Exhibitions

The single best thing that I saw during Frieze Seoul?
A friend asked me right when I got back to New York earlier this month, and I had to stop and think. There were too many highs, too many surprising delights. There was a great deal of dross, too. (What art week doesn’t have that?) But the third edition of Frieze had the capital city, and South Korea as a whole, in peak condition. Galleries and museums staged ambitious shows and stayed open late. Smart, tough editions of revered biennials awaited further down the peninsula, in Busan and Gwangju. The festivities felt more cohesive than those of Frieze’s first two outings. The mood was giddy, buoyant, precarious.
Best in show at Frieze was in the booth of New York’s Tina Kim Gallery: This 9-feet-tall painting of beskirted legs from 2001–04 by the superb Kang Seok Ho, who died in 2021, only 50. Alluring, surreal, intimate, and strange.
Sure, huge deals were not getting done at Frieze and the homegrown Kiaf at the Coex convention center, but art was selling, and people were having a ball. Art was everywhere, corporate tie-ins were everywhere, and the parties just kept coming.
On the opening night of the fairs, you could venture north of the Han River to the Samcheong neighborhood, which is home to some veteran blue-chip firms, and find hundreds of people perched on plastic stools in Kukje Gallery’s capacious courtyard. The revelers were eating fried chicken and swilling beer from a row of taps (an act of generosity hard to imagine in New York), then visiting punchy solo shows by Kyungah Ham and Michael Joo that are open through November 3.
At Gallery Shilla, the chickens just kept coming.
Gallery Shilla termed its event “The Night of 100 Chickens,” and offered to all comers heavenly roasted birds from the back of a truck. It was toasting a show by the Mono-ha sculptor Kishio Suga titled “20 Years” (which is how long he’s worked with Shilla). The centerpiece of the affair, which runs through October 19, is Multiple Existence (2014), a circle of short cement columns topped with black rocks—a kind of room-sized Stonehenge, enigmatic and powerful, with a small opening for you to enter.
Yoo Youngkuk, Work (Terra Firma), 1964, at PKM Gallery. Buy some for your local museum.
Meanwhile, PKM Gallery had DJs and drinks for its radiant exhibition of the Korean modernist Yoo Youngkuk (1916–2002), “Stand on the Golden Mean” (through October 10). Yoo made hard-edge abstractions that pull their power from the natural world. They are bracingly succinct. Until last year, when Pace did a New York show, he had never had a solo show beyond Korea. Now there’s a collateral event at the Venice Biennale. Everyone should know him.
An untitled work by John Pai from the 1980s at Gallery Hyundai.
Like Kukje, Gallery Hyundai was hosting a doubleheader—the intricate abstract sculptures of the Korean American octogenarian John Pai in one of its buildings (through October 19) and a show in partnership with the esteemed Los Angeles outfit Commonwealth and Council in the other. The collabo, “Open Hands,” ran only two weeks (through September 15), which is a shame because it had some gems, like a pair of boots bearing carved Crocs, both carved from wood, a piquant display of taste and ornamentation by Eusung Lee.
Eusung Lee’s Dandelion Acceleration (2020) in “Open Hands,” a collaborative show between Gallery Hyundai and Commonwealth and Council.
One hub of activity that night was the main location of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), where the (toothsomely named) duo Kimchi and Chips used 33 laser projectors to create an artificial purple moon outside. (See the image up top.)
Inside, the MMCA was inaugurating “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists,” easily the most divisive show in town, with some 130 works by more than 50 modern and contemporary figures from around a dozen countries. Complaints I heard: the installation is too jam-packed (certainly true), the selection of names is a bit random, and the premise is retrograde.
Lee Bul’s Monster: Pink (1998/2011) next to a trinity of drawings by Guo Fengyi in “Connecting Bodies” at the MMCA’s main Seoul branch.
That’s all fair enough, but it is impossible for me to begrudge a show with major pieces by, among many others, Guo Fengyi (her frenetic drawings of spectral beings are paired with a monstrous sculpture by Lee Bul), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Pacita Abad, and Atsuko Tanaka, particularly when many of those pieces have rarely or never been seen in Korea.
One of the breakout hits of the week: “Jung Youngsun: For All That Breathes on Earth” at the MMCA
The MMCA also delivered one of the sleeper hits of the week, a survey of the landscape architect Jung Youngsun, “For All That Breathes on Earth,” which just closed. Yung, who is 63, was the first woman licensed as a land-development engineer in South Korea, and she has helmed an astonishing number of landmark public projects in the country. They include the Gyeongchun Line Forest Trail in Seoul, an almost 4-mile-long park built along a decommissioned rail line (it’s like a street-level High Line that cuts through the city: tranquil, popular, and judiciously paced), and the traditional garden at Samsung’s Hoam Museum of Art in Yongin (where Nicolas Party now has a show).
A little garden respite designed by Jung Youngsun as part of her show at the MMCA.
Presenting massive outdoor works in a museum is obviously not simple, but curator Lee Jihoi managed it, in high style, by arraying photos, models, drawings, and videos throughout the galleries, including some underfoot. A sense of plentitude—of sharp, restrained ideas, well-executed—prevailed. In a museum courtyard, Jung created a rustic environment to offer a taste of her light touch and respect for the natural world. “I hope that the gardens we tender, stroke, and nurture will be a source of inspiration and a moment of healing and recovery for all,” she once said. Those are words to live by.
Park Rehyun’s Woman (1942) in “Turbulent Times” at the Seoul Museum of Art.
The MMCA was just one of three major institutions taking an all-women approach for a sprawling group show. The ARKO Art Center hosted 16 women sculptors, including Venice Biennale star Kim Yun Shin, in “ZIP,” which closed on September 8, and the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) has 23 women artists in “Turbulent Times: Women, Life” at its main location (one of eight!) through November 17.
Another work by Park Rehyun in “Turbulent Times” at the Seoul Museum of Art, this one a venturesome abstraction titled Work (1966–67).
