graphts piece is included in “Seen/Scene”). Amalgam (Inflate), meanwhile, surfaces a rare interiority.
“You can walk into it and be on the inside,” Cave explained of the work. “That feeling of what it’s like to be inside of a form or a body was very interesting.”
Nick Cave, Graphts (2024). Photo courtesy of the Shepherd.
It’s a view that came in handy as Cave planned his first public sculpture, newly installed at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The bronze, titled Amalgam (Origin), is modeled on his own body, its skin textured with vegetation and its head replaced with a growth of bare branches occupied by birds. The artist had originally intended for the statue to stand 15 feet tall, but working with V.R. forced him to rethink scale: “This is not big enough,” he thought. The sculpture was raised to 26 feet, the same height as Amalgam (Inflate).
“There’s a bigger force that I believe in. In looking at something at this grand scale allows me to think about optimism in this vernacular way that is just bigger,” he said. “It takes all of us to be proactive when we envision ourselves at this capacity.”
“Seen/Scene” is on view at the Shepherd, 1265 Parkview St, Detroit, Michigan, through January 10, 2026. More

As Art Basel Paris draws the global art world to the French capital, the city’s museums are throwing open their doors to some of the year’s most anticipated exhibitions. From a spotlight on pioneering art dealer Berthe Weill at Musée de l’Orangerie to the much anticipated grand opening of Jean Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier, there’s something for every art lover.
Here are our top picks of what to see in the City of Light.
Bridget Riley: Starting PointMusée d’Orsay, October 21, 2025–January 25, 2026
Bridget Riley, Copy after ‘Le Pont de Courbevoie’ by Seurat (1959). Private Collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates. ©Bridget Riley 2025. All rights reserved.
What better pairing for the undulations of the newly sparkling river Seine than the vibrating canvasses of Op Art master Bridget Riley? The 94-year-old is showing at the Musée d’Orsay in a fascinating show that traces Riley’s creative origin story to an encounter with the work of Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat. In 1959 she copied Seurat’s Bridge at Courbevoie, and the hypnotic study of color and optical vibration became a defining influence on the evolution of her artistic process. Soak in a bevy of geometric patterns, lines, and color arrangements characteristic of Riley’s dizzying works in the unbeatable setting of the celebrated museum.
—Naomi Rea

Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophone ThoughtPalais de Tokyo, October 22, 2025–February 15, 2026
Pope.L, Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action (1998–2015), displayed at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles, 2015. Courtesy of the Pope.L Estate; the MOCA L.A., and Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Photo: Brian Forrest.
This wide-ranging exhibition dives deep into the French intellectual currents that have shaped U.S. art since the 1970s, particularly the revolutionary ideas of Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, and Frantz Fanon, among others. Organized by curator Naomi Beckwith, the show puts works by seminal artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cindy Sherman, Hans Haacke, and Pope.L in conversation with new commissions by the next generation of makers and thinkers, including Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Cici Wu.
The group show accompanies a solo retrospective exhibition by American sculptor Melvin Edwards—his first in France—continuing the theme of Franco-American artistic exchange. The shows kick off Palais de Tokyo’s fall season and are free to visit with no reservation necessary on October 22 and 23.
—Margaret Carrigan

Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-GardeMusée de l’Orangerie, October 8, 2025–January 26, 2026
Raoul Dufy, Thirty Years, or Life in Pink (1931). © Paris Musées / Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
Long overshadowed by male contemporaries, pioneering dealer Berthe Weill finally takes center stage in this sweeping exhibition that traces her overlooked influence on the rise of the 20th-century avant-garde. The show highlights Weill’s crucial role in launching the careers of artists like Picasso, Modigliani, and Matisse, as well as her support for women artists, including Suzanne Valadon and Émilie Charmy. The show offers a rare glimpse into the early Parisian art market through the lens of a tenacious gallerist who believed deeply in one principle: “Place aux jeunes” (Make way for the young), which was printed on her business cards. 
