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      Ghost, the Triennial That Artist Korakrit Arunanondchai Launched in Bangkok, Returns Full of Fresh Ideas

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      Ghost is back. Launched in 2018 by Akapol Op Sudasna and Korakrit Arunanondchai, the hotly watched experimental art and performance triennial is set to return to Bangkok for its first post-pandemic edition next month, this time helmed by curator Christina Li and with the title “Live Without Dead Time.”
      Technically, the new edition is called “Ghost 2565,” with the number referencing this year’s date in the Buddhist calendar. As for its title, it’s a translation of a poetic graffiti from May ’68 in Paris: “vivre sans temps mort.”
      Ghost 2565 will feature moving-image works from thirteen artists including Emily Wardill, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Wu Tsang with Tosh Basco. It is set to debut brand new films from Chantana Tiprachart and Tulapop Saenjaroen, and feature a program of live performances by the likes of Koki Tanaka, Orawan Arunrak, Pan Daijing, and Rabih Mroué (with Hito Steyerl).
      “It feels more like a festival than an exhibition in certain ways,” Arunanondchai told Artnet News.
      Ghost transpires across seven dispersed locations, including Bangkok CityCity Gallery, Jim Thompson Art Center, and Nova Contemporary. Baan Trok Tua Ngork will serve as the event’s central hub, hosting gatherings, public programming, and something called Wendy’s Wok World, “an alter-ego, character-driven culinary project,” per the release, “in residence throughout Ghost with a special menu of wok-based dishes.”
      Wu Tsang, The show is over (2020). Produced by Schauspielhaus Zürich, Co-Commissioned by Lafayette Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.
      Notably, though the show will have informational pamphlets on hand, no works throughout Ghost will be accompanied by wall text. This is a way of rejecting the notion the typical Western format of art, where “there’s something to get, or not get,” according to Arunanondchai.
      Instead, the artist-founder has been working since the first Ghost in 2018 to cultivate a program where twelve local hosts who’ve studied and discussed this edition’s content facilitate dialogue in the “Host Program,” dispensing critical information about the works on view for attendees in weekly public programs. Arunanondchai considers these hosts like mediums—literally channeling Ghost.
      Still from Meriem Bennani, Life on the CAPS, 2022. Courtesy the artist; CLEARING, New York/Brussels; and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles/New York
      “A lot of people who have come as attendees or to perform also naturally end up becoming a part of it,” Arunanondchai said.
      Li, the director of Spring Workshop in Hong Kong, visited Ghost’s final day in 2018, and says she was inspired. “I had no idea what to expect and was struck by the spirit of hospitality and generosity,” she told Artnet News. “You can really sense that the festival not only was conceived for, but also struck a nerve with the local young artistic community who were really receptive and excited to explore and be immersed in the works on view.” She added that she hopes the festival “can be a model in rethinking ideas of engagement and commitment” well beyond Bangkok.
      For “Live Without Dead Time,” her curatorial strategy started with an extended research trip after travel restrictions loosened late last year, visiting Thailand and elsewhere. “I was drawn to [Thai artists] Tulapop Saenjaroen, Orawan Arunrak, and Chantana Tiprachat’s practice as filmmakers, as well as their unique way of storytelling,” she said, explaining her process. “For other regional and international artists, I was careful to highlight practices, struggles, or subject matters that can resonate with local audiences [in Bangkok].”
      Video Still. Æther, 2021, Shuang Li. Courtesy Peres Projects
      When Arunanondchai launched Ghost, he envisioned three total editions, spaced three years apart. The inclusion of an outside curator in Ghost 2565 marks one planned stage in the event’s natural evolution. Ideally, Arunanondchai would like the Bangkok scene to center the next round.
      His ambitions go beyond that, too. He envisions Ghost as an alternative type of space—building a zone between the consumer space of Bangkok’s modern malls and the sacred space of its ancient temples. “It’s about spending time,” Arunanondchai explained, “not necessarily about looking at something.”
      “Ghost 2565: Live Without Dead Time” takes place in venues throughout Bangkok, October 12-November 13, 2022.
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      Watch Out, Coachella? Bentonville, Arkansas Just Launched a New Art-and-Tech Festival, So We Went to Check Out the Vibes

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      Over four nights and three days, upwards of 10,000 visitors flowed through Bentonville, Arkansas to attend the inaugural edition of FORMAT. Event producers describe the flashy new affair as a blend of “art, music, and technology.” If this year’s iteration is a reliable indication, what that means is a heady cocktail of cyborg art, NFT interventions, and other high-production performances. 
