Exhibitions

As the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death approaches in 2023, news has poured in about conservation research into three Blue Period works. 
In 2014, researchers announced a “hidden” portrait beneath The Blue Room (1901) and, four years later, revealed a dozen layers beneath The Soup (1903), plus a landscape below Crouching Beggarwoman (1902). 
The fruits of this research are now being shared with the public in “Picasso: Painting the Blue Period” (until June 12), an exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
Since the 2018 announcement, researchers at the Phillips, which owns The Blue Room, have honed their analysis with the aid of colleagues in other institutions. National Gallery of Art imaging scientist John Delaney, for example, scanned The Blue Room four times (most recently in 2019) with increasingly refined and sensitive instruments, according to Phillips curator Susan Behrends Frank, to peel back the history of the work.
Each scan “brought forward additional information about elemental materials and clarity of detail in the portrait of the man beneath the surface image,” she said.
“We want people to see this well-known artist in a fresh light—to see him at the very beginning of his career internationally,” Behrends Frank added. “We want people to see how rich this very early moment is in his career, and the conservation science in this exhibition gives you another window into thinking about the creative process of an artist that seems to be so well known.”
An infrared reflectance image of The Blue Room showing the portrait of an unknown man. The canvas is rotated 90 degrees clockwise. Image: John Delaney and Kathryn Dooley, National Gallery of Art.
The Blue Room, which is the first of the three major Blue Period canvases that exhibition visitors encounter, was originally titled The Toilette when Duncan Phillips purchased it in 1927 as his first Picasso acquisition.
It was just the third to enter a U.S. museum after the Art Institute of Chicago acquired The Old Guitarist (1903-4) and Albright-Knox Art Gallery acquired La Toilette (1906) the prior year.
For decades, conservators knew something lay hidden beneath, because some brushstrokes went the wrong way, and underlying forms peeked through. The surface depicts a nude woman, head bowed, washing herself over a basin in a room into which light streams from a window on the left. A bureau and chest flank the window, and a colorful rug, table with flowers, and bed round out the interior.
The bather’s pose, which evokes the works of Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin, plus Picasso’s addition of two pictures into the scene, reveal his broader artistic mission. 
The artist used ultramarine blue, which was costlier than his typical Blue Period Prussian blue paint, to include an image on the bedroom wall of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster “May Milton,” as a way of associating himself with one of his idols. Researchers now believe that the underpainting of the man was done in mid-summer 1901, giving the final version of The Blue Room an early- to mid-November 1901 date, rather than the prior scholarly consensus of summer 1901.
This means Picasso painted the final work shortly after he turned 20, which is significant for an artist who told biographer Pierre Daix that his friend Carles Casagemas’s suicide at that age “got me started painting in blue.” (Casagemas worked in the same studio as Picasso and died in a cafe just down the street that February.)
Notedly, the new dating also means that Picasso memorialized Lautrec with The Blue Room, as Lautrec died in September 1901 at age 36. (Prior dating would have meant that Picasso painted the work while Lautrec was still alive.) 
Picasso may have done the underpainting to curry favor with someone, or it may have been an archetype of someone he saw at Montmartre, Behrends Frank said. She added that conservators’ new understanding of how thinly and quickly Picasso painted The Blue Room supports artist Jaume Sabartés’s recollection, in his memoir of 1901, that Picasso worked seemingly with tunnel vision, focusing all his energy on creating. 
“Our painting really confirms that entire manner of his concentration and process,” Behrends Frank said.
Research into two more Blue Period pictures from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Crouching Beggarwoman and The Soup, also chart new understandings of Picasso’s process.
Pablo Picasso, Crouching Beggarwoman (1902). © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In the former, Picasso first drew the woman holding bread (or a bowl) in her hand. But he later changed his mind, and enshrouded both hands in the woman’s cloak. 
“By covering that up and enclosing the figure completely, so all we see is her face, it gave her a totally different presentation and meaning,” Behrends Frank said. 
Scans of the work showed a landscape beneath. It is unknown if Picasso painted that work, which was also initially a mystery.
“We thought this was a fantasy [scene] inspired by [painter Pierre] Puvis de Chavannes,” Behrends Frank said.
But when she and her colleagues showed the under-image to Josep Laplana, director of the Museum of Montserrat, he said he knew what it depicted.