“Turbulent Times” was organized as part of SeMA’s centennial celebration of the birth of Chun Kyung-ja, a painter of charismatic and not-infrequently eccentric works who died in 2015 at 90. All of its participants were, to varying degrees, Chun’s contemporaries, though with quite varied artistic interests. They lived through many of the same unfathomably harrowing events—civil war, dictatorship, protests, and economic turmoil—while striving to develop careers in a deeply patriarchal society. Like the MMCA’s effort, this was a case of a show trying to cover too much ground in too little space, but it would be churlish to complain about seeing treasures from canonical figures like Lee Whaja and Park Rehyun.
Kim In Soon’s Mother Nature (1994) at the Seoul Museum of Art.
A bonus offering at SeMA right now: an exhilarating display of unflinching paintings by the feminist painter Kim In Soon, 83 this year. One choice example of her work, the earth-colored Mother Nature (1994), has a woman on her hands and knees, nursing a small child, in the soil underneath a factory. The show was assembled from a trove of work that Kim donated to the museum, and it’s up through February 23, 2025. (Those seeking more on female artists from Korea should order a copy of Korean Feminist Artists: Confront and Deconstruct, a richly illustrated tome by curator Kim Hong-hee that Phaidon is publishing next month.)
Installation view of Elmgreen and Dragset’s “Spaces” exhibition at the Amorepacific Museum of Art.
Other trends? How about . . . haunted houses!
Lost in “Spaces” at the Amorepacific Museum of Art.
First, the bad. At its formidable David Chipperfield–designed museum in the Yongsan district, the beauty conglomerate Amorepacific has a massive Elmgreen & Dragset exhibition up through February 23, 2025, titled “Spaces.” It is enormous, and it is vacuous. Its banalities include a 1,500-square-foot modernist home, in which a life-size sculpture of a boy gazes eerily at a window. In its bathroom, a single pipe connects the drains of two identical sinks. One gallery over, another boy stands in a huge, empty swimming pool wearing VR glasses as he stares at his hands. With big-budget theatrics and pipsqueak imagination, the artists solemnly share this revelation: contemporary life is marked by alienation and ennui.
Priscilla Jeong’s Traveling Domestic (2024) in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s superb “Dream Screen.”
Now, the great. Over at the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul’s most important art venue, the indefatigable Rirkrit Tiravanija tapped 26 Asian artists for an exhibition called “Dream Screen.” Running through December 29, it’s the latest edition of Leeum’s biannual “Art Spectrum” show for emerging artists. It’s a barnburner, with a design based loosely on the maze-like Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif., which has some 2,000 doors. Entering the show, you encounter a beguiling, nearly 10-foot-tall ring sculpture by New Yorker Priscilla Jeong. Open a door and you’re in a bar from the international collective Sparkling Tap Water, where a band was jamming on opening night. Each black-walled room and hallway holds another intriguing piece, and out back is a 50-foot climbing wall-as-artwork by the Seoul-based Jihyun Jung. (My climbing attempt went poorly.) Strong work in a compelling space that presents it well: yes, please.
There were also haunted (or at least semi-haunted) houses in the Gwangju and Busan biennales, but let’s save those for proper reviews.
Anicka Yi’s Vinegar Fissure (2024) in her solo outing at the Leeum Museum of Art.
In another wing of the Leeum, Anicka Yi unveiled “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One,” with 33 works, almost half of them made this year. Yi brought one of her early inventions, gloriously tempura-fried flowers, back into the mix, assembling them into standing abstract forms that suggest 3D sci-fi Arcimboldos: hallucinogenic contrapposto. The show is up through December 29, then heads to the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in an expanded form.
A Do Ho Suh sculpture related to his installation at the University of San Diego in California, Fallen Star (2012).
The houses that Do Ho Suh features in his art are not haunted, just deeply personal, filled with memories. At the Art Sonje Center, a proving ground for young talent that hosts the occasional star, Suh has a number of sculptures centered on the notion of an ideal home in a one-man show, “Speculations,” through November 3. A hanok (a traditional Korean house) and trees sit atop a flatbed truck in one of his miniature models. In another, a modest suburban abode has crash-landed on the green roof of an austere office building. It’s a moving exhibition, a portrait of an artist on the move, seeking firm ground, like us all, and it confirms that Suh is one of the signal talents of our times (and still underrated, despite his global renown).
A Lee Ufan at Pace. Solid, stolid, unimpeachable.
Down the street from Leeum, Pace had the most impressive show of force of the week: “Correspondence,” a pairing of two giants of abstraction: Lee Ufan of Korea and Mark Rothko of the United States (and what is now Latvia). Each man got his own floor (wise not to intermix such singular aesthetic agendas), and the lines to enter have been enormous. A special bonus: Lee, who’s 88, installed a characteristically charming sculpture in the gallery’s courtyard, an upright white stone staring down a small hill of steel.
A Sam Falls botanical painting at Eva Presenhuber’s display in P21’s former space.
Pace opened in Seoul back in 2017, the same year Lehmann Maupin entered, and a flood of galleries from Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere in Asia has followed: Gladstone, König, Tang, Ropac, Peres, White Cube, and the list goes on. It’s an open question whether the market can accommodate so many competitors, but foreigners are continuing to try out the city. Zurich’s Mai 36 Galerie has a collaborative show with the local Paik Hae Young Gallery in the Itaewon area (through October 15), not far from where fellow Swiss firm Eva Presenhuber has mounted a bite-sized Sam Falls show, in a small space that was once part of the P21 gallery. Up through October 5, it has just three works, including one of those beautiful, melancholic pieces that Falls makes by setting plants atop canvas outdoors and letting their images transfer over time.
Keem Jiyoung’s 으스러진 연둣빛 미명 (2024) at P21.
P21, a stalwart supporter of venturesome Korean artists, moved into a bigger space earlier this year, where it has a solo show (through October 11) with Keem Jiyoung called “With Night’s Nape Between Our Jaws”: big, bright, meaty multi-panel paintings of waves overlaid with snippets of poetic text, written in hangul. They are potent. “We are briefly alive,” one reads. That is why, during an action-packed art week, there is no time to rest. You just have to keep going.
A work by the one-namer COBRA at Whistle.