      Home to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville has, over the last decade, gained momentum as a site of interest on the art world’s radar. (The Momentary, the Museum’s contemporary art-focused satellite that opened in 2020, is currently host to a riveting set of works by the likes of Kara Walker, Xaviera Simmons, and Lucy Raven.) That this town of 50,000 is now also home to a recurring, internationally oriented festival indicates a sustained interest on the city’s part to continue attracting economic growth via cultural tourism. 
      Getting to the festival entailed a short rideshare north of downtown Bentonville, followed by a walk along a paved road which can be significantly shortened by any of the independently run bike carriages or golf carts zipping back and forth. (Shuttle buses and bicycles were, incidentally, the only other modes of transportation available to visitors; parking was not an option.)
      At the end of the trail, past the festival gates, FORMAT’s venues sprawled out across a 250-acre expanse of the Runway Group’s backcountry airstrip, luring in visitors with flashy lights and endless waves of musical programming. 
      The event was anchored by two traditional concert stages, where the likes of Nile Rogers, Beach House, and Herbie Hancock held court. Peppered around and beyond these performance spaces were smaller, selfie-friendly installations—not unlike those found at comparable festivals like Coachella—that formed an immersive theme park of “Big Fun Art.” Noteworthy among these were ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS’s Smokey, which served as a stage for English rapper and DJ Shygirl’s crowd-pleasing concert, and a version of James Tapscott’s Arc ZERO: Eclipse sculpture, which doubled as a misting station for festival-goers seeking relief from the end-of-summer heat. 
      Doug Aitken’s New Horizon (2019) at FORMAT Festival. Image: Rain Embuscado
      According to Mafalda Millies, one of the festival’s curators, the idea behind FORMAT started to take shape as early as 2018. In collaboration with co-curators Roya Sachs, Elizabeth Edelman, and Charles Attal (co-founder of the concert promoter C3 Presents), the team’s search for a venue gained traction following a conversation with Olivia Walton, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s director, along with her husband, Tom (grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton), and brother-in-law, Steuart.
      “It was Olivia Walton who began the conversation,” Millies said in a phone interview, later remarking on Walton’s knowledge of both the visual arts and of the town (“which they’re hoping to grow, culturally speaking”) as being instrumental to realizing the event.
      The Bizarre Bazaar, one of the curatorial initiatives designed to include local artists and producers, offered a mix of services like food trucks and specialty merchant tables in a dedicated area. But while local participation on the vendors’ side opened up some opportunities, the price for visitors was, for many, still out of reach. Day passes for general admission started at $125, a number that soared to $2,500 for a three-day “Platinum” VIP pass. 
      Jacolby Satterwhite’s PAT (2022) being performed at FORMAT Festival. Image by Rain Embuscado.
      So, how was the art? Each of the participating visual artists engaged the space with their signature approaches. Maurizio Cattelan’s TOILETPAPER MAGAZINE, for example, opted to embody the “artist-as-set-designer” role, transforming a barn into a platformed dance hall for an installation titled Drag Me to the Disco. Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman, meanwhile, built a hybrid speakeasy-cum-performance-venue titled Next Door, which they constructed using repurposed doors from porta-johns and a variety of counter-cultural ephemera.
      Artist Nick Cave (currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Arts Chicago), participated in the festivities, contributing a selection of his Soundsuits (1992–present) which dancers activated during musical acts by artists like the Flaming Lips and Seun Kuti & Egypt 80. Nancy Baker Cahill, who presented a number of NFT artworks at the Solana House venue (sponsored by the eponymous blockchain), captivated passersby with amorphous digital renderings displayed on floor-to-ceiling digital screens.
      Jacolby Satterwhite chose the occasion to debut PAT, a new performance piece developed in partnership with Performa. He remarked that the event’s production quality was of the highest quality. “I was attracted to the lineup,” Satterwhite admitted to Artnet News, adding that FORMAT also provided a good testing ground for the new “tone” of his work.
      Neil Harbisson channeling a NASA livestream at FORMAT Festival. Image by Rain Embuscado.