“Immediately, he recognized that it’s this private park now owned by the city of Barcelona,” Behrends Frank said. (There is no record of Picasso having visited the park, which would have been closed to the public in the early 20th century.)
Pablo Picasso The Soup (1903). © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In The Soup, Picasso had initially considered a male figure giving bread to a boy or a girl, until he changed it to a woman giving soup to a girl. The image was an “obsession” to Picasso, according to Behrends Frank.
“He was completely struggling with this idea of how to convey something about the universal charity that one associates with soup as a form of nourishment,” she said.
“We think of soup kitchens even today. In Picasso’s mind, he was trying to find a way to universalize this and not simply make it a genre picture, but to give it heft.”
Looking ahead, Behrends Frank thinks there is more work to be done, especially on the many Blue Period works that are in Russia, which have been x-rayed but not subjected to deeper kinds of scans. 
“I’m sure those curators and conservators would love to be able to take this next step that is being done in Europe and the U.S.,” she said.
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The Modernist painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902–1968) has long been a staple of German public collections, beloved for his saturated colors and dynamic compositions, which were inflected by Expressionism, Art Informel, and abstraction over the course of his career. Yet even in his home country, there are still dimensions of his work that remain to be discovered, and a retrospective now on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle—of 120 paintings, watercolors, and drawings, the largest show of his oeuvre in 30 years—seeks to contextualize lesser-known works and introduce Nay’s practice to new audiences.
“The exhibition is the first comprehensive show in decades, and it is addressed to a new generation of viewers and people who might not be so aware” of the artist’s early career, explained Aurel Scheibler, chairman of the board of the Ernst Wilhelm Nay Foundation, which was created in 2005. “It shows a thread that connects all these different periods of his work.” (Scheibler, who is also an art dealer based in Berlin, is the step-grandson of Nay.)
Exhibition view of Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s retrospective at Hamburger Kunsthalle. Courtesy Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung.
Nay, who studied under Karl Hofer at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, began painting in the late 1910s and was an accomplished artist by the outbreak of World War II. His work was labeled as “degenerate art” and around ten of his works were confiscated from museum collections. The artist himself destroyed one of his own works for fear of reprisal.
In need of money, Nay joined the army in 1939 and was posted to the Eastern front, followed by France. He managed to continue to make art when he was off duty, painting for a time at the studio of an amateur artist he befriended in France. His studio in Berlin was bombed during air raids of the German capital. “He was more free to work [abroad] than in Berlin,” Scheibler said, but “it was hard to get canvases, so he made more so gouaches and works on paper.” Scheibler added that this period of work, as well as that from just before the war, is very rare and of great interest to collectors.
After the war, Nay’s international career took off when he participated in the Venice Biennale in 1948 and the first-ever Documenta in Kassel in 1955 (its curator, Arnold Bode, would also include him in the next two editions). In 1956, Nay represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. He caused a stir at the third Documenta when he presented his now-celebrated “Eye Paintings,” which were hung from the ceiling—a move that divided audiences at the time. He died in his studio in Cologne in 1968.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Couple with butterflies (1939). Alexeyev-Brandl Collection. © Ernst Wilhelm Nay Foundation. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022. Photo: Trevor Good.
Magdalene Claesges, scientific director and head of the Nay foundation’s archives in Cologne, said that scholarly and market focus has predominantly been on his famous “Disk Paintings,” and the retrospective—which was curated by Karin Schick—seeks to offer a more polyphonic perspective on his career, which went through many other phases.
Works from between 1954 and 1962 known as the “Scheibenbilder” have long been in demand: a painting from the period, titled Scheiben und Halbscheiben (1955),set a record for the artist at Ketterer Kunst in 2017, selling for €2.3 million ($2.6 million), well above its €250,000 ($412,007) estimate, according to the Artnet Price Database.
But other periods, including that of the “Fugale Bilder,” which preceded it from 1949 to 1951, have been overlooked and under-studied, Scheibler noted. “This period of his work marks a transition from the more figurative work he was making in the 1940s to his later works, which are more abstract. It is a period that is more flat and constructed,” he said.
Though interest in the artist in Germany has long been strong, more recently major institutions in Europe have made moves to collect his work. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, which acquired Inferno Hallelujah (1964), a moody canvas with his iconic eyes in deep crimsons and blues, in 2014, while the Musée National d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris acquired Blau—Orange und Gelb (1967) in 2016. Scheibler said, “People are rediscovering him as one of the major postwar painters of Europe.”
Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s retrospective is on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, March 25 through August 7, 2022.
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Elmgreen and Dragset have taken over the Fondazione Prada in Milan for a show titled”Useless Bodies?” that focuses on Big Tech and its impact on our lives.
The works, according to an exhibition statement, explore “present condition of the body in the post-industrial age, in which it seems that our physical presence is losing its centrality.”
The body, indeed, may even now be “completely superfluous.”
“One could claim our physical selves have even become more of an obstacle than an advantage,” the artists said in a statement. “Twenty years into the 21st century, the status of the body is now that of the product—with our data gathered and sold by Big Tech.”
Many of the figures in the works are in precarious positions: climbing walls, perched atop a ladder, stuffed into the backseat of a car, and—in one particularly unsettling case—rolled half inside a morgue’s cooling freezer.
See more works from the show below.
“Elmgreen & Dragset: Useless Bodies?” is on view through August 22, 2022.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s Watching (2021) in the exhibition “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s Piscina di Largo Iscaro (2021) in the exhibition “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset’s What’s Left? (2021) in the exhibition “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Bogdan (2020). Courtesy: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, London, Seoul Photo by: Roman März.
Elmgreen & Dragset, The Touch (2011). Courtesy of Perrotin. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Statue of Liberty, Fig. 2 (2021). Installation view, 14th Robert Jacobsen Prize of the Würth Foundation, Museum Würth 2, Künzelsau, Germany, 2021. Photo: Studio Elmgreen & Dragset.
Exhibition view “Useless Bodies?” by Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.
Elmgreen & Dragset, The Painter, Fig. 2 (2021). Photo: Elmar Vestner. Courtesy, Pace Gallery, New York.
Elmgreen & Dragset, The Outsiders (2020). Installation view, Art Basel. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy, Pace Gallery, New York.
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Much has transpired since 2019 when Whitney curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards were announced as the next organizers of the institution’s flagship biennial: a pandemic, a presidential election, a wave of protests. Even the date of the always-anticipated exhibition changed, moving from 2021 to April of this year. 
Tasked, as all Whitney Biennial curators are, with staging a show that reflects the times into which it’s born, Breslin and Edwards found themselves in a difficult position. They had to track down art that captured the spirit of those world-altering events without trivializing or exploiting them—and do a lot of that work over Zoom.
With that kind of brief, it’s unsurprising that the biennial almost always produces controversy. 
For their turn in the hot seat, Breslin and Edwards took an open-ended approach that may successfully turn down the collective temperature. They opted to ask questions instead of offering declarations, to create a space for contemplation, and to look beyond the borders of America for a portrait of the country.
Ahead of the opening of the exhibition, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” Breslin and Edwards spoke to Artnet News about the curatorial experience and what viewers can expect.
Alfredo Jaar, still from 06.01.2020 18.39 (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong & Co.
The idea of designing an exhibition to reflect the art of our times is daunting at the best of times, but the last three years have not been the best of times, and much has changed since 2019 when you two were announced as curators of the biennial. Does that distinguish this biennial from others in your mind?
David Breslin: Well one amazingly consistent thing was working together with Adrienne. Because I do think that in the best of times, these are hard shows to do and, as you say, these have not been the best of times. To have someone that you trust, respect, and admire, someone you have absolute faith in, is really important. 
To the other point, I would say that, for every person who does a biennial, whether they’re at the Whitney or elsewhere, the sands are always shifting; the times and the ways in which artists are reacting to them are constantly changing. I think the degree of change in such a brief period of time is something that Adrienne and I had to reckon with in a way that felt really alive to the moment. But we also didn’t want to claim or sensationalize any particular part of it. We were thinking about how the exhibition can reflect the complicated layers of emotion that we’ve all felt.
Adrienne Edwards: One of the things that really rocked me was when we got on the museum floor before artwork started coming in. It was just this clearing; it was completely open and there was nothing there. In some ways it felt deeply metaphorical and emblematic of what we needed and had hoped for. David and I felt it was important to put together this show, wanted to contextualize artists in relationship—all the stuff you can read in the essay and the press release. But what was really moving was realizing what it meant to stand there and see all of these radical juxtapositions, all of these incredible things—and not just side to side, as we’re accustomed to seeing them, but how you could get a sidelong glance that takes you across 15,000 square feet and see a relationality there. That really opened things up in a way that reinforced that we were onto something when we set out to make a show that was about the conditions in which we were living.