— Cathy Fan

Exposition GénéraleFondation Cartier, October 25, 2025–August 23, 2026
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2 Place du Palais-Royal, Paris. ©Jean Nouvel / ADAGP, Paris, 2025. Photo: ©Martin Argyroglo.
The long-awaited grand opening of Jean Nouvel’s shape-shifting new headquarters for the Fondation Cartier will be the toast of Paris art week. Located in a prime location opposite the Louvre, the dramatic architectural overhaul of the Hausmannian building is almost as anticipated as the opening exhibition curated by Grazia Quaroni and Béatrice Grenier. Titled “Exposition Générale,” it celebrates the Fondation Cartier’s history, bringing together 600 works by more than 100 artists from the institution’s collection, in an epic display of creative might. Highlights include a roll call of the biggest names in contemporary art from Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney to Joan Mitchell and Olga do Amaral who had a critically acclaimed retrospective at the foundation last year.
— N.R.

Meriem Bennani: Sole CrushingLafayette Anticipations, October 22, 2025–February 8, 2026
Meriem Bennani © Valentina Somma, Courtesy Fondazione Prada
Meriem Bennani turns the entire Fondation into a pulsating, absurdly musical organism in her latest installation. The sound installation “Sole Crushing” fills the building with the rhythmic clatter of over 200 animated flip-flops, striking surfaces to create a layered soundscape that’s equal parts symphony and protest. Originally commissioned by Fondazione Prada, the work is reimagined here with a new score by Cheb Runner (Reda Senhaji) and a site-specific architecture. As the sandals perform in unison, solo, or call-and-response, Bennani evokes the collective energy of a crowd—whether joyous, chaotic, or revolutionary—tapping (literally) into the simple sonic power of communal movement.
— C.F. More

America continues to contend with its past, often in the messiest ways imaginable. Just this weekend, millions marched in No Kings demonstrations around the country, protesting president Donald Trump’s authoritarian overreach; the White House reliably (and embarrassingly) trolled the protesters with a photo of Trump and vice president J.D. Vance wearing crowns, as if forgetting the very reason the Revolutionary War was fought. A few years ago, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement especially, monuments to Confederate officials were graffitied and torn down in cities across the country in protest of the racist worldview they embodied.
Now, “MONUMENTS,” a long-awaited show that hopes to find something generative in looking at those felled monuments to the “Lost Cause,” opens at two institutions in Los Angeles.
Ten decommissioned monuments come together with existing and commissioned works by 19 contemporary artists in the show, which is a collaboration between the Brick (formerly LAXART), headed up by Hamza Walker, and the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art, whose participation is helmed by senior curator Bennett Simpson. Nominally a co-organizer, though she wasn’t involved in choosing works, is New York artist Kara Walker (no relation to Hamza); the show includes a dramatic commission by her. “MONUMENTS” has been in the works since 2017, and came to public attention in 2021, when Walker revealed his plans on the Hope and Dread podcast, hosted by art advisor Allan Schwartzman and journalist Charlotte Burns.
Installation view of “MONUMENTS” at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick, Los Angeles. Laura Gardin Fraser, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (1948), and Hank Willis Thomas, A Suspension of Hostilities (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for The Museum of Contemporary Art.
The historical artifacts on view include two whose centrality to bloody recent history can hardly be exaggerated: monuments to Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson that were at the center of the “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi and white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. After white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer, Trump would memorably say that there were “very fine people on both sides.” The Brick had been granted ownership of the Jackson monument by a unanimous vote of the Charlottesville city council; it is one of nearly 200 Confederate monuments that have been destroyed or decommissioned.
The oldest artifact in the show is also a whopper: a statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which included the words: “There are no rights that a black person has that a white man is bound to respect.” Unveiled in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1887, it was removed from public view by the city in 2017, amid the nationwide wave of protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.
A Beheaded General Meets a Paint-Bombed Confederate President
Alongside the monuments are newly commissioned works by Walker along with artists including Karon Davis, Abigail DeVille, Stan Douglas, Kahlil Robert Irving, and Cauleen Smith. Some pieces respond directly to the decommissioned monuments, while others offer contemporary commentary on the historical themes the monuments put in play. What’s more, there will be loaned works by contemporary artists including Nona Faustine, Martin Puryear, and Hank Willis Thomas. 