      Artist Neil Harbisson answered FORMAT’s call to present his “space concert” for the first time to a U.S. audience. Largely known for his advocacy of the cyborg art movement—he has an antenna implanted in his skull—Harbisson’s contribution to FORMAT involved connecting to the NASA International Space Station, and translating the signals he received into a musical composition. This Bentonville performance of a work which Harbisson had previously only delivered in European cities stood as an example of what was possible in a technologically decentralized art world.
      “The composition is created by the cosmos,” Harbisson told Artnet News. “There is no separation between artwork and artist. Art is everywhere.”
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      In Pictures: See the Visceral Pleasures of ‘Real Corporeal,’ Debuting Arthur Jafa’s Newest Work Alongside Art by the Next Big Things

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      Not every show is worth a special trip. But “Real Corporeal,” an ambitious exhibition organized by Gladstone Gallery in the former home of Gavin Brown’s enterprise in Harlem, justifies a commute. Helmed by London curator Ben Broome, the show brings together works by an intergenerational cast of artists in a variety of media, all concerned with re-asserting the body’s presence in the gallery space.
      As anyone who’s ever had to use the restroom at an art show might know, white cubes are meant mostly for the mind and eyes. But a robust performance program accompanying the show aims to pack bodies into the gallery, where visitors will be surrounded by 30 works from artists with conversant practices.
      “If one is to conceptualize the exhibition as a family gathering, the aunts and uncles are seated interspersed amongst the younger cousins,” the press statement reads. Renowned electronic musician Klein has a work, cheekily titled Life as a Clout Chaser is Hard (2022), alongside a contribution by her mentor, artist Mark Leckey. Sara Sadik’s moving images are kindred with those of Cyprien Gaillard.
      Those who come to see Arthur Jafa’s latest, Dirty Tesla (2021), which riffs off his practice of sequencing found footage, may stay for Tommy Malekoff’s Desire Lines (2019), a 15-minute video of strange spectacle that contrasts car tires with fireworks. Also on view are figurative paintings by sought-after artists Chase Hall, Pol Taburet, Amanda Ba, and George Rouy.
      Broome told Arnet News that the massive Harlem space was a natural fit for “Real Corporeal”: “It’s an incredible gallery for showing art—there’s nothing else like that monastic top floor in New York City.” But the architecture is but one of many entry points.
      Broome maintains there’s no single “best spot” to understand “Real Corporeal” from—except the mind, counterintuitively, “when you’re on the train home thinking anxiously about whether Klein’s work Life as a Clout Chaser is Hard applies to you.”
      Or, better yet, catch a performance. Gladstone recently hosted Chassol on September 24, and Slauson Malone 1 on September 26. Keep your eyes on the gallery’s Instagram for future announcements, including a yet-to-be-revealed performance from Joan Jonas, the eldest artist in the show.
      “Without her,” Broome said, “I wonder how many of these artists would be here.”
      “Real Corporeal” is on view at 439 West 127th Street through October 15, 2022.
      Tommy Malekoff, Desire Lines (2019). Two-channel digital video and sound. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Photography by David Regen
      Installation view, “Real Corporeal,” including Arthur Jafa’s Dirty Tesla (2021) at center. Photography by David Regen.
      Christelle Oyiri, The Twilight of The Idols (2022). Printed 4 plexiglass panel installation. Installation view, Photography © Jay Izzard
      Installation view featuring works by George Rouy, Chase Hall, Christelle Oyiri, Walter Pichler, and Klein. Photo by David Regen
      Chase Hall, Up and Downstate Boys (2022). Acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas
      Pol Taburet, Fertilizer / Neg (2022). Installation view, with viewers. Photography © Jay Izzard
      Installation view, featuring works by Pol Taburet and Rhea Dillon. Photo by David Regen
      Amanda Ba, The Plower and the Weaver (2022). Oil on canvas
      Mark Leckey, To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) (2021). Two channel 9:16 video installation, aluminum, steel, with 7.1 surround sound. Installation view. Photo by David Regen
      Christelle Oyiri, Family Fresco 2002 (2022). Printed 4 wooden panel installation. Installation view. Photography © Jay Izzard
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      With Sold-Out Gigs in New York, Iconic Indie Band Pavement Will Open a Pop-up Show Celebrating Its 30-Year History

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      Ice, baby, there’s a Pavement exhibition coming to New York. 
      This week, the seminal band announced the arrival of “Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum,” a four-day-long pop-up that coincides with its slate of sold-out shows at Brooklyn’s Kings Theater later this month. (The “1933” of the show’s title is a reference to the group’s debut EP, “Slay Tracks 1933-1969,” which was actually released in 1989.)