Whistle, one more gallery championing emerging art (there are too few in Seoul), tapped three peers from around Asia for a group show: Kiang Malingue (of Hong Kong), Misako and Rosen (Tokyo) and ROH (Jakarta). That’s a lot of cooks in one kitchen! But the eight-artist presentation, “Transposition 1: Observing the Walking Patterns” (through October 19), was pleasantly coherent. The highlight: three odd, funny birdcages by COBRA (the founder of Tokyo’s XYZ Collective gallery), each containing a captive little painting.
It is rare to see an object quite unlike any you have seen before. Behold, this Jan Tomza-Osiecki piece at WWNN.
Other highlights on the emerging end of the spectrum: the just-closed “Fairy Tales” at the newish WWNN (thank you to artists Sylbee Kim and Nico Pelzer for guiding me there!), which had some impressively surreal constructions by Jan Tomza-Osiecki and (quite an unexpected sight) enigmatic little ink-on-paper flower pieces by Luc Tuymans; young gun Sinae Yoo’s addictively alluring paintings in her solo show “Derivative Messiah” at the Doosan Art Center (through October 12); and Hwang Sueyon‘s wily paper constructions, some in a vaguely haunted shed, at G Gallery (closed September 28).
An untitled Urs Fischer sculpture from 2015 at Jason Haam.
If one was seeking international heavyweights in Seoul, they were out in force, too. Sterling Ruby has his art at the Shinsegae Gallery through November 19, beneath the luxe clothing emporium Boon the Shop, where selections from his clothing line are available. Urs Fischer has taken over dealer Jason Haam’s white cube in Seongbuk and a house next door, which he will soon tear down to make way for another. The show is titled “Feelings,” and it runs all the way to December 7. There is fruit in a standalone toilet, new “Problem Paintings,” and an old sedan parked out front painted roughly the same brown color as the road. (Seems dangerous!) Gabriel Orozco is at White Cube through December 14 with paintings and works on paper from his 2021–22 “Diario de Plantas.” They’re sliced-and-diced depictions of plants and animals he’s encountered in Acapulco, Mexico City, and Tokyo, and they’re the most eye-pleasing things he’s done in years, maybe ever. New York legend Nari Ward is at Lehmann Maupin through October 19, also with a birdcage (but bearing shoe tongues, rather than a compact painting). Joan Jonas has a display of her majestic kites hanging from the ceiling of the Gladstone Gallery through October 12. And last but not least, works from the heavyweight-filled Pinault Collection (Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Yi, and more) are on view at the Songeun Art and Cultural Foundation until November 23.
Julie Mehretu’s BMW Art Car at Frieze New York. It looks fast!
Big-name artists and big-league galleries are, of course, two signs that an art week has fully arrived. But it’s the big-budget brand collaborations that can really take matters to the next level. At Frieze, BMW presented a race car with a (very frenetic) paint job conceived by Julie Mehretu, while Illy hawked espresso cups bearing the trademark gradient washes of Lee Ufan.
A Brutalisten dish inspired by gomguk (beef bone soup).
Over in Seongsu, the so-called Brooklyn of Seoul, Porsche took the trophy for the most ambitious corporate venture, a multifarious project called “The Art of Dreams” that involved Capsule, the astoundingly lush design tome from the Kaleidoscope gang. There was art, by Ezra Miller, Kwangho Lee, and others; there was a series of talks; there was a Porsche parked in one gallery; and there was a lunch by Brutalisten, the Stockholm restaurant of Carsten Höller whose manifesto calls for dishes to be cooked with only a single ingredient, plus water and salt. (When foreign boîtes begin alighting for art fairs, you know things are getting real.)
Addressing the assembled diners, Brutalisten chef Stefan Eriksson praised the quality of ingredients at the local markets. “Thank you, Korea, for having this wonderful produce!” he said. His cow dish stole the show: a bowl of thin, supple slices in a somewhat-unsettling range of colors, from cream to smoldering red to mushroom gray. Never before have I tasted meat that so clearly declared, “I am the flesh of a dead animal.”
One channel of Heecheon Kim’s two-channel tour de force, Studies (2024), at the Atelier Hermès.
But let’s get back to art.
As it happens, the best thing I saw all week was actually on view thanks to a luxury brand’s largess. That was Studies (2024), a genuinely terrifying horror film by the excellent video artist Heecheon Kim, which I caught on the last day of Frieze, right before leaving town. It’s not the sort of fare one expects from a seller of $600 scarves, but there it was, screening at the Atelier Hermès, in the basement of the firm’s massive store in Dosan Park. If you are in Seoul on or before October 6 and miss it, you are committing a grave crime. The two-channel piece clocks in at about 50 minutes, and (very loosely speaking) follows a wrestling coach as he investigates the disappearance of some of his student-wrestlers.
“Horror movies these days are made in such high-resolution and high-definition,” Kim says in an interview in an accompanying publication, “that they seem to have difficulties with cinematically visualizing uncanny or odd phenomena or creatures.” Without giving too much away: He dodged that issue by incorporating relatively grainy close-up shots of wrestling. In those snippets, a glitch induces a harrowing sense of body horror that remains slippery and only half-legible, even when the coach watches in slow motion. It’s a masterful production, with a lot to say about digital life, and real life, right now, and it ought to tour the globe.
Works by Sohyun Hong and Magnus Peterson Horner on view in Shower’s party at the club Sx.
The hours were ticking down on my flight back to New York, and regret was taking hold. There were so many shows that I still had not yet seen. The pleasure of visiting a city during an art fair is that you get to taste so much—dozens of spaces, thousands of artworks, bracingly rare meat—but there is pain in that, too. You never have the full meal. You are an interloper, on the move, not a regular. As time runs short, you have to triage. What can you skip? What do you have to see?
The galleries were all closed for the night, so I made a final stop at a club called Sx on a hill across the street from Lehmann Maupin. Shower, a recent Seoul upstart, was throwing a party there and had arrayed works around its dark rooms by Mira Mann, Jonghyun Park, and others. It was midnight, the music was loud, and the dance floor was slowly filling up. Things were just getting started.
Below, more photos from Frieze Week in Seoul, with reviews of the Busan and Gwangju biennales to come.