Nona Faustine, Ye Are My Witness, Brooklyn, NY (2018). Courtesy of the Estate of Nona Faustine and Higher Pictures.
The show promises visual fireworks and pointed combinations of historical and contemporary. There will be bronze ingots from Charlottesville’s melted-down Robert E. Lee statute, the New York Times revealed. Filmmaker Julie Dash created a piece, HOMEGOING (2025), featuring opera singer Davóne Tines and set in Charleston’s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where nine parishioners fell to a white supremacist’s attack in 2015. A statue of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, was pulled down from its pedestal in Richmond and bombed with paint, Simpson explained on a video call; this “really interesting-looking artifact” will be surrounded by Andres Serrano’s portraits of leading figures in the Georgia Ku Klux Klan.
But the star of the show is Kara Walker, the sole artist whose work will appear at the Brick. Just as a Hollywood filmmaker might need to attach a big name to a project to get it off the ground, Hamza Walker told me in 2021, he figured from the outset that he would need to recruit a high-profile co-conspirator. Talking to the Times recently, he said, “To me, Kara’s piece is the whole thing. The show could almost be considered an excuse to get one of those things into Kara’s hands.”
Kara Walker, Unmanned Drone (2023). Photo: Ruben Diaz. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins.
Her piece, which represents the dismantled and rearranged Jackson monument—literally beheaded in the process—is titled Unmanned Drone (2003). Titling the piece for a weapon of war highlights the role of Confederate monuments, which were erected long after the Civil War in what might be termed a racist propaganda war. The 1921 monument, by New York sculptor Charles Keck, shows Jackson on his horse, Little Sorrel, which itself became massively popular after the Civil War, and became an object of some fascination for the artist. The end result presents a frightening 11-foot-high hybrid of Jackson and his steed.
Who Greenlights Loans of These Contested Objects?
“The first thing you’ll see in the Geffen are the chunks of granite from the base of the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond,” said Hamza Walker in the video call, adding that the chunks of stone are heavily graffitied. “That is the calling card for the show: the dismantling with visible signs of protest on the chunks of granite. The stone has an archaeological feel, almost, combined with the urgency of the spray paint.”
Installation view, “MONUMENTS,” at the Brick and the Geffen Contemporary at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for the Museum of Contemporary Art.
One of the centerpiece juxtapositions, Simpson explained, is between a monument to Matthew Fontaine Maury, a Confederate naval commander and oceanographer, and paintings created in response by Walter Price. “They’re abstract paintings—Hamza called them the progeny of Bruce Nauman and Alma Thomas—made with his feet, marching back and forth across the canvas. They have a panoramic, underwater feeling. Walter wanted to deal with Maury because he had been in the Navy, so he has a personal affinity to that context.”
“MONUMENTS” at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick, Los Angeles. Frederick William Sievers, Matthew Fontaine Maury Globe (1929), center, with paintings by Walter Price. Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for The Museum of Contemporary Art.
Red tape is a part of any artwork loan. First of all, the curators had to convince the lenders that they would treat these objects with the same level of care they would any work of art. But in the case of the monuments, there was sometimes ambiguity regarding who actually had the authority to greenlight a loan request.
In some cases, the local authorities understood very well the “Lost Cause” ideology that underpinned these statues—”one of the greatest propaganda campaigns ever waged in this country,” said Walker—and were keen to agree to the loan. But the chain of command wasn’t always clear. In Baltimore, though the city claimed ownership of the object, the Maryland Historical Trust has the easement of the property where it was sited. In other places, like Boston and Pittsburgh, the local department of cultural affairs owned the object and made the decision. 
“Things were unfolding in real time,” said Simpson. “The monuments had just come down in the past year or two. It really was not clear what the future of the objects would be.” Added Walker, “It still isn’t!” 
