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      A Sculpture Depicting King Tut as a Black Man Is Sparking International Outrage

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      What did the ancient Egyptians look like? A new exhibition at National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Netherlands, has sparked controversy by including a contemporary artwork that appears to depict the Pharaoh Tutankhamun as Black.
      “Kemet: Egypt in Hip-Hop, Jazz, Soul and Funk” pairs Egyptian antiquities from the museum’s collection with work inspired by ancient Egyptian culture by created by musicians of the African diaspora, including Miles Davis, Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, and Rihanna.
      The Leiden exhibition acknowledges that while generations of Black musicians have drawn strength and empowerment from ancient Egyptian culture, the racial identity of ancient Egyptians has been a topic of spirited debate for decades.
      The show’s title comes from the ancient Egyptians’ name for their homeland, Kemet, which means “black land.” But, the exhibition explains, the color referenced the rich, dark soil of the Nile river valley, rather than the people’s skin tone. The museum also discounts the theory that the noses on many ancient Egyptian statues were broken off in modern times in order to disguise visibly African features.
      David Cortes, I Am Hip Hop (2019). Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden.
      “This is a very difficult topic and that is the thing with this exhibition: I think you really have to give it a chance,” Daniel Soliman, museum’s Egyptian and Nubian curator, told The Art Newspaper. “There are Egyptians, or Egyptians in the diaspora, who believe that the pharaonic heritage is exclusively their own. The topic of the imagination of ancient Egypt in music, predominantly from the African diaspora, Black artists in different styles, jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop, had long been ignored.”
      Nevertheless, the exhibition’s thesis has led to backlash, particularly due to the David Cortes statue, I Am Hip Hop. The 2019 sculpture is based on the 1999 Nas album I Am…, in which the African American rapper was photographed to look like the famed mask of King Tut.
      An outraged article titled “Dutch museum claims Tutankhamun was Black” in the Egypt Independent cited a complaint from Egyptian antiquities expert Abd al-Rahim Rihan. Not only does the statue inaccurately depict King Tut’s race, he claimed, the artist has actually created an unauthorized copy of an Egyptian antiquity, which can only be produced by the nation’s Supreme Council of Antiquities under Article 39 of the Protection of Antiquities Law No. 117 of 1983.
      The claim has reportedly prompted an official inquiry from Ahmed Bilal al-Burlusy, a member House of Representatives, as to whether Cortes violated Egyptian law. (The piece is a contemporary artwork, not a replica, the museum said in a statement.)
      But the exhibition has also fueled long-running arguments about racial identity and cultural appropriation, including on the Facebook group Egyptian History Defenders, which describes itself “defending Egyptian history and heritage against Afrocentric culture vultures.”
      There has also been a rash of one-star reviews for the museum on Google, calling it a “woke museum with zero scientific references and heavily under the influence of afrocentrism” who “are forgers who steal the history of Egyptian civilization and attribute it to black African[s].”
      “The exhibition does not claim the ancient Egyptians were Black, but explores music by Black artists who refer to ancient Egypt and Nubia in their work: music videos, covers of record albums, photos, and contemporary artworks,” museum director Wim Weijland said. “The exhibition also acknowledges that the music can be perceived as cultural appropriation, and recognizes that large groups of contemporary Egyptians feel that the pharaonic past is exclusively their heritage.”
      Adele James, a Black British actress, plays Cleopatra in Queen Cleopatra. Photo courtesy of Netflix.
      The question of the race of ancient Egyptians also led to an uproar over the new Jada Pinkett-Smith-produced Netflix documentary-drama series African Queens: Queen Cleopatra and its depiction of the famed ruler by the Black actress Adele James. (An Egyptian lawyer even pushed to block the airing of the series in the African nation, and an Egyptian network has announced plans for its own documentary starring a light-skinned Cleopatra.)
      “Netflix is trying to provoke confusion by spreading false and deceptive facts that the origin of the Egyptian civilization is Black,” former Egyptian antiquities minister Zahi Hawass told the al-Masry al-Youm newspaper. “This is completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not Black.”
      Cleopatra was the last rule of the Ptolemaic dynasty, a Greek-ruled kingdom descended from Macedonians—but her family had been in Egypt for 300 years, and nothing is known about her maternal ancestry.