Club Sx.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s solo Frieze Seoul booth with Galerie Quynh of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It won the fair’s annual Stand Prize.
Works by Lee Bae at Johyun Gallery’s Frieze booth.
Paintings by Suh Yongsun at One and J Gallery.
An Anne Imhof painting at Sprüth Magers’s booth at Frieze Seoul.
The London Bagel Museum, a Seoul institution, staged a pop-up at Frieze.
A glorious surprise at the MMCA: Lee Kang-So’s seminal Disappearance installation was on view in its atrium. Lee first staged it for a week at a Seoul gallery in 1973, serving makgeolli (a Korean rice wine) to visitors. The convivial gathering—relational aesthetics avant la lettre—had a definite political edge under the authoritarian regime of the time. At the MMCA, it’s being presented in collaboration with a group called OURLABOR, which has incorporated mirrors and lights (that seem totally unnecessary). Lee went on to become a remarkable abstract painter, and he just joined Thaddaeus Ropac.
Installation view of Elmgreen and Dragset’s “Spaces” exhibition at the Amorepacific Museum of Art.
A tense moment in the Elmgreen & Dragset show. I moved through quickly.
A camouflaged car by Urs Fischer at the Jason Haam gallery.
Installation view of the exhibition “Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Zifzafa” at Barakat Contemporary.
Installation view of “Joan Jonas: the Wind sings” at Gladstone Gallery.
Installation view of “Hwang Sueyon: Pastel, Bullet, Beautiful Fingers” at G Gallery.
Another work by Do Ho Suh, on view at the Art Sonje Center.
Minouk Lim’s radiant, spectral solo show at BB and M, “Memento Moiré.”
Farewell.
And finally: more food photos.
Two leaves, from Brutalisten at Porsche’s luncheon.
A medley of seafood at the Brutalisten pop-up.
If you are wandering along Sejong Village Food Street in the Seochon neighborhood, stop in your tracks and go eat. Hearty and flavorful seafood awaits you.
Delicate, subtle, refreshing Pyeongyang naengmyeon at Jinmi Pyeongyang Naengmyeon in the Gangnam district, a short taxi ride or a pleasant walk from the Coex convention center.
Street toast from Namdaemun market: rich, spicy, and deeply satisfying, an instant cure for jet lag.
There are countless places to get tonkatsu in Seoul, but my favorite spot is Mesiya, across the street from Seoul Station. Go with the cheese-stuffed version, order the stewed kimchi, and pour it on top, or use it as a dipping sauce. You’ll have wait at noon, but the compact place clears out by 1 p.m. It’s the perfect venue to debrief a series of gallery visits. Afterward the meal, you will need a nap.
A bingsu to end all bingsus at Maa: chamoe melon coulis, galanga soft serve, and passion fruit pâte de fruit. Like a well-organized art week, it can change your life. More

The iconic “Rainbow Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I, painted when she was nearly 70 but where she is portrayed as youthful, has been restored and returned to Hatfield House, which sits alongside her childhood home in Hertfordshire.
“It is probably the most iconic piece in our collections and the focal point of the Marble Hall, so its loss was certainly felt during conservation—the House feels complete once again,” Vannis Jones Rahi, head of archives and collections, told the BBC.
The portrait, painted between 1600 and 1603 by an unknown artist, is believed to be one of the final depictions of Elizabeth I, created just before or shortly after the so-called “Virgin Queen” died in 1603. It has long captured the public imagination. In it, she is seen holding a thin rainbow arc in her right hand, beside which is the Latin inscription, “Non sine sole iris”, or “No rainbow without the sun,” in what is considered a reference to the queen as the sun, both a source of light and wisdom, as well as a harbinger of peace.
After traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2022 and 2023, the portrait underwent a “meticulous conservation,” by Nicole Ryder, who cleaned and corrected minor losses to the subject matter for more than a year, according to the BBC. The canvas was also X-rayed, and pigments were further analyzed.
Detail. Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1600-1603). Courtesy of Hatfield House
The restoration and conservation process also revealed several new discoveries. Most notably, “one of the key takeaways from the event was that all experts were in agreement that this likely represents a posthumous portrait of Elizabeth, rather than one commissioned and painted during her lifetime,” said Rahi in an e-mail. Ryder found underdrawings suggesting the face was created using a pre-existing pattern, so the queen need not have sat for this portrait.
Indeed, instead of depicting an aging monarch, the portraitist took artistic liberties akin to modern-day Photoshop, erasing wrinkles and portraying the queen with ageless beauty. The queen’s thick, blonde, ringlets match a lustrous, golden-tinged, orange cloak. Though she would have been in her 60’s when this was painted, it is believed the queen wanted to be perceived as a youthful, virgin beauty, a message the artist took great pains to convey, down to the smallest details. White pearls, a symbol of chastity, literally drip from her hair, neck, and dress.
The name of the painting’s creator is another great unknown, for which the recent conservation has provided a few more clues. A bill of payment in the Hatfield House Archives from the painter John de Critz for alterations to a portrait of the queen—not unlike alterations revealed during the Rainbow Portrait restoration, “could strengthen the argument for the painting’s attribution to de Critz,” Rahi added. In addition to de Critz, the portrait has been attributed to several other artists, including Federico Zuccaro, Isaac Oliver, Nicholas Hilliard, and Marcus Gheeraerts the Young.
Detail. Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1600-1603). Courtesy of Hatfield House
Other intriguing, but strange symbols by today’s standards, emerge from the artwork, such as floating eyes and ears on the cloak mentioned, believed to represent Queen Elizabeth’s all-seeing and hearing eyes and ears, as well as her wisdom. A richly embroidered serpent seen on her sleeve was also a recognizable sign of shrewd wisdom in Tudor England.
This early Surrealist cloak, if you will, was originally painted red, not orange, but it had faded, and a layer of 24-carat gold was added, according to Ryder’s study. Its inner lining was also originally purple, not gray, and made from crushed insects. Silver-leaf patterns around her cloak have also disintegrated, and the famous rainbow in the queen’s hand was not painted in shades of gray as it appears now, but full of color.