Adam Pendleton, still from Ruby Nell Sales (2020–22). Courtesy of the artist.
How has your approach to the show evolved since 2019?
DB: From about November 2019 to mid-March, when we were told that the museum was shutting down for what was then thought to be a brief moment, we were on the road. It was a traveling moment. It was about going into studios, getting on planes, seeing people from afar, roaming around New York, seeing people that were closer by. But even before that, Adrienne and I had a lot of time to just sit together with artists names or images we wanted to share with each other or books or essays or articles that proved to be formative. Then, in mid-March, everything shifted and, like that, we were on Zoom.
Adrienne and I had to develop a different kind of relationship with each other too. When you’re in the same space, you take for granted that you can just meet up and have a chat. It suddenly had to be very deliberate. But I was surprised by how much more intimacy that allowed for. All the texts that we have, the photos that we’ve sent back and forth, even images of pages from books that we were reading—I still remember that as being a really grounding thing when we were pretty much by ourselves or with our families in that moment.
The phrase that forms the name of the show, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” opens Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye.” It was also the name of an album by bebop drummer Max Roach and an exhibition curated by David Hammons. What does it mean to you?
AE: It’s a kind of vernacular that I would hear from my grandmother and women of her generation. It’s this very kind of tongue-in-cheek thing like, ‘I’m going to tell you something you already know, but you never talk about.’ [Laughs] It just worked for us. So did the fact that those sources are interdisciplinary references, because that’s such an important part of the show. Trying to speak to identity or a sense of belonging or history or social formation—those are all things that David and I were thinking about very deeply. So it just seemed to be the perfect title.
Coco Fusco, still from Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates.
You’ve used somewhat soft language to describe the show—language that suggests rather than states. You’ve called the exhibition “speculative” and an “experiment,” described the subthemes as “hunches,” and the group of artists as an “ensemble.” Fair or not, we tend to associate the Whitney Biennial as a kind of declarative, flag-in-the-ground kind of exhibition—and because of that, it almost always proves to be alienating to some people. I wonder, with this new language, are you trying to get away from that understanding and move toward something more nuanced and contemplative?
AE: I would say it’s necessarily contemplative, given the times in which it’s been made. How can you have any sense of certainty about anything really? It would seem absurd.
That clearing on the fifth floor that I mentioned before, it’s really about leveling and holding space, it’s about the importance of everyone being able to ask questions, to show up with our own experiences and have those brought to the fore.
This whole idea that any singular exhibition could be declarative is already deeply problematic and, at the Whitney, there’s a kind of institutional openness and clarity about that impossibility. Because institutions are changing too. These institutions are comprised of people, so every time you have a different cast of characters here, you’re going to get a different kind of show. What the Whitney Biennial was 20 years ago, what it was 30 years ago—it’s really different from what the Whitney Biennial is now. And you know what? That feels really right and honest and generative.
DB: I think we find that there’s real strength in speculation. Instead of leading with our own kind of declarations of what it should be, we wanted to situate the show as an encounter with different ways of imagining a world. Some exhibitions revolve around this question of, “Well what power does art have to change the world?” They have these very grandiose ideas. In no way are we thinking that it can’t, but we believe art has a way of impacting and changing people, how people think and respond. And then people have a way of changing the world or reacting to it. There’s never going to be any singular story that a show like this can narrate. So it became a question of how we might be able to create an ensemble where there are multiple narratives that can bleed in and out of each other. 
N. H. Pritchard, Red Abstract / fragment (1968–69).
Accompanying the exhibition’s wall texts and other materials is a symbol that comes from the avant-garde poet N. H. Pritchard. It’s a set of inverted parentheses: ) (.  What does that motif mean to you? 
AE: Pritchard is an artist that I’ve come to know in my relationship with [Whitney Biennial artist] Adam Pendleton, who also has reprinted some of his work. The symbol seemed so iconic to David and I, the profound openness it suggests. I think about it as an interval, a space between two marks. It’s so emblematic of where we are in this moment, this in-between space, ready to get on with it. Also, the fact that it was done in ’68, another troubling and complicated year, and still resonates across time is incredible.