      Billed—in the indie outfit’s signature brand of slacker savant humor—as an “international museum exhibition,” the show will bring together artifacts and archival material spanning Pavement’s 30-plus year history.
      On view will be “previously unseen imagery, artwork and ephemera, commendations and commemorations,” as well as “rumored relics of the band’s real and imagined history,” according to the project’s website. “Exclusive merchandise and classic museum souvenirs” will also be available for purchase.
      Following its run in New York, the Pavement Museum will make stops in London and Toyko before ultimately landing in the band’s hometown of Stockton, California, where it will go on permanent display. 
      The exhibition “completes a circle for one of the most celebrated and deliberated bands in modern music and helps redefine a secret history performed in plain sight,” an announcement reads. 

      On the occasion of its four sold-out concerts at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre, the rock band Pavement will unveil an international museum exhibition, Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum pic.twitter.com/YhrBgY1x0i
      — PAVEMENT (@pavement_band) September 26, 2022

      What that “secret history” refers to is unclear. Probably nothing, as the pop-up’s description reads like a sardonic send-up of the sensationalized, “Behind the Music”–style editorialization of similar shows, like the Rolling Stones’ “Exhibitionism,” for instance. Then again, the tension of a band mocking indie fame while reluctantly embracing it has always been at the heart of Pavement’s charm.  
      A representative for the group didn’t immediately respond to Artnet News’s request for more details about what visitors can expect, but Variety reported that the event is, at least, real, and not another ironic joke. 
      Incidentally, another museum plays a foundational role in Pavement’s history: the group’s frontman and drummer, Stephen Malkmus and Steve West, were working as security guards at the Whitney Museum of American Art when they recorded their first album, “Slanted and Enchanted,” in 1991.
      Pavement, which officially disbanded in 2000, is currently out on the road for a long-awaited—and repeatedly-delayed—reunion tour, the group’s first since 2010.
      “Pavements 1933-2022” will be on view September 29–October 2 at 475 Greenwich Street in New York.
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      ‘I Had Never Seen Anything Like It Before’: Steve Martin on the Spark That Led Him to Become One of the Top Collectors of Australian Indigenous Art

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      Steve Martin has been back in the headlines of late, thanks to his leading role in the hit Hulu comedy Only Murders in the Building. But he also has a star turn this fall at the National Arts Club in New York, which is presenting a small but striking exhibition of Indigenous Australian art from the actor’s personal collection.
      Titled “Selections from Australia’s Western Desert: From the Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield,” the show features six works from among the 50 or so contemporary paintings by Indigenous Australian artists that Martin has purchased with his wife since 2015.
      The couple’s passion for this still rather obscure area of contemporary art got its start at Salon 94 on the Upper East Side, which at the time was presenting the first U.S. solo show for Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri. Martin read about the show in the New York Times, and was immediately intrigued. “I got on my bicycle, and I went down, and I bought one,” he told Artnet News.
      Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, Rockholes and Country Near the Olgas (2008). Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield.
      Martin, of course, had been collecting for years, starting out with a James Gale Tyler seascape he picked up at an antique store for $500 at age 21 and still owns; today, he estimated, it has dipped in value to $300. (Martin’s next acquisition, a print by Ed Ruscha of the Hollywood sign, has probably fared better over the years.)
      The love affair with Indigenous Australian art, however, was something of a slow burn for Martin and Stringfield.
      “We hung it, we loved it, but we didn’t really think about it for a few years. But there is a whole culture around these paintings, and slowly, through osmosis, I began to learn more and more,” he said. “The history of Indigenous painting only goes back to about 1970—before that it was sand painting, wall painting, carving, and this was the first time these images could be set down in a permanent way.”
      Making lasting, portable works that could be sold was transformative for the Indigenous art community—and brought something brand new to the art world, a movement that became known as Desert Painting.
      “I think it’s such a fascinating story,” Martin said. He also appreciated collecting in an area where there wasn’t a huge amount of established scholarship.
      “It’s fun to have something to study, to try to understand, to apply your critical eye to without any outside pressure,” he added. “There’s not a lot of promotion about [these] artists. You just have to find it out yourself.”
      Slowly but surely, Martin began buying more and more Indigenous art, even traveling with Stringfield to Australia. (Though they didn’t make it to the Outback, they visited a center where working artists create their paintings.)