While scientists now have more clues to work from, questions remain. “This portrait of Elizabeth is enigmatic because there is so much that is still unknown surrounding the painting’s purpose and creation and so much rich symbolism that can be interpreted differently through so many different lenses,” Rahi told reporters.
The portrait’s display in Hatfield House’s Marble Hall, built in 1611, is also a return home of sorts. Elizabeth spent a happy childhood in Hatfield, according to the heritage site. She lived with her siblings in the adjoining Old Palace, a medieval brickwork home built in 1485, of which only the banquet hall remains today. But the princess was also later kept at Hatfield in what amounted to house arrest, after her half-sister, Queen Mary, assumed the throne in 1553, and rightly feared the younger Elizabeth could replace her. As historians tell it, only five years later in 1558, Elizabeth was sitting under an oak tree in Hatfield Park, when she learned she was to become queen. The park’s website points visitors in the direction of that “Elizabeth Oak,” located a good ways off the map. More

Move over, Los Angeles. Northern California is launching a new regional arts initiative: the Further Triennial, which will unite the biggest nonprofit art institutions from San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, Sacramento, Marin and Sonoma counties, and everywhere in between, when it opens in spring 2027.
The Triennial was founded by art collector and philanthropist Robin Wright (no relation to the actor), who has called San Francisco home since the 1980s and is deeply embedded in the local art scene.
“It was about coming together, a vision of collaboration, and how we could raise all boats at the same time and say something to the world,” Wright told me. “There’s such potential here—such rich resources of artists and art-historical movements that we could explore in more depth.”
Wright has been toying with the idea of a large-scale regional art project for Northern California since visiting the first PST Art initiative organized by the Getty Foundation in Southern California in 2011. (The fourth edition, “Art and Science Collide,” opened earlier this month.)
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Henrik Kam, courtesy of SFMOMA.
“Many of us went down to L.A. at that time and were amazed by the richness of that event,” Wright said. “We came home and thought, well, that’s Southern California, but we have so much to offer here in Northern California that it got us thinking.”
Thinking turned into action in 2018, when the triennial first entered its initial planning stages—but progress stalled in 2020. Still, Wright believes the delay was ultimately beneficial: “The outcome will be much more resonant and meaningful.”
Helming the ambitious project is Further director Zully Adler, a former research fellow at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who recently completed his PhD on Bay Area artist Martin Wong.
“All of that instilled in me a fiendish obsession with art from Northern California, which comes out of the spirit of the counterculture and is very radical in its thinking, irreverent in its attitude, and very joyous and exuberant,” Adler told me.
“It’s bohemian, grounded in a radical sense of independence and anti-institutionalism,” he added. “There really is no other place that has used art so meaningfully in the pursuit of equity and justice. You can think of Emory Douglas and his amazing designs for the Black
Panther Party, for example, or the student protest movements.”
Installation view of “Emory Douglas: Black Panther” at the New Museum. Photo courtesy of the New Museum, New York.
Art in Northern California is also closely tied to the outdoors and nature, the dramatic meetings of land and sea and towering forests—it’s a place where artists have access to cities with thriving downtown cultural sectors just a stone’s throw from peaceful, remote landscapes.
“There’s always been this much more dispersed creative community nestled into private corners of the redwoods and things,” Adler said, noting that this will lend a sense of discovery to Further’s geographically disparate exhibitions. “It’s gonna be right around the corner when you think you’re in the middle of nowhere.”
The hope is that Further can be a celebration of Northern California’s vibrant culture and contemporary art scene, but also an opportunity to revisit overlooked moments from art history.
“There are so many colorful and intriguing figures that really haven’t gotten their due yet. I come from this historical and curatorial urge to excavate these lost histories and movements,” Adler said.
View up the trunks of large redwood trees in a grove at Redwoods Regional Park, Oakland, California, January 17, 2022. Photo courtesy Sftm by Gado/Getty Images.
Further exhibitions will appear at museums and arts organizations including SFMOMA, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Marin MOCA, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, as well as smaller, more local organizations.
“What we anticipate is each one of these places mounting exhibitions and programs, keeping with the spirit and disposition of their own organization and highlighting [the] very rich and diverse creative arts landscape we have here,” Adler said.
There will also be a central hub with exhibitions and performances, as well as guides to the broader programming throughout the region. If visitors want to focus on the environment, or on activism, or other specific topics, there will be thematic pathways to help them plan out what to see.
Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Pranksters’ bus, Further. Photo by Harry Herd/Redferns from Getty Images.
The initiative’s name is an homage to the Bay Area’s embrace of the counterculture, drawn from the school bus christened Further that San Francisco author Ken Kesey drove cross country in 1964 with his “Merry Band of Pranksters.” (The psychedelic drug-fueled roadtrip features in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and filmed footage from participants became the basis for a 2011 documentary, Magic Trip.)
But Further also is meant to reflect the drive for exploration that has led so many artists to California for generations.
“Northern California has for a long time been a place that welcomes those who do not really fit in elsewhere.
If your ideas are unorthodox or your sense of self is unconventional, you’re welcomed here,” Adler said. “Artists journey westward until they get here. But once they do, is that an opportunity to keep going and keep dreaming? I think this place is very much one of reverie and looking out on the horizon over the Pacific with a push towards the creation of new worlds and the manifestation of things that are still unknown.” More

Tim Burton has taken over the New York Botanical Garden. Sort of. His team has green-lit “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail,” an 8,300 square foot immersive attraction that just kicked off its two month run. For $49, experience these grounds like never before, meeting 3D-printed characters from Burton’s beloved 1993 film as its soundtrack swells, and kaleidoscope hues illuminate the trees. The Garden has 30,000 kinds of them.
“The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” is the first venture by Spanish entrepreneur Iñaki Fernandez and Broadway legend Jeffrey Seller, who’s produced award-winning shows like Rent (1996), Avenue Q (2003), and Hamilton (2015), and created Broadway’s rush ticket program.
Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” at New York Botanical Garden in Bronx, New York. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail.
Fernandez’s firm LETSGO has already produced the traveling Tim Burton’s Labyrinth spectacle, currently open in Berlin, but “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” marks Seller’s debut in experiences. He considers the move not a transition, but an addition, to his career.