      “While shooting, I became the target of a huge online hate campaign. Egyptians accused me of ‘blackwashing’ and ‘stealing’ their history,” series director Tina Gharavi wrote in Variety, arguing that James was probably more accurate casting than the white Elizabeth Taylor, who famously played the queen in 1963.
      “Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister? And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white?” Gharavi asked. “Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians, it seems to really matter.”
      “Kemet: Egypt in Hip-Hop, Jazz, Soul and Funk” is on view at the National Museum of Antiquities, Rapenburg 28, 2311 EW Leiden, Netherlands, April 22, 2023–September 3, 2023.
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      Street Artist and Keith Haring Collaborator Angel Ortiz’s New Graffiti-Inspired Works Bottle the Vibe of 1980s New York. See Them Here

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      On the makeshift dance floor inside Chase Contemporary gallery, the ’80s are in full swing. Gloria Gaynor is blasting out of the DJ booth, producing hip gyrations reminiscent of a time when a Soho party meant something altogether different. Someone is draped in a boa, to what degree of irony it’s hard to tell.
      The gathering is here to celebrate the latest installment of Angel Ortiz’s comeback, “Ode 2 NYC,” a collection of new works on show through June 18. And in case any young stragglers are unaware of whose party they’re crashing, it’s proclaimed in a giant black-and-white photo that hangs over the champagne bar: Ortiz (aka LA II) stood alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf. “You’re in the presence of New York street art royalty,” goes the message.
      Angel Ortiz, Shazbot (2023). Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
      Ortiz is hunched over a folding table by the door, tagging posters, t-shirts, hats, and quite frankly anything he can work a fat marker into. He shoulders a tattered backpack the almost entire time, as though at any moment he might scurry off and find something more interesting to do. This appears unlikely. He’s surrounded by longtime friends and fans, seemingly enjoying his reemergence into the spotlight. But then again, it wouldn’t be entirely out of character given Ortiz’s line of work.
      Ortiz was barely a teenager when he broke onto the city’s street art scene in a much-worked over legend that goes something like this: the Lower East Side native and his graffiti crew, the Non Stoppers, had been spray-painting the area for years when Ortiz’s densely packed lines caught the attention of Keith Haring, then a School of Visual Arts student. Haring was relentless in his search of the LA II tag creator, eventually finding “Little Angel” and beginning a long-lasting collaborative partnership. It was mutually beneficial, with Haring granted local street access and acceptability, and Ortiz thrust into an international art market that was developing a sudden taste for street art.
      Keith Haring and Angel Ortiz standing in front of a work they collaborated on. Photo courtesy of the artist.
      The narrative of Ortiz’s success is so entwined with Haring that it would be understandable if, 40 years on, the Puerto Rican felt frustrated by the tie, as though it diminishes the merits of his own art. Not so. Ortiz remains glowing about his relationship with Haring. He’s also clear-eyed that it was Haring who approached him and asked for help (and, it seems, took inspiration from LA II’s bold line work).
      “My relationship with Keith has always been about friendship first and the artistic aspect was and will always be secondary,” Ortiz told Artnet News. “Keith sought my guidance on how to accentuate his isolated figures and make them have a more complex environment to come to life visually. The collaborations artistically were magical and will never be duplicated.”
      Angel Ortiz, Hudson (2023). Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
      Ortiz’s latest collection follows a sold-out show at London’s D’Stassi Gallery in 2022 and sees him continue to transfer his distinctive tags, symbols, and icons from the city’s surface onto canvas. To view Ortiz’s current work is to enter a maze of arrows, lines to nowhere, half-formed letters, calligraphic flourishes, bold outlines, and negative spaces. Oftentimes, Ortiz orients his works around his formative motifs: the heart, the crown, the cat, the taxi cab (a nod, perhaps, to Ortiz’s first collaboration with Haring on a taxi hood), and the spray can, which, onsite in Soho, grows arm and legs that extend onto the gallery wall.
      In “Ode 2 NYC,” as in London, Ortiz also reaches more often for the paintbrush than the spray can. “I feel differently depending on which medium I use and feel most artistically free when I have a spray can in my hand,” Ortiz said. “When I use a paintbrush on canvas, it is artistically the most unforgiving of all my weapons of choice.”
      Ortiz’s expertise with a marker compensates for any lingering uncertainty he may have with more traditional artistic tools. In works like Big Apple (2023) and Gotham (2023), the movement of thick and thin lines create the context in which painted symbols sits.