Prichard as a figure was so interesting. He traversed these really different worlds and always seemed to be a little too eccentric for both of them in some ways. What we were able to see in the estate was his poetry, but with a visual lexicon added to it. There are these really dazzling, colorful drawings overlaying the language itself. Pritchard’s poetry is very compelling, but it’s not closed in terms of its symbolism or signification. It’s actually profoundly open. Those are all things that Dave and I had been saying we wanted to put into this exhibition.
DB: Adrienne, I still remember when you and I met with Ian Russell, Pritchard’s nephew. We were looking at some drawings and poems—I think it was in August of last year. There were so many times we just looked at each other and we didn’t have to say anything, we just kind of knew. It was one of those great moments that come with working with someone for a long time. When we saw that symbol, our eyes met and we thought, ‘All right, we’re going to do something with this one.’ [Laughs] You will see it on the side of the introductory texts. It’s incorporated there as a nod to this other way of looking and seeing.
Your biennial includes artists outside of the U.S.—specifically from Canada and Mexico—which is not new for the Whitney Biennial, but might nevertheless confuse some who are expecting a survey of American art.
DB: It was very important for us to think about “The Whitney Museum of American Art” and the fact that that can mean so much for so many different people. Obviously, people who visit aren’t just from the United States, and the work that people make within the United States has ramifications everywhere in the world. That’s something Adrienne and I took very seriously in putting on this exhibition, that there is a kind of push and pull relationship between the United States and the countries closest to us. The artists who are working on the border of Tijuana aren’t just being shown on their own. They’re incorporated within a flow of other artists and works that touch on similar themes about, say, how pop culture is defined or minimalism is thought about. We wanted to make an exhibition that looks like what America really looks like, which is a country of immigrants, a country of pressure along the border.
Denyse Thomasos, Displaced Burial / Burial at Gorée (1993). Courtesy of the Estate of Denyse Thomasos and Olga Korper Gallery.
There’s a tonal dichotomy between the show’s top floors—one light and open, the other dark and labyrinthine. What is the relationship between these two sections?
AE: The sixth floor is a labyrinth. There is, almost in a Borgesian kind of way, an unfolding of different kinds of spaces and rooms. Unlike the fifth floor, your experience is far more directed. You’re directed through this antechamber and then you can come out of that and you can go left or right, you can go forward. So there are these undulating, changing experiences there. That floor has a lot of moving image work, which is often presented out in the open because we have literally transformed the floor into a black box itself. It really feels like a void; it has a force to it. Then, on either end, there are these works that are deeply about light.
So as intense as I think it’s shaping up to be on the top floor, it’s actually optimistic. It tries to embody the possibility of something else. I think of that floor as characterizing both a sense of history and also this contemporary moment, the last two-plus years of life in the United States. Deeply encapsulated in that space are our issues, our hopes, our disappointments. But there’s a way out if we choose to take it.
“Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept” will be on view April 6 through September 5, 2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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When the Whitney Biennial was founded in 1932, it was conceived as a bellwether survey of U.S. art from the preceding two years. That’s still loosely the idea driving the museum’s signature show, even if its mission has gotten much more fluid over the ensuing 90 years. 
The newest iteration of the Biennial, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” is proof of this broadening. It will bring together 63 artists and collectives whose work spans generations, mediums, and—perhaps most notably—geographic borders. 
For curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, organizing a show with the aim of drawing conclusions about the state of art today would be an irresponsible exercise at the best of times. But in 2022—after a pandemic, a presidential election, and a spate of global protests—generalizations are simply unthinkable. Instead, the 80th Whitney Biennial reflects the precarity of our moment. 
“Rather than proposing a unified theme, we pursue a series of hunches throughout the exhibition,” the curators explained earlier this year upon announcing the show. Among those “hunches” are “that personal narratives sifted through political, literary, and pop cultures can address larger social frameworks” and “that artworks can complicate what ‘American’ means by addressing the country’s physical and psychological boundaries.”
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For the last Biennial in 2019, Artnet News surveyed recent examples of the Whitney’s show to identify patterns among participants. With a new entry onto the list, we have a new set of observations. 
For one, this year’s participants are a little older, on average, than those of previous years. Of the 2022 artists, 31 are under 40, while 23 fall on the other side of that line.