“I found a new way to surprise people,” Seller told me at the press preview. “This is the first venture that I’m doing that takes us out of the traditional theater and puts us out of doors, in a place where you can go with your friends. You don’t have to sit down, you can talk all you want, you can sing all you want, you can take pictures all you want, and just have a rollicking good time. That’s too tempting a human activity to not get involved with.”
Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” at New York Botanical Garden in Bronx, New York. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail.
In his opening remarks christening the trail, Seller, who is about to turn 60, recalled spending his 29th birthday touring the San Francisco warehouse where The Nightmare Before Christmas was being filmed.
He and Fernandez met at dinner in Madrid, and bonded over their mutual love for Burton. Fernandez’s team had already worked in gardens, and Seller helped forge the connection with the facilities in the Bronx. “We knew that we had to open in New York,” he told me, “because New York sets an artistic agenda for the rest of the country.”
Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” at New York Botanical Garden in Bronx, New York. Photo: Manoli Figetakis/Getty Images.
Guests enter the extravaganza through the illuminated outline of a giant orange pumpkin, followed by a tunnel of rainbow light. The film’s infamous scarecrow, surrounded by glowering orange torches in the shape of flames, welcome guests to the Nightmare proper—followed by the genuinely haunting Mayor of Halloween Town, who mutters while scrolling through faces as you pass. Corpse Kid, Dr. Finkelstein, and the lovely Sally follow in rapid succession.
Jack Skellington makes his debut halfway through the trail, amongst a graveyard of incandescent headstones. The trail’s technological centerpiece follows: a 30-foot long projection tunnel, where a four minute-long sequence of spooky visuals like spiders crawling over wood grain transports viewers to the heart of the plot—Skellington’s plan to overthrow Christmas Town. The Oogie Boogie’s installation is the real visual treat of this section, with its towering stacks of dice and projected gambling wheel, replete with the authentic sounds of Las Vegas.
Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” at New York Botanical Garden in Bronx, New York. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail.
Nonetheless, nature is the star of this show. Out of all the spectacles, the most mesmerizing part of the light trail is the sight of the trees’ shifting colors. Falling autumn leaves lend gusto to the smoke effects, and spiders have set up shop on the sculptures, their webs adding eerie accents. One of the most striking moments in the show arrives in its first quarter—and it’s just a stark, dead tree set alight in a natural clearing.
Whether you think the rest of the hullabaloo is worth the price depends on whether you and your loved ones love Tim Burton as much as Fernandez and Seller do.
“The Nightmare Before Christmas Light Trail” is on view at the New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Blvd., Bronx, New York, through November 30. More

Caravaggio, Rubens, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Veronese, and Bernini: it’s a roll call of the greats, and just a handful of the artists whose Renaissance and Baroque works have traveled from their home in Rome’s Galleria Borghese to the Musée Jacquemart-André for a rare exhibition in Paris.
The museum chose the all-star line up for its first show back since it has been closed for renovations since 2023. Curators at the Paris mansion-turned-museum have handpicked 39 paintings and four sculptures from the once powerful Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s Baroque collection, and are displaying them at the gilded Boulevard Haussmann former home of the banker Edouard André and artist Nélie Jacquemart—major collectors in their own right—until January 5, 2025.
The exhibit is as much an opportunity to soak in these rarely traveling masterpieces of 16th and 17th-century Italian and Nordic art as it is to understand the artistic vision and life of the powerful, yet ruthless man who collected them. Scipione Caffarelli-Borghese (1577–1633) wielded influence through his uncle, Pope Paul V, famously whipping up criminal charges against Caravaggio-collector Giuseppe Cesari, who was forced to hand over paintings by the chiaroscuro master to the Borghese family as a result.
In fact, one item from the confiscated trove is the poster image for the exhibit: Caravaggio’s Boy with Basket of Fruit, (c 1595). It depicts a young man holding an overflowing basket of perfectly ripe fruit, his open lips and bare shoulder beckoning provocatively. On several other occasions, Borghese threatened artists, and even imprisoned Domenichino Zampieri (1581-1641), in order to get his hands on their creations.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Self-portrait at a Mature Age , circa 1638-1640, oil on canvas, 53 x 43 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome © Galleria Borghese / ph. Mauro Coen
Along with Borghese’s insatiable taste for contemporary talent, however, came artistic patronage—of which he was quick to benefit himself. Importantly, the cardinal is credited with discovering and supporting then-adolescent Baroque sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). One of Bernini’s earliest surviving sculptures, The Goat Amalthea (c. 1609-1615), which depicts a reclining goat feeding the infant Jupiter, has made it to Paris, as has his striking Self-portrait at a Mature Age (c. 1638-1640). The latter is one of Bernini’s few surviving paintings—a work not easily forgotten. With his concentrated stare, the artist appears to look right back at the viewer.
Raphael, Lady with Unicorn , circa 1506, oil on canvas applied on panel, 67 x 56 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome © Galleria Borghese / ph. Mauro Coen
Another highlight is Raphael’s Lady with Unicorn (c. 1506) oil painting. The 16th-century Florentine girl depicted is thought to have been inspired by the Mona Lisa, with the composition’s similar framing, and quarter-turned, mysterious profile. In her arms, the model holds a miniature, furry unicorn—a symbol of conjugal virtues. For centuries the picture was painted over into Saint Catherine of Alexandria, but after a 1935 restoration, its true subject matter and attribution to Raphael was revealed.
There is also an ever-fascinating, early copy of Leonardo’s Leda (c1510-20). In it, a nude Leda stands beside her swan, who cups her hips with its wing while their children play at their feet, with an unhatched egg resting behind the odd, but smiling couple.
Leonardo da Vinci (copy after), Leda and the swan , before 1517, oil on panel, 115 x 86 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome © Galleria Borghese / ph. Mauro Coen
With his considerable wealth and influence, the cardinal filled his early 17th-century Villa Borghese Pinciana (today the Galleria Borghese) with several hundred works of art spanning Italian schools and international regions. He showcased the collection much like a museum would today, though this was a radical concept at the time, and is credited with galvanizing Rome’s golden era, as a precursor to what became the modern collector.