      Carlene West, Tjitjitji. Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield.
      They also met Indigenous artist Yukultji Napangati when she visited New York a few years ago and had her over to dinner.
      “She made my daughter a family member, which was quite an honor, and I played the banjo,” Martin said. “Yukultji is quite a historical figure. She was one of the Pintupi Nine, and came in from the Outback when she was 13—had never seen a white man, had never seen a car—and then became a notable painter.”
      As Martin and Stringfield’s holdings in Indigenous art grew, so too did their desire to show them to the world. To start, Martin staged a small show at the Uovo storage facility in Queens for friends and family.
      Word got out. Next came an outing at Gagosian—nothing for sale, of course—that showed in both New York and Los Angeles, and an exhibition at the Australian counsel residence in New York. (That showed paired Martin’s collection with works owned by John Wilkerson, whose collection focuses on smaller, earlier works on board, before Indigenous artists got access to canvases.)
      These days, Martin and Stringfield are winding down their active collecting.
      “Our indigenous art collection is pretty dense—there’s not much left to acquire. Right now, we are just having fun moving works around,” Martin said. “I love to rotate things. Every time you move a picture, it’s like getting a new picture. You see it anew.”
      And of course, he loves seeing his collection on the walls of the National Arts Club, which is currently presenting works by Tjapaltjarri, Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, Timo Hogan, Carlene West, and Doreen Reid Nakamarra.
      “It’s an unpredictable melange of pictures. There’s some later ones—Timo Hogan is very contemporary,” Martin said, adding that “in the Australian Indigenous art world, a 50 year old is considered a young painter.” Hogan is 49.
      “I’d like people to be able to see the National Arts Club show because it’s very, very unusual,” he added. “And I hope they have the same experience I did—I had never seen anything like it before.”
      “Selections From Australia’s Western Desert From the Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield” is on view at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, New York, September 12–October 27, 2022. 
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      The Met Is Showing Incredible Ceramics by the Often Unnamed Enslaved Potters Who Worked in the American South

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      The Metropolitan Museum of Art has organized an important exhibition centered around 50 ceramic objects made by enslaved African American potters who were active in westernmost South Carolina during the 19th century.
      “In the decades before the Civil War, a successful alkaline-glazed stoneware industry developed in Old Edgefield District, a clay-rich area,” the museum says in a statement. And while common depictions of slavery focus on the backbreaking labor of harvesting cash crops, the exhibition “Hear Me Now,” shows that enslaved people were also highly skilled artisans.
      “When I talk to artists about it, they’re still incredulous about the fact that these jars were made, that they survived the kiln firing,” said co-curator Adrienne Spinozzi, an assistant research curator from the Met’s American Wing, of the unique ceramic housewares, which became a lucrative cottage industry in the plantation economy.
      Face jug, by an unrecorded potter, attributed to Miles Mill Pottery (1867–85), Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, alkaline-glazed stoneware with kaolin glaze. Photo: Hudgins Family Collection, New York.
      Michigan-based historian Jason Young co-curated the exhibition, contributing years of research and writing about the region’s pottery-rich past. Young also curated a show around Theaster Gates’s engagement with this history, called “The Clay Sermon.” Ethan Lasser, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (where the show travels to next), rounded out the curatorial team.
      Planning for the show started in 2017, when the Met acquired a face jug from an unrecorded Edgefield potter for their permanent collection galleries. Spinozzi saw the object as a route to have conversations about “American history and these really difficult and complex and challenging moments in our country’s past.” She then visited South Carolina to do further research.
      The exhibition opens with 12 massive jars by David Drake—perhaps the best-known potter from Edgefield. Despite social restrictions against educating enslaved communities, Drake learned to read and write, developing exquisite handwriting, and he carved a wide array of simple literature onto his works, as well as signing and dating them. One jar from June 1834 reads “concatenation,” meaning a system of interconnection. Forty of the jars in the exhibition have similar “verses” carved onto them—sometimes poetic or biblical, sometimes informative (“this jar is for pork”) or even declarative,, proclaiming “I made this.”
      Detail of work by Dave, later recorded as David Drake, American, ca. 1801–1870s.
      Nineteen regional “face jugs” follow Drake’s works. These vessels, not commercial objects, were shaped to have visages with expressions in high relief. They appeared around 1858, half a century after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed, but the same year a ship arrived with 400 captive Africans—100 of which went to Edgefield’s potteries. Many face jugs are believed to resemble minkisi, ritual objects hailing from West-Central African religious practices.