Elsewhere, the extremely sensitive nature of these particular artifacts added a more emotional dimension to what might usually be just a bureaucratic process. Sometimes, said Walker, the reaction was, “Why do you want to do this? You’re not making fun of us, are you?” But, he said, “Museums are not in the business of making fun of people.”
A Nation Turns Again To a Shameful Past 
The heady days of the wholesale removal of Confederate monuments may be in the past, and in fact there has been a concerted backlash to that iconoclastic moment, Walker pointed out. 
“MONUMENTS” at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick, Los Angeles. Right: Edward V. Valentine, Jefferson Davis (1907). Left: Andres Serrano’s portraits of members of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan. Photo: Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for The Museum of Contemporary Art.
“I would make an argument that ideologically the South is rising again,” he said, reeling off a list of moves by public and private entities to rehabilitate the same people whose monuments were torn down. The National Park Service announced in August that it would replace a monument to Confederate army officer Albert Pike that was taken down from its perch in Washington, D.C. in 2020. The mealy-mouthed press release claims that it will honor his leadership in Freemasonry; there is no mention of his military role. 
An Alabama town recently installed a new monument to Confederate admiral Raphael Semmes after the original was vandalized and removed in 2020. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, meanwhile, undertook to return all the names of Confederate generals to U.S. Army bases—defying a 2021 law barring the use of their names by finding soldiers with the same surnames and saying (again, mealy-mouthed) that the bases are now devoted to them.
And, on the private side, at a park in North Carolina, an individual has opened Valor Memorial, a private park “dedicated to resurrecting Confederate statues that municipalities removed from public view,” as the Times reported just this month. 
Walker likened these initiatives to trolling and dog whistles. 
“This is the kind of episode,” he said, “that we read about in history books and go, ‘They did what?’”
“Monuments” will be on view at the Brick, 518 North Western Ave, Los Angeles, and the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, from October 23, 2025–May 3, 2026. More

Flora Yukhnovich (b. 1990), one of the fastest rising art market stars of the past five years, has brought her brushy, romantic paintings to New York’s Frick Collection The British artist, known for melding abstraction with the traditions of French Rococo and Italian Baroque, has created a site-specific mural inspired by the museum’s beloved François Boucher (1703–1770) series “The Four Seasons” (1755).
“Flora has developed this language very much of her own,
in the field of abstraction, but bordering figuration. With her paintings, you’re always trying to work out, is it abstract? Is it figurative? Is it somewhere in between? What is it? That’s what is very exciting to me,” outgoing Frick chief curator Xavier Salomon told me. (After 11 years in his current position, Salomon is leaving next month to become director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.)
He first met Yukhnovich at a 2021 opening in London at her dealer, Victoria Miro, and decided to set up a studio visit. What he found was an artist who seemed to bring the Baroque into the 21st century, infusing the peachy pink pastels of the Rococo into sweeping, floral-inspired tableaux that somehow tapped into contemporary pop culture.
“Pretty much from the beginning, there was an idea of could she do something for the Frick?” Salomon said. While the museum doesn’t collect contemporary art, it does work with living artists, inviting the likes of Arlene Shechet (b. 1951), Nicolas Party (b. 1980), and, still on view, Vladimir Kanevsky (b. 1951) to respond to its historic holdings. Yukhnovich was a natural to join their ranks.

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An Artist on the Rise
“Flora is someone who is very avidly looking at Rococo art, art of the 18th century in France and Italy,” Salomon said. “As a curator who works on historic objects, it is very exciting to see a young, talented artist dialoguing with the art of that time, bringing it into a contemporary world.”
But it isn’t just the Frick that has found itself captivated by the young artist. Yukhnovich’s work has struck a chord with many in the art world, tapping into a burgeoning Neo-Rococo movement.
Flora Yukhnovich, The Four Seasons: Summer (2025), installation view in the Cabinet Gallery at the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr., ©Flora Yukhnovich, courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Victoria Miro.