Co-curator Francesca Cappelletti described the Borghese collection as “a space that could be equated with a time machine,” blending classical Roman works from antiquity with Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces, surrounded by marble works and frescoes. Seen in the context of the Musée Jacquemart André’s collection of Italian art from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, including its sumptuous Tiepolo ceiling fresco in what is now a café, the entire experience becomes a journey through history, shaped by the art that defined it. More

To most people, Harcourt Road is a normal street name. But for the people of Hong Kong and those living in the English city of Sheffield, this road existing in these two places carries the weight of parallel histories of resistance despite the fact that they are 6,000 miles apart from each other.
Uncovering these ties are Sheffield-based Hong Kong artist duo C&G Artpartment, formed by Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng. Through their expansive community art project, Harcourt Road, in collaboration with local art space Bloc Projects, the pair has been working on matching streets in the two cities that share the same names. In 2023, they narrowed down the focus of the project to just Harcourt Road, comparing the histories of the residential street in Sheffield and the Hong Kong thoroughfare that has played host to major social movements of the past decade.
“To me, and a lot of people from Hong Kong, Harcourt Road is a significant street full of memories,” said Cheung, an artist, curator, and former elected District Councillor who emigrated from Hong Kong to the U.K. in 2021. “Harcourt Road in Sheffield plays a pivotal role in the area’s grassroots activism and local democracy. On many occasions, the residents stood up for themselves and fought for justice in their community.”
Clara Cheung of C&G Artpartment (left) explains to a local resident about the parallel histories of Harcourt Road in Sheffield and Hong Kong. Courtesy of the artists.
On September 28, the project enters a new stage of development with the opening of the exhibition “Harcourt Road” at Bloc Projects, with a grant of £47,930 ($64,143) from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The show’s opening date coincides with the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, which saw pro-democracy protests erupt in Hong Kong in September 2014 after Beijing shot down the city’s proposal for a political reform that would allow its leaders to be elected in universal suffrage, as promised in the city’s mini-constitution. The protests at the time were largely peaceful. Demonstrators occupied Harcourt Road, a major highway in the city’s Admiralty neighborhood that connects Central and Wan Chai, with camping tents and makeshift structures reclaiming the public space that was previously inaccessible to the general public. It evolved into a space for public art and community events.
On September 28, 2014 Police fired 87 rounds of tear gas and pepper spray at the peaceful demonstrators on Harcourt Road. Protesters shielded themselves against tear gas and pepper spray with umbrellas, which became a symbol of resistance. The incident marked the beginning of the Umbrella Movement, also known as Occupy Central, a 79-day demonstration occupying Harcourt Road and the nearby government complex.
A local resident participated in a Harcourt Road Mobile Museum initiative in Sheffield. Courtesy of C&G Artpartment.
Since then, and even more so after Hong Kong’s anti-government protests in 2019–20, when Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law that saw activists, lawmakers, and journalists arrested, many from Hong Kong have sought refuge in the U.K., among them C&G. During their research into the histories of Sheffield’s Harcourt road, Cheung discovered that the little street has witnessed waves of migration throughout the past century—from Irish and Eastern European workers after World War II to Hungarian and Polish migrants in the 1950s, followed by those arriving from the Caribbean and India in the following decade. Today, Hong Kong migrants setting in the U.K. have joined the neighborhood’s diverse community.
The artist duo, as well as their collaborator, Bloc Projects’ co-director Sunshine Wong, are eager to tell the stories that connect these two roads and their respective communities. “The two very different Harcourt Road tell surprisingly similar stories of collectivity: that no matter how large or small the communities, how permanent or temporary, they coalesce whenever there’s a common struggle,” Wong said in a statement.
Earlier in the summer, C&G launched an initiative called Harcourt Road Mobile Museum. An e-bike mounted shelf carrying books, documents, photographs, and drawings related to the two Harcourt Roads. Stationed in various locations around the street and the nearby Weston Park, the duo conducted oral history interviews about their stories and memories of the neighborhood.
Artist Wai Hang Siu’s photography work on Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement on Harcourt Road, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.
As part of the project, the team also worked with a local photographer to produce a series of portraits of local families and invited residents to color the contour outline drawings of a type of Sheffield-grown wild weed, a symbol of resistance as it cannot be eradicated. More than 100 drawings have been collected and will be compiled in an animated short to be unveiled at the exhibition.
Meanwhile, C&G Artpartment is also presenting “Iron Barricades – Cable Ties – Hope,” a solo exhibition of photography artist Wai Hang Siu, who also emigrated to the U.K. from Hong Kong. The show will feature Siu’s never-been-shown photographs taken during the 2014 Umbrella Movement at their own art space in Sheffield. The show runs from September 29 through November 2.
“As part of the collective of Hong Kong diaspora, we will not disperse completely, although I cannot tell how things will pan out in the future. We do what we can do now, and focus on the present,” Cheung said. More

What time is it? Time for The Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay to come back to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The 24-hour film is made up entirely of over 10,000 appropriated shots of watches and clocks showing the actual time for each and every minute of the day.
The Clock will be on view in MoMA’s second floor galleries from November through some time next spring. Though it is quite literally watching the clock in real time, viewers often find the experience strangely addictive, and can stay for hours on end, creating long lines almost any time it’s screening.
It took Marclay and a team of six assistants two years to find all the sequences featured in the artwork, which draws on both film and television to pay perhaps the ultimate homage to the passage of time.
Cinema buffs will of course enjoy trying to identify the source material for each fleeting shot, drawn from everything from Gone With the Wind to Sex in the City. Selections are paired thematically, not just based on time—although naturally morning hours feature plenty of snoozing alarm clocks, and lunch time is heavy on office workers taking their midday break.
Christian Marclay, The Clock (2010). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. Installation view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 21, 2012–January 21, 2013. ©2024 Christian Marclay. Photo by Thomas Griesel, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
“It follows the precise flow of time, yet there are multiple narratives, which jump around, cut and return at another moment,” Marclay told Frieze magazine in 2018, ahead of the film’s showing at Tate Modern in London.