      Angel Ortiz at the opening of “Ode 2 NYC”. Photo: courtesy Chase Contemporary.
      But there’s a contradiction at play here. Although Ortiz’s lines and motifs echo the era in which they were born, such is the intricacy, polish, and arrangement of his works that are conveniently presented on canvas that they lose urgency, that connection with the surface of the city. And this is fine: artists are forever evolving, retooling, reframing. It just feels more jarring in the context of graffiti.
      It’s a shift Ortiz himself acknowledges. “The 1980s graffiti was free of social media and the thought of building a brand,” he said. “Today’s graffiti is not bad; it is just different. It is like comparing professional sports in the 80’s to now. Same sport fundamentally, just a completely different game.”
      See more images of the show below.
      Angel Ortiz at opening of “Ode 2 NYC.” Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
      Installation view of “Ode 2 NYC.” Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
      Angel Ortiz, Walter (2023). Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
      Angel Ortiz, Untitled (2023). Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
      Installation view of “Ode 2 NYC.” Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
      Angel Ortiz, Subway (2023). Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
      “Ode 2 NYC” is on view at Chase Contemporary, 413-415 West Broadway, New York, through June 18.
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      In Pictures: Vilnius’s Modern Art Museum Marks the 700th Anniversary of the Lithuanian Capital With a Show on Post-Soviet Psychology

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      As part of city-wide celebrations for the 700th anniversary of Vilnius, the MO Museum—the Lithuanian capital’s modern art hub—has put on a special showcase of contemporary art that invites audiences to time travel to the 1980s and trace Vilnius’s transformation since the late Soviet era.
      This show brings together 150 works, ranging from visual art to text and sound, to immerse visitors in the creative vision of theater director Oskaras Koršunovas and set designer Gintaras Makarevičius.
      The exhibition is named after and inspired by Ričardas Gavelis’s oppressive 1989 novel Vilnius Poker, a masterpiece of Lithuanian literature that takes the city as its protagonist at a time when its citizens are dealing with the psychological fallout from a collapsing Soviet system. Its publication was a turning point for the country’s creative and cultural liberation, and now this exhibition explores the developments of the decades since and the evolving identity of Vilnius today and tomorrow.
      The range of work on show includes pieces from the 1960s up to the present moment that reflect on the novel’s evergreen themes of freedom, identity and memory.
      “The novel depicts Vilnius as an intricate, chaotic, dream-like city with nothing specific or real. This was the starting point in creating the exhibition, which is designed like a universal tale, not limited to a specific place or time period,” explained the museum director Milda Ivanauskienė.
      “Vilnius Poker” runs at MO Museum until January 28, 2024. Check out some of the works from the exhibition below.
      Rūta Spelskytė-Liberienė, Mountain Stag Beetle (2019) in the “Vilnius Poker” exhibition at the MO Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. Photo courtesy of Go Vilnius.
      Installation view of “Vilnius Poker” exhibition at the MO Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. Photo courtesy of Go Vilnius.
      Installation view of “Vilnius Poker” exhibition at the MO Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania showing Nerijus Erminas, That Which Is Unseen (2013). Photo courtesy of Go Vilnius.
      Installation view of Vytautas Tomaševičius, Trajectory (2020) at the “Vilnius Poker” exhibition at the MO Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. Photo courtesy of Go Vilnius.
      Rimantas Milkintas, Too Long (2017) at the “Vilnius Poker” exhibition at the MO Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. Photo courtesy of Go Vilnius.
      Mindaugas Skudutis, Vilnius Poker (2022) at the “Vilnius Poker” exhibition at the MO Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. Photo courtesy of Go Vilnius.
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      In Pictures: The Museum of Arts and Design’s ‘Funk You Too!’ Exhibition Traces the Irreverent Roots of the Contemporary Clay Craze

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      The new show “Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture,” at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), articulates the links between groups of artists working in a once-neglected, now-valorized medium. It unites artists from the Funk generation, an anti-establishment movement that emerged on the West Coast in the 1960s, with artists carrying on their subversive spirit in clay today.
      Comprising some 50 artworks, the show “arrives at a moment when clay as a sculptural medium is receiving unprecedented attention from the art world,” said Elissa Auther, MAD’s deputy director of curatorial affairs and chief curator, in a press release. “Taking advantage of MAD’s significant collection of historical Funk ceramics, ‘Funk You Too!’ examines the critical contexts that gave rise to the prominence of humor in ceramic sculpture and advocates for the ongoing relevance of Funk ceramics to a new generation of artists.” 