In 2017, fresh out of grad school at City & Guilds of London Art School, Yukhnovich secured her first gallery representation. She immediately began building up a waiting list for her work—not to mention a social media following now approaching 100,000.
Her first painting to come to auction, at Phillips New York in 2021, astonished with a $1.17 million result on an estimate that topped out at just $80,000. She’s since sold nine more works at auction for over $1 million— including one just last week at Phillips London. She has a £2.69 million ($3.6 million) record, set in 2022, and a 100 percent sell-through rate, according to the Artnet Price Database. In 2023, mega dealer Hauser & Wirth added Yukhnovich to its roster; her eagerly awaited debut show with the gallery opens at the end of the month in Los Angeles.
Flora Yukhnovich, Warm, Wet ‘N’ Wild (2020). The painting set the artist’s auction record with a £2.69 million ($3.6 million) sale in 2022. Image courtesy Sotheby’s London.
Yukhnovich’s show at the Frick isn’t even the first time she’s been invited to make work about Boucher at a storied institution. Last year, she installed two new oil paintings atop the grand staircase at London’s Wallace Collection for “Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo.”
“The two projects were along the same path,” Salomon said. “They’re both great artists, Flora and Boucher. Obviously they’ve never met in person, but you see them responding to shapes and colors and textures and subjects in the same way.”
Francois Boucher, Spring, “The Four Seasons” (1755). Collection of the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr.
The History Behind “The Four Seasons”
In August 1916, museum founder Henry Clay Frick purchased Boucher’s “Arts and Sciences,” the paintings now in the Boucher Room, from the dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939). The next month, he got an unexpected letter. It was from American heiress and art dealer Virginia Bacon (1853–1919). She had changed her mind about selling Boucher’s “The Four Seasons,” recently inherited from her late brother-in-law Edward Rathbone Bacon (1848–1915). Did Frick still want them?
Frick sent off a check for $159,000, and the paintings were his. But the works’ origin story dates back to the reign of King Louis XV (1710–1774). The artist painted them for Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), a member of the French court and the king’s official mistress.
François Boucher, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1750). Collection of the Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Her life was remarkable. Born to a middle-class businessman, Madame de Pompadour rose to a position of great power and influence on the strength of her charm and beauty, but also her wits and education. She held great sway at court due to her relationship with the king, and became both a leading patron of the arts and major collector.
Boucher was Madame de Pompadour’s favorite painter, and his works, including paintings and tapestries, decorated her lavish home, the Château de Bellevue. (The two were quite close, and he even taught her the art of etching.) Her patronage and taste helped define the richly ornate sensibilities of the Rococo period, which is presently enjoying something of a revival.
Francois Boucher, Winter, “The Four Seasons” (1755). Collection of the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr.
“This exhibition is a dialogue between two artists, Boucher and Flora, but the shadow of Madame de Pompadour is very much there,” Salomon said. “She was very accomplished and an incredibly intelligent and clever person, which applies to Flora as well. I wish I could be a fly on the wall in a room with the two of them, hearing what the conversation would be like.”
It is unclear where Madame de Pompadour originally hung “The Four Seasons,” but the paintings have an irregular chantourné shape, with corners added later—and subsequently removed during restoration— to make them rectangular. That suggests they were meant to be displayed above a doorway.
Francois Boucher, Autumn, “The Four Seasons” (1755). Collection of the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr.
Originally, Frick wanted to incorporate the series into the Boucher Room, but that space only had two doors over which to hang them. Nevertheless, these Rococo treasures became part of Frick’s Beaux-Arts mansion, which he filled with treasures from throughout European art history—from 14th-century Old Masters through to then-contemporary canvases by the Impressionists.
There’s an interesting through line across the centuries for “The Four Seasons.” Created for the mistress of the French king in one of Europe’s wealthiest courts, mere decades before the nation’s social inequality sparked a violent revolution, the paintings came to America during the increasingly stratified Gilded Age, and wound up in the collection of Frick, who some art historians characterize as a robber baron. Yukhnovich has created her own take on “The Four Seasons” at a time when wealth inequality continues to rise globally. Against that backdrop, it’s worth noting that the Frick’s admission fee is now up to a whopping $30, up from $22 before the reopening, a prohibitive sum for many art lovers.