The MoMA acquired the epic video work in 2011, as a promised gift from the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. The subsequent exhibition, which ran just one month, from December 2012 to January 2013, welcomed 40,000 visitors. It was just one of many blockbuster showings of The Clock since its debut at White Cube gallery in London.
The film won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and, earlier that year, drew crowds braving the January cold to wait at Paula Cooper Gallery during its first New York run. (The first MoMA outing was actually the second time The Clock had played in the city that year, following a run at Lincoln Center that summer.)
“Made only three years after the launch of the iPhone and YouTube, this epic video collage anticipated a world in which the separation between our daily lives and those lived onscreen would become increasingly intertwined. Produced through meticulous editing and exhaustive research well before today’s A.I. tools became commonplace, the work brilliantly highlights a world in which our symbiotic relationship to the digital world of images has taken on 24/7 dimensions,” Stuart Comer, the MoMA’s chief curator of media and performance, told me in an email, calling the work a “cinematic tour-de-force.”
Christian Marclay, The Clock (2010). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. ©2024 Christian Marclay, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
The MoMA has not yet announced the dates for after-hours viewings of The Clock, but such events are part of Marclay’s conditions whenever the work is shown.
The museum stayed open 24-hours a day for three weekends during the film’s last outing, plus a special New Year’s Eve showing with a silent disco. Midnight is a particularly dramatic time in the film, with celebrations of the holiday, of course, and the explosion of London’s Big Ben clocktower in V for Vendetta.
The Swiss American artist initially created The Clock in an edition of six, for sale for $467,500. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa teamed up to jointly purchase one edition, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art snagged another. Overseas, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Tate joined forces to purchase a third.
Christian Marclay, The Clock (2010). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. Installation view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 21, 2012–January 21, 2013. ©2024 Christian Marclay. Photo by Thomas Griesel, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Last time the work screened at MoMA, the museum opened a special Twitter profile to keep would-be visitors appraised of the wait time. According to the account, which will not be reactivated for the work’s return, the final weekend saw lines as long as three hours for access to the exhibition.
Seeing the whole film is, of course, nearly impossible.
“Some people are frustrated and they feel they have to see all 24 hours,” Marclay told the Guardian in 2018. “I say, ‘No no no!’ Just enjoy it for the moment. Enjoy what you can. When it’s time to eat or go to the bathroom, you leave.”
“Christian Marclay: The Clock” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, New York, November 10, 2024–spring 2025.  More

The Union Church of Pocantico Hills in Westchester County, New York, may appear a modest country church, but inside its unassuming stone walls lies something extraordinary—Marc Chagall’s very first stained-glass window in the U.S.
The work was commissioned following the death of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1960, when his children decided a memorial was due him in their family church, located close to the Rockefellers’ Kykuit estate. For decades, the Union Church had benefitted from the clan’s largesse, including a $10,000 donation toward its first building. It already housed a rose window designed by Henri Matisse, commissioned by Rockefeller in 1948 in honor of his late wife, Abby.
To commemorate their father, the Rockefeller kids tapped another artist from the French school, Marc Chagall, hot off a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, where his famed Jerusalem Windows were shown. For Union Church, Chagall created an intricate, jewel-toned piece after the biblical tale of the Good Samaritan to mirror Rockefeller’s philanthropic efforts. He would go on to design eight more windows for the congregation. Today, the Union Church is the only one in the country to feature Chagall’s stained-glass work.
Union Church windows by Marc Chagall, showing the Good Samaritan behind the altar and Hebrew prophets on the side. Photo: © J Matorano for Historic Hudson Valley.
This fall, the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center is revisiting Chagall’s historic contribution to the church. The Pocantico institution’s “Sketching Light” will bring together 27 preparatory studies that Chagall made for the stained-glass pieces. These works on paper provide a rare view into the artist’s creative process, said Katrina London, the center’s curator.
“Chagall’s sketches give us fleeting insights into the mind of one of the most renowned 20th-century modernists,” she said in a statement, “rendering his work at once extraordinary and familiar.”
Marc Chagall working on stained-glass windows in the Jacques Simon studios in Reims, 1961. Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.
When Chagall embarked on the Union Church project, his stained-glass works were growing in demand after he unveiled his series of 12 monumental windows for what is now known as the Abbell Synagogue. The Metz Cathedral had come calling, as had the Chichester Cathedral in the U.K. These commissions arrived as the artist was rounding off his long-running “Bible” series, begun in the 1930s, which saw him reinterpret the Old Testament in a set of striking figurative illustrations.
Unveiled in 1962, his large Good Samaritan window is a narrative work in which the entirety of the parable can be read—from the act of violence that besets a traveler to his rescue by a kind stranger. Chagall’s preparatory sketches show how he began the work as a pencil and ink sketch, before adding color and texture with paint and mixed media. These maquettes helped him picture how sunlight would activate the glass work.
“For me,” Chagall once reflected, “a stained-glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world.”
Marc Chagall sketches for Union Church windows (1965-66). Collection of Rockefeller Archive Center. Photo: © Mick Hale.
The show will also explore the eight other windows Chagall created for Union Church. He had proposed these other pieces, David Rockefeller remembered, to create a more “harmonious” environment (the congregants, however, required some persuading to allow yet more modern art into their place of worship). The windows he produced depict Hebrew prophets including Elijah, Joel, and Ezekiel in colors—blues, yellows, and greens—that were specifically chosen to echo those of Matisse’s rose window.
Marc Chagall, sketch for Ezekiel. Collection of the Rockefeller Archive Center. Photo: © Mick Hale.
Chagall’s drafts and colorwork for the church’s nine windows were snapped up by David Rockefeller for the Rockefeller Archive in 1975. They were exhibited only once, at MoMA in 1978—making “Sketching Light” the first time they will be presented together in decades, to mark the Rockefeller Archive Center’s 50th year. The Union Church is a brisk half-mile walk from the exhibition venue.
“Sketching Light” is on view at the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center, 200 Lake Rd, Tarrytown, New York, October 11, 2024–May 17, 2025. More