      Artists of the Funk generation from the 1960s to the 1980s, such as “father of Funk art” Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, and Patti Warashina, are juxtaposed with up-and-coming younger artists who also express humor in clay. The younger figures include Genesis Belanger (the subject of a recent New Museum exhibition), Ruby Neri (lately highlighted in the New York Times’ T Magazine), and Woody De Othello (who had a breakout moment at Art Basel Miami Beach a few years back).
      Alake Shilling, Baby Bear Loves Alake (2021). Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
      While the original Funk artists toiled in a medium that was relegated to craft status, clay today is on a much more equal footing with other media. Ceramic artists such as Betty Woodman, Ron Nagle, and Ken Price are enjoying museum retrospectives and buzzy markets, as the rigid boundaries between art and craft have become more porous, if not entirely eliminated.
      “Many of the contemporary artists in the exhibition have attracted widespread critical attention,” said Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, independent curator, writer, and curator of the exhibition, in a press release. “Yet, their work has rarely been contextualized in relation to the history of ceramics, craft and the broader history of Funk art.”
      “Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture” is on view at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, through August 27. See more images below.
      Genesis Belanger, You Never Know What You’re Gonna Get (2021). Photo: Jenna Bascom, courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
      Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Lista Para Volar (2022). Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
      Installation view of “Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture” at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo: Jenna Bascom, courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
      Viola Frey, Group Series: Questioning Woman 1 (1988). Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
      Patti Warashina, Pitter-Podder (1968). Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
      Installation view of “Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture” at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo: Jenna Bascom, courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
      David Gilhooly, Bread Frog as a Coffee Break (1981–82). Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
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      How Artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Is Using A.I.-Generated Birdsong to Draw Attention to Humanity’s Impact on Dwindling Species

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      Step into Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s new installation at the Toledo Museum of Art and you’ll be greeted by a chorus of bird calls: trills, chirps, and warbles, ebbing and flowing into each other. The hitch? Not every tweet is real; rather, a good portion of that birdsong is the product of artificial intelligence. 
      The work, titled Machine Auguries: Toledo, marks Ginsberg’s U.S. debut and represents her continued exploration into how the dawn chorus, the daily call and response performed by birds in the spring and summer, has been impacted by modern civilization.  
      Over decades, bird populations have greatly dwindled, not just due to habitat loss, but the effects of human-made noise and light pollution. So much so that birds have had to sing louder and at a higher pitch, if they even know when to sing. 
      Installation view of “Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo” at Toledo Museum of Art, 2023. © the artist. Photo: Madhouse.
      “I wanted to consider the effects of our behaviors on other species, and as a human I can’t help but ask how their adaptation, or lack of it, then affects us,” Ginsberg told Artnet News. “What will there be without birds?” 
      To that end, Ginsberg gamed out an immersive sound installation wherein a natural dawn chorus gradually gives way to one filled with A.I.-generated calls, set against a backdrop of an artificial sky. The first iteration of Machine Auguries was installed at the Somerset House in London in 2019, with the latest edition, presented in partnership with Superblue, offering what Ginsberg considers a fuller realization of the work.  
      Where the natural chorus in the first installation was populated with British birds, the Toledo version has been aptly localized to feature 25 species, from the northern cardinal to the black-capped chickadee. These were selected by the artist with help from birding experts and locals such as the Black Swamp Bird Observatory.  
      “We chose the most iconic species to the local chorus—the birds that define the soundscape of the local dawn,” explained Ginsberg. 
      Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Northern Cardinal (2023), one of several digital paintings generated by the artist using DALL-E 2 and included in a field guide accompanying the exhibition. Photo courtesy of the artist and Toledo Museum of Art.
      The generative adversarial network that powers the artificial chorus has also had a significant upgrade, having been built on a fresh dataset of some 100,000 field recordings from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Ginsberg recalled that the technology in 2019 could only make one-second clips; now, though, it can make complete four-second passages.
      And all that in such a way that “we can no longer tell what is real or not,” according to Ginsberg, who tested out the artificial calls on the bird I.D. app, Merlin, and with local birding expert, Kenn Kaufman. The feedback from both was that the machine-generated calls were “indiscernible” from the real ones.  
      “That’s the highest praise imaginable for a technological project,” said Ginsberg, “but also the saddest outcome of creating an imperfect copy of an un-replicable, complex world.” 
      Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. Photo: © Nathalie Théry.
      Which gets to the heart of Ginsberg’s practice, which has long probed “the conflicted relationship we have with nature and with technology, depleting one to prioritize the other.” In her pieces—such as 2018’s The Substitute, which virtualized the last male northern white rhinoceros, and Pollinator Pathmaker (2022), an algorithmic tool that explores the impact of human-designed gardens on insects—the tension between nature and technology is evident in both medium and message. 
      In Toledo Museum’s vast Canaday Gallery, Ginsberg has thus installed a lighting array that mimics the colors of a sunrise. As the hues shift from a grayish blue to a warm orange, an American robin sings, only to receive an A.I.-generated response. More birds join in as the day artificially dawns and the bird orchestra builds with deep machine calls emitted by 24 speakers.  
      In the end, under the bright light of the gallery, the viewer is left “in the absence of nature,” said Ginsberg, “taking time to listen to an unnatural reconstruction of the life outside.”  
      Installation view of “Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo” at Toledo Museum of Art, 2023. © the artist. Photo: Madhouse.
      To the artist, this growing overlap between the real and unreal gets to the matter of A.I. at large. The advances in the technology, even during the six months it took to build out this project, have shifted the conversation between the first Machine Auguries and this latest iteration, surfacing, for Ginsberg, questions of authorship and what we choose to value. 
      But more so, it has sharpened her augury of losing the real to the unreal. 
      “Why are we in an A.I. arms race as we increasingly shut out the world around us that allows us to exist? The artificial robin may sound like a robin to even the keenest human—and A.I.—ears. But does it sound like a robin to a robin?” she said. “The A.I. has learned from what already exists; imagination still has a role in finding new questions. 
      “Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo” is on view at the Toledo Museum of Art, 2445 Monroe Street, Toledo, Ohio, through November 26. 
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      Meet the New York-Based Curatorial Platform That’s Creating Space for Underrepresented Artists

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      As entry-level professionals in the New York art world, Cristina Cruz and Neha Jambhekar bonded over gallery openings, spending each Thursday night together enjoying wine and art at receptions across Chelsea. Now, after nine years of friendship, the two have finally staged an exhibition of their own, launching a new curatorial platform, Jambhekar/Cruz, to promote the work of emerging artists of underrepresented backgrounds.
      “It’s a culmination of all the fun we have in New York, all the people we’ve met, and how we feel when we see art,” Jambhekar told Artnet News.
      The duo’s inaugural show, titled “Really From,” features a mix of Southeast Asian and Hispanic artists, plus one Chinese artist. It is being held at the NYC Culture Club, a nonprofit space at the World Trade Center Oculus run by brothers Parker and Clayton Calvert that offers artists and curators free exhibition space in partnership with Westfield World Trade Center.
      The idea for a curatorial collaboration was something Jambhekar and Cruz had been tossing around for a year or two, so when the opportunity came to stage an in-person show at minimal cost, they seized it.
      Installation view of “Really From,” curated by Jambhekar/Cruz at NYC Culture Club. Photo courtesy of NYC Culture Club.
      “We realized this is something that we both feel super passionate about. There are not enough people out there who are highlighting artists of color, which is crazy because New York is such a diverse city,” Cruz told Artnet News.
      The exhibition title is a play on a question that most people of color are all too familiar with. Sure, you may live in the U.S., but where are you really from?
      “I usually say I’m from Florida. For Christina, it’s the Bronx,” Jambhekar, who was born in India, said. Cruz’s parents are from Nicaragua. “These artists are showing us who they are through their practice and their work.”
      Installation view of “Really From,” curated by Jambhekar/Cruz at NYC Culture Club. Photo courtesy of NYC Culture Club.
      Cruz and Jambhekar met through their jobs at (full disclosure) Artnet, where Cruz got her start as a gallery liaison, and Jambhekar was hired as an auction house success specialist, fresh off of finishing her masters at the Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York.
      “I remember thinking here’s another brown person—that was something that was super rare,” Cruz said. “Artnet was one of my first jobs in the art world, and it was nice to meet somebody who looked like me who I could connect with.”
      Installation view of “Really From,” curated by Jambhekar/Cruz at NYC Culture Club. Photo courtesy of NYC Culture Club.