      “Hear Me Now” bridges that history with the present moment by including contemporary Black artists who resonate with the Edgefield story, including Simone Leigh, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Woody De Othello, Theaster Gates, and Robert Pruitt.
      Theaster Gates, Signature Study (2020). Courtesy of the artist and White Cube, LondonPhoto: © White Cube/Theo Christelis.
      “As curators, we brought a different set of questions to the material,” Lasser told Artnet News. “We were also conveners, drawing on our own networks to engage friends and colleagues in the act of interpretation.”
      Scholarship on enslaved artists from American history has been slim. A team from the Met traveled with a conservator to South Carolina in 2019 to take samples of residue from the vessels’ interiors beyond their prohibitively slender necks. They’re now working with outside experts to learn what these enigmatic face jugs actually held.
      “We’re building this database that includes photographs of the interior,” Lasser added. “We’re looking at these objects, looking at their histories, trying to see if we can trace them back to the African American community.”
      Storage jar (ca. 1845), by an unrecorded potter, Trapp & Chandler Pottery (1843–ca. 1850), Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, alkaline-glazed stoneware with iron slip. Photo: Courtesy of the Collection of C. Philip and Corbett Toussaint.
      “We want viewers to walk away with an appreciation of the full breadth and depth of this fascinating material,” Young added over email. “We want them to connect with the people who created this material, even while living under a harsh regime of American racism and slavery.”
      To further this aim, on December 3, the Met will host a public program titled “Learning from Edgefield,” which will have discussions with historians, artists, and museum leaders on the best practices around working with African American cultural heritage sites like Edgefield, and how museums collect, display, and interpret objects by enslaved makers.
      “I am most looking forward to the conversations the show opens up,” Lasser said, “about Edgefield and ceramics, enslavement and industry—perhaps even about museums and collecting today.”
      “Hear Me Now” is on view through February 5, 2023, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It then travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 4–July 9, 2023), the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (August 26, 2023–January 7, 2024), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 16–May 12, 2024).
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      In Pictures: See Inside the Albertina’s Legacy-Defining Basquiat Retrospective

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      No artist in the history of New York City quite exemplifies the grit and determination of the 1980s quite like Jean-Michel Basquiat. 
      In a first for Austrian audiences, Basquiat’s legacy is being given a major retrospective at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. The show includes iconic pieces such as La Hara (1981), a skeletal portrait of a police officer that sold at auction for $35 million in 2017,  and Self-Portrait (1983).
      The exhibition is being billed as a legacy-defining one for the artist. More than  50 major works have been lent from public and private collections, including Basquiat’s estate (the artist’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, even attended the opening), the Nicola Erni Collection, and art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac.
      Born in Brooklyn in 1960, to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat started developing his artistic style as a teenager, first conceiving the graffiti moniker SAMO in the 1970s with a high school friend, Al Diaz. 
      Basquiat’s later work, which many critics defined as “neo-expressionism,” was deeply influenced by these early experiences creating street art, and by the rap and punk music scenes he was a part of. In 1979, together with filmmaker Michael Holman, for example, Basquiat formed an experimental band called Gray. 
      The Albertina’s show unpacks the artist’s roots and follows his meteoric rise in the art world, from being the youngest ever participant at Documenta in 1982, to his relationship with other cultural superstars like Madonna and Warhol, through to his untimely death of a drug overdose in 1988, age 27.
      “Basquiat: The Retrospective” is on view through January 8, 2023, at the Albertina in Vienna. See more images from the exhibition here. 
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
      Untitled (1982) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Studio Tromp; © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artesar, New York.
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      Filipino Artist Pio Abad Turns Ferdinand Marcos and Ronald Reagan’s Cozy Correspondence Into Art at the Carnegie International

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      A foreign dictator pleads his case with the U.S. President and fashionable First Lady. Rudy Giuliani weighs in. So does Senator Orrin Hatch. These are not from the top secret documents kept in Mar-a-Lago by former president Donald Trump, but the correspondence of another celebrity-turned-president, Ronald Reagan, drawn from his official archives. And for the Filipino artist Pio Abad, they are a record of how powerful people manipulate public opinion to maintain their status.