Francois Boucher’s Four Seasons installed in theWest Vestibule, the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr.
Fitting in at a Gilded Age Mansion
Yukhnovich’s project graces the walls of the museum’s first floor “cabinet gallery,” which, until the recently completed renovation and expansion, was home to the Boucher Room. Those ornate wooden panel paintings are now back upstairs, recreating the boudoir of Frick’s wife, Adelaide Childs (1859–1931), and leaving space for Yukhnovich in work her magic just around the corner from “The Four Seasons.”
“When I began responding to Boucher’s ‘Four Seasons,’ the Disney musical Mary Poppins came to mind. Boucher’s portals reminded me of Mary and the children leaping into Bert’s pavement drawings, landing in a surreal pastoral of farm animals,” Yukhnovich wrote in an essay for the exhibition catalogue. “It’s a painter’s dream.”
Flora Yukhnovich, The Four Seasons: Spring and The Four Seasons: Summer (2025), installation view in the Cabinet Gallery at the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr., ©Flora Yukhnovich, courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Victoria Miro.
She has been influenced by Boucher since grad school, when she first encountered his work at the Wallace: “In an instant, I was sitting crossed-legged on my bedroom floor again, playing with Barbies and peering into Polly Pockets, surrounded by plastic pinks and pastel greens,” Yukhnovich said. “I was hooked.”
At the Frick, she’s created a panoramic installation designed in response to the room’s architecture, the canvas shaped to fit around the windows and doors. For the first time, Yukhnovich, who recently moved to New York and completed the project here, made a canvas designed to be applied directly to the wall for installation.
Flora Yukhnovich, The Four Seasons: Spring (2025), detail. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr., ©Flora Yukhnovich, courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Victoria Miro.
“I wanted to make something that operates kind of like a painting, kind of like a wallpaper,” Yukhnovich said in a video for the museum’s acclaimed YouTube channel. “I thought it would be so interesting to have something that really interacts with the space, in the same way that Boucher’s work will have been set into the architecture.”
“It’s a very contemplative space,” Salomon said. “You just sit on the bench in the middle and looking around you’re surrounded by this whirlwind of shapes and color and art.”
Flora Yukhnovich, The Four Seasons: Autumn and The Four Seasons: Winter (2025), installation view in the Cabinet Gallery at the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr., ©Flora Yukhnovich, courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Victoria Miro.
The finished paintings read as landscapes, hints of mountains and vegetation seemingly forming and reforming before your eyes. Somehow, Yukhnovich has captured the hopeful rebirth of spring, the endless days of lazy summer, the crisp embrace of fall, and the long, frosty, chill of winter in her brushstrokes. There’s a sensual nature to her work that echoes the themes of luxury and seduction in Boucher’s original compositions.
“It makes me look at the abstract qualities in Boucher and suddenly, you know, instead of just looking at shepherds frolicking in a landscape in the 18th century, you start thinking about.
What decision is he making about color, about positioning figures, about the landscape, about the relationship between the two, about the shifting light?” Salomon said.
Francois Boucher, Summer, “The Four Seasons” (1755). Collection of the Frick Collection, New York. Photo: by Joseph Coscia Jr.
The two artists’ paintings differ in an obvious way, in that Yukhnovich has left out the rosy-cheeked men and women that star in Boucher’s series, like the young gentleman tucking flowers into his beloved’s hair, or the voluptuous women reclining by a fountain in various states of undress. But stare at her works long enough, a figure—or at least parts of one—might begin to appear amid the dreamy, swirling colors.
That’s by design, Yukhnovich said: “I always have some sort of hint of the bodily in the work.”
“Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons” is on view at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, New York, New York (September 3, 2025–March 9, 2026),
“Flora Yukhnovich: Bacchanalia” is on view at Hauser & Wirth 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, California, October 30, 2025–January 25, 2026. More