      One day over lunch in the office kitchen, Cruz proposed a night of gallery-hopping to visit some of her clients. Soon, Jambhekar had transferred to the gallery department, further solidifying their Thursday night routine. (Artnet has promoted Cruz several times, most recently to a product owner role; Jambhekar left Artnet late last year for a job at another high-profile art world business.)
      After years of pounding the pavement on the gallery and art fair circuit, as well as connecting with artists on Instagram, Cruz and Jambhekar had a long list of artists they were interested in working with when it came time to put together the exhibition. They compared Instagram likes, set up studio visits, and were delighted—if surprised—to find the artists eager to come on board.
      That even included Jaishri Abichandani, by far the most established artist in the bunch, a talented feminist painter and sculptor from India who had an impressive solo show at Los Angeles’s Craft Contemporary museum in 2022.
      Jaishri Abichandani, Stephanie the Angel (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Jambhekar/Cruz.
      Her massive painting, Stephanie the Angel (2023), fringed in feathers, is an undeniable showstopper, strategically placed at the entrance to draw passersby into the gallery. (It’s the most expensive work in the show at $20,000; the rest are between $800 and $9,000, with most $4,000 and under.)
      The range of works on view is impressive.
      There are colorful, delicate sculptures from Max Benjamin Sarmiento inspired by his childhood memories and his visits to Ecuador, and a claustrophobic painting of the view from a moving subway car by Angel Cotray. Zeehan Wazed contributed dreamlike canvases based on photographs his sister took in Bangladesh, while Pranav Sood is showing two acrylic paintings that incorporate cartoon faces into abstract geometric designs.
      Misha Japanwala, Portal to my Ancestors (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and Jambhekar/Cruz.
      Other artists to watch include Misha Japanwala, who makes resin and bronze casts of women’s body parts, and opened a solo show at New York’s Hannah Traore Gallery earlier in May.
      “It’s about how Muslim women are so oppressed and covered up, and she’s trying to break those stereotypes,” Jambhekar said.
      But most of the participating artists—the full list includes Aiza Ahmed, Kantinka Huang, Freddy Leiva, Melanie Luna, Visakh Menon, Anjuli Rathod, and Aparna Sarkar—have had few prior opportunities to work with galleries.
      “We want to create a place for brown people so they can say ‘I’ve been in a show,’ just to give them some confidence for their career. And we also want to make it easier for the emerging collector to buy works,” Jambhekar said. “Basically, we wanted to do something for our friends who are artists, and our friends who are collectors.”
      Cristina Cruz and Neha Jambhekar of Jambhekar/Cruz outside their exhibition “Really From” at NYC Culture Club. Photo courtesy of NYC Culture Club.
      Staging an in-person show was undoubtedly a monumental task, especially while both women were working full time—moving forward, Jambhekar/Cruz will focus on online exhibitions, with perhaps one in-person outing per year. But the experience was also proof that their many years in the business had paid off.
      “We have been working for so long with galleries and we understand this world,” Cruz said. “Once we fought those feelings of impostor syndrome, we realized we do have the expertise for this.”
      “Really From,” curated by Jambhekar/Cruz is on view at NYC Culture Club, World Trade Center Oculus, C1 Level, South Concourse, 185 Greenwich Street, New York, New York, April 17–May 21, 2023.
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      Look Familiar? Germany’s Exhibition at the Architecture Biennale Has Salvaged and Repurposed Material From 40 Art Biennale Shows

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      What’s old is new again. Germany’s contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale is leading the trend for acquiring second-hand goods, by repurposing last year’s pavilion by the artist Maria Eichhorn. To make it their own, the participants are working with materials they salvaged from 40 exhibitions at last year’s art biennale, including many national pavilions.
      Reduce, reuse and recycle is the theme of “Open for Maintenance,” which opens to the public on May 20 for the 18th edition of the biennale. It is presented by two sustainability-minded practices: Leipzig-based SUMMACUMFEMMER and Büro Juliane Greb from Cologne and Gent, which are working in collaboration with the quarterly magazine ARCH+.
      The meeting space at Open for Maintenance at Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. Photo: © ARCH+, SUMMACUMFEMMER, Büro Juliane Greb.
      The idea of “squatting” the Giardini pavilion is inspired by squatters’ movements that have long pushed against relentless urban renewal. Instead, the pavilion’s team hopes to redirect energy away from the notion of rebuilding and towards repair and maintainance what is already within the built environment.