      The Reagan letters all involve the late Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, who fled the Philippines in the wake of the People Power Revolution in 1986, and found refuge in Hawaii. The texts have been carved onto a series of Carrara marble tablets by Abad under the title “Thoughtful Gifts,” as part of his contribution to the Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, opening on Saturday, September 24.
      “You can see that this wasn’t just a professional relationship,” Abad said of the communications between the two political power couples. “It was a personal one. And I think they genuinely liked each other.”
      “Dear Mr. President, I have no other recourse but to write you this letter,” Ferdinand Marcos entreated with Ronald Reagan on October 20, 1988, in a last-ditch effort to avoid racketeering charges brought by Rudy Giuliani, then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The ousted dictator wanted the president to personally intervene in the case and allow the Marcoses to prove that the billions in cash, real estate, art, and gems they amassed during their decades in power—some of which they smuggled with them out of the Philippines—were not acquired using stolen funds.
      “Imelda sends her prayers to you and Nancy,” Marcos ended his missive. “I remain your obedient servant.”
      Pio Abad, Thoughtful Gifts (October 20, 1988) (2020).
      In his reply, penned that same day, Reagan told Marcos that “the facts and circumstances in this case left me no choice except to defer to the Attorney General. I regret very much that this has become necessary but under our system you will have every opportunity to refute these charges.” He ended they note with an assurance that “Nancy joins me in extending to you and Imelda our best wishes.”
      A day later, the Marcoses were indicted on RICO charges in New York, and although Ferdinand died just a few months later, Imelda would stand trial in 1990—and be acquitted.
      In another letter, presented by Abad as a triptych, Giuliani outlined the evidence against the Marcos family in a dispatch to the Attorney General’s office, following a search of their daughter’s home in California. Giuliani wrote that the assets federal agents seized from the property—including more than 100 works of art and antique furniture—provided “further evidence that the Marcoses have continued to commit crimes and to conceal the fruits of their racketeering enterprise since they arrived in the United States.”
      Although Imelda Marcos was acquitted of racketeering, the trove of art that authorities in the U.S. and the Philippines seized was sold at auction in New York in 1991. But hundreds of works acquired by the family using their ill-gotten gains remain unaccounted for, including a Picasso that was spotted on the wall of Imelda’s home during a visit from her son, Ferdinand Jr., after he won the Philippines presidential election earlier this year.
      “These letters become portals to the past,” Abad said of the historical documents. “They are also like a palimpsest of how these characters were viewed then and how they are now.” Ferdinand Jr.’s rise to power, for example, largely came through a whitewashing of his parents’ actions during their reign. “The way that political personalities are recycled and reinterpreted throughout history, and the fact that we’re seeing this happen within a single generation, is frightening,” Abad said.
      In a further twist of fate, the Carnegie exhibition opens almost 50 years to the day that Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines.
      Pio Abad, installation view of Distant Possessions (2022) in the 58th Carnegie International. Photo: Sean Eaton. Courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art.
      Abad’s other work in the exhibition draws on the Carnegie Museum of Art’s own history, specifically its founding patron, Andrew Carnegie. In addition to being a philanthropist and art collector, the steel magnate was—first and foremost—an industrialist.
      “Obviously Andrew Carnegie was one of the proponents of public philanthropy instead of paying your taxes,” Abad said. Carnegie was also a vocal opponent to a proposal being floated by the U.S. government at the time to annex the Philippines, even offering to buy its independence for $20 million.
      In an essay published in 1898, Carnegie put forward his arguments for why Filipinos should be left to govern themselves. In a telling passage, Carnegie described the Philippines as a nation of “about seven and a half millions of people, composed of races bitterly hostile to one another, alien races, ignorant of our language and institutions. Americans cannot be grown there.”
      Abad has taken that last sentence and enlarged it into a wall-sized mural, painted to mimic the neoclassical letters carved on the museum’s façade. The piece is meant to show that the ideological structures that underpin these cultural infrastructures “maybe haven’t really changed,” the artist said.
      That does not mean change is impossible, however. “I think we are at a point where a lot of Americans are questioning the myths that they were brought up with,” Abad said. “Beliefs of exceptionalism are being picked apart—rightfully so.”
      What Abad wants visitors to come away with from his project is to see that “as much as it’s a geopolitical study, it’s also an obsession informed by personal history. So it’s also universal.”
      “It’s a transnational tragedy that touches all our lives, which is ultimately tied to capital or greed or impunity, and the need to transform political fact to personal myth,” Abad said. “Regardless of how distorted it becomes.”
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