      “Every year, the Biennale grounds in Venice host a new exhibition. Hidden from the visitors’ eyes, heaps of materials are transported to the city and then ferried to the various national pavilions by boat and handcart. Six months later, most of them end up being discarded,” write the participants in an accompanying publication. “Now, we are part of the same spectacle. We bear responsibility, but we are also quite free in our design decisions. So, can we find another way?”
      The German Pavilion as a repository for salvaged materials at Open for Maintenance at Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. Photo: © ARCH+, SUMMACUMFEMMER, Büro Juliane Greb.
      The first step was to treat Eichhorn’s Relocating a Structure exhibition from last year’s art biennale as a “found” object. Luckily, her presentation was minimal to begin with: through delicate interventions, Eichhorn engaged with the German Pavilion’s history of having been rebuilt by Ernst Haiger under the Nazis in 1938 by exposing strips of the original pavilion’s underlying brickwork and foundations.
      The insights from her project have been preserved, but additions introduced by the architecture team include accessibility features like a ramp and toilets, as well as a fully-equipped workshop.
      To make their adaptations, the team transported leftover materials salvaged from last year’s biennale and national pavilions, including the blue columns from the Israeli pavilion, jute fabric from the Chilean exhibition, and spiral ducts from Austria’s presentation. The central ramp, which has been designed to look like it was integral to the building’s architecture, is made from reused materials from Dana Kosmina’s Ukrainian Pavilion. Gravel, taken from the exhibition “The Concert” by Latifa Echakhch at the Swiss Pavilion was used for the base. The team was also able to salvage PVC banners from the biennale’s entrance tents.
      “One challenge we faced was having to adjust constantly,” one of the curators Melissa Makele told Artnet News. “Many decisions could only be made on site. However, designing with unpredictability generates new creative possibilities that offer an optimistic outlook for the discipline.”
      Open for Maintenance at Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. Photo: © ARCH+, SUMMACUMFEMMER, Büro Juliane Greb.
      It is no secret that biennales have a bad reputation when it comes to waste and carbon emissions, and the impact is felt greatly by an already fragile ecosystem like Venice.
      “The biennale cannot be disentangled from its local context and the spatial effects it has on everyday life,” added Makele. “As an exhibition of this size and format, it is structurally involved in the depletion of resources and the economic and touristic exploitation of the city it operates in. You need to take these dynamics into account if you want to participate in such an event.”
      “To center architectural practices of care and repair is not so much driven by the motivation to pick up on a trendy topic,” she said. “Rather it is through realizing that we are actively endangering our own existence if we do not work towards a fundamental transformation and restructuring of the industry.”

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      in Exhibitions

      How a Broadway Producer Recreated Peggy Guggenheim’s Groundbreaking ‘Exhibition of 31 Women’ on Its 80th Anniversary

      by

      “I was a liberated woman long before there was a name for it,” art doyenne Peggy Guggenheim once remarked. Indeed, the trailblazing collector and socialite bucked the conventions of her time, living a bohemian lifestyle (including a brief and fiery marriage to Max Ernst), while championing women artists in an age when most female creatives were sidelined to roles of wife and muse. 
      This week, New York art-lovers will have the rare and fleeting chance to see the work of the women artists Guggenheim heralded in the very 57th Street space that was once her Art of This Century Gallery. This time-traveling experience is the work of Tony Award-winning producer Jenna Segal who has revived Guggenheim’s pivotal “Exhibition of 31 Women”—the first-of-its-kind in 1943 to showcase only women artists—to mark its 80th anniversary. Segal’s show will run for a total of 31 hours, spread out over a week.
      Meret Oppenheim, Untitled, (Helene Mayer) (1936). Photograph courtesy of the 31 Women Collection.
      Guggenheim originally organized the exhibition at the suggestion of her dear friend Marcel Duchamp. The sweeping exhibition brought together works by today’s art-historical heroines including Frida Kahlo, Louise Nevelson, and Méret Oppenheim, as well as myriad others who have since fallen into obscurity such as the hauntingly poetic French artist Valentine Hugo and Swiss-born American abstract artist Sonja Sekula.
      The works on view are all from Segal’s personal collection and represent a larger passion project for the producer, who has long admired Guggenheim’s ethos. 
      Berenice Abbott, Peggy Guggenheim (1926). Collection of Jenna Segal.
      Segal—who is the founder of Segal NYC, a production company focused on highlighting women creatives—first became interested in the famed art world patron when she visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice while backpacking through Europe in college. Captivated by the collector’s vision, Segal then devoured Guggenheim’s fascinating autobiography and learned of her heroic efforts to protect artists in Europe at the dawn of World War II.
      “I bought her autobiography and read it on the train as we were continuing to travel and it really struck me that here was this American woman who I had never been taught about [and who] had done so much,” she said. A seed of inspiration had been planted. “I tucked her in my heart,” Segal explained of her affection for Guggenheim, knowing, on some level, she would return to her story later.
      Leonor Fini, Femme En Armure I (Woman in Armor I) (1938) Photograph courtesy of the 31 Women Collection.
      Then, in 2020, deep in quarantine, Segal happened to return to Guggenheim’s autobiography. She’d long considered “31 Women” a pivotal, and tragically unknown, moment in women’s history. With the itch to produce, Segal’s thoughts coalesced around the possibility of bringing together the works of all the artists included in the exhibition in one place.
      “At first I just wanted to see if I could find all these women,” Segal noted. Since no known photographs of “31 Women” exist and many works included were listed simply as “untitled,” Segal decided she would try to feature at least one work by each of the 31 artists, rather than try to recreate the exact show itself.
      She soon immersed herself in a crash course on art history and collecting, taking to online auction houses, eBay, and dozens of other sources to assemble her collection. She decided she would focus on works made as close to the exhibition date as possible. “Through self-education, I began to see the differences in what these artists were making in the ’30s and ’40s and what they were doing in the ’50s and ’60s.” Amid a moment of global uncertainty, she found these earlier works resonated with her. 
      Valentine Hugo, Portrait d’Arthur Rimbaud (1936). Collection of Jenna Segal.
      This immersion was an eye-opening experience filled with rich stories that touched Segal personally: “I could go on and on about any of these artists.”
      In the friendship between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, two artists included in the collection, for example, she found a corollary. Having met in Paris in 1938, the two began a long-lasting and intimate correspondence in exile from their homelands. Their exchanges ranged from deeply felt memories to artistic considerations. “It reminds me of an email correspondence I have with a friend of mine, a woman writer in London,” Segal noted.
      One artist, French painter Valentine Hugo, Segal finds herself acquiring again and again. “Valentine Hugo haunts me, I say” Segal laughed.
      “As I was building this collection, I painted one wall in my office with magnetic paint so I could move around images of works by these artists to see it all in one space,” she explained. “I left one day and I come in and somehow in the night, the Hugo image had moved up to the ceiling. She was reminding me of her.” For Segal, the uncanny experience speaks to the mysteries artists are able to both capture and evoke.
      If Hugo has haunted Segal, another artist has eluded her: Gypsy Rose Lee. Gypsy Rose Lee was an iconic 20th-century American burlesque entertainer who was also an artist and playwright. While Segal has managed to acquire works by all other 30 women, she remains on the hunt for a work by Lee.
      Unknown Photographer, Gypsy Rose Lee with artwork likely to be the one included in the original “Exhibition of 31 Women” in 1943. Photograph printed from original 35 mm negative. Photo: The 31 Women Collection.
      “She was the Kim Kardashian of her time,” enthused Segal. “It’s shocking that people don’t know her today and that I can’t find a single work by here. It’s like if in 80 years, there were not a pair of Skims to be found!”
      Today, Segal’s office is in what was once Guggenheim’s famed 57th Street gallery. Asked how this came about, Segal laughed. “I went to the door and knocked,” she said, noting a producer’s instinct. “I figured I’d just go see for myself.” After some cajoling, Segal secured the space, which had fallen into drab disrepair. Segal enlisted oopsa creative studio and agency, led by architects Eric Moed and Penelope Phylactopoulos, to invigorate the space with aspects of the gallery’s original design by Austrian American architect Frederick Kiesler.
      While Segal is happy the exhibition is garnering attention, she hopes it will be a call to historians and a springboard for the future.
      “I am not a historian. I am not a museum. I don’t claim to be an expert,” she said. “Peggy said, ‘I listened and I became my own expert,’ and that’s what I would say I am. But in the annals of art history, there are people who know a lot more than me. I hope they’ll come in and feel as inspired as I do and we’ll get some great scholarship.”
      “The 31 Women Collection” is on view at 30 W 57th St, New York through May 21. Reservations for free, timed-entry admission can be made here.
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