Puerto Rican choreographer Awilda Sterling-Duprey, born in 1947, is the oldest of the bunch. The youngest is Mexican video artist Andrew Roberts, born in 1995. Five artists (Steve Cannon, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha N. H. Pritchard, Jason Rhoades, and Denyse Thomasos) are deceased—an uncommonly high figure for an exhibition so ostensibly tethered to the present.  
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Visitors will almost certainly discover at least some new names at the exhibition next month, if not many. Refreshingly, you’ll find just seven of the Biennial’s artists on the rosters of the country’s four biggest galleries (that is, David Zwirner, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery).
The vast majority of participants do, however, hail from coastal hubs. Twenty-three, or 36 percent of the bunch, live and work in New York (or at least divide their time between there and another city); 12, or 19 percent, call Los Angeles home. (For comparison, in 2019, 51 percent of participants came from New York, and 11 came from L.A.)
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The 2022 Biennial also skews more international than other recent editions.
Sixteen artists, including Yto Barrada, Alfredo Jaar, and Duane Linklater, were born outside of the U.S. That accounts for a solid quarter of the participant list, a high mark last seen with the 2008 Biennial, in which more than a quarter of artists were foreign-born. That percentage decreased for each of the successive Biennials, dipping to 17 percent in 2019. 
Eleven of this edition’s artists live and work abroad, including three in Mexico (Mónica Arreola, Alejandro “Luperca” Morales, and Roberts) and two from Canada (Rebecca Belmore and Duane Linklater). 
“We wanted to make an exhibition that looks like what America really looks like,” Breslin told Artnet News in an interview, “which is a country of immigrants, a country of pressure along the border.”
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If you enter Michelle Stuart’s current New York solo show, “The Imprints of Time, 1969–2021,” expecting to see Land Art, you might feel confused. There is no documentation of large-scale sculptural interventions changing the face of the landscape—but make no mistake, many of these works involve the physical transformation of the earth.
For many years, the Los Angeles-born artist collected physical remnants of the earth during her travels around the world, bringing it back to the studio and painstakingly grinding piles of dirt and rocks onto thick sheets of paper to imbue it with natural earth tones. It’s a process that “reduces mountains to grains of sand,” art critic Lucy Lippard once wrote.
Now 89, Stuart has spent decades creating art that engages with natural environment, carefully archiving materials and breaking down eons of embodied time into orderly grids. Her literally groundbreaking career is set to be the subject of an upcoming documentary film, Michelle Stuart: Voyager, from director Karen Bellone and producer Karen S. Shapiro.
Ahead of the final days of her show at  Galerie Lelong, Artnet News spoke to Stuart about drawing inspiration from nature, working with the earth, and her lifelong determination to make art.
Michelle Stuart, Collection Table (for Rumpf) 1997. Photo courtesy of Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
To help understand your work, with its unusual approach to material and subject matter, it might help to go back to the beginning. What was your art education at Los Angeles’s Chouinard Art Institute, today part of CalArts, like?
It was terrible. I only went there briefly, because I didn’t like it that much. It was a boys’ schools, really. Some of the teachers were fine with women, but some weren’t. One of them said to me, “I don’t know why women bother to go to art school. There aren’t any women artists anyway. They must know that.” Of course, I was already determined, but I never forgot it. Can you imagine an art teacher saying that?
The one experience at Chouinard that was a positive one was that Bernard Leach, an English ceramist, and Shoji Hamada, a Japanese potter, came for a talk. I was in a clay class, so I went, and it was really a revelatory exploration.
Hamada just sat on the ground with a pot and a wheel, and showed us how he made pots. He didn’t speak English, so Leach of course translated for him, about how in Japan and Korea it was alright if there was a mistake in art, because only God was perfect. I thought it was a beautiful sentiment, not in any religious sense, but in the sense of espousing chance as a gift to the artist. It encapsulated the idea of time. It was a really memorable experience for me.
Michelle Stuart, Creation Myth (2020). Photo ©Michelle Stuart, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
You mentioned that you were already determined to be an artist when you got to art school. When did you first know that was your life goal?
Very early. I was very fortunate in having parents who appreciated art. My father loved words and books and my mother loved art. When I started making art as a child, my mother would put it on the walls and say “this is really good.”
In high school, I took a class at night with a Hungarian draftsman, Francis de Erdely, at Jepson Art Institute. My mother drove me since I was too young to drive. He had classes in drawing that were very traditional, with corpulent models. It was classical, in-the-round depth drawing. He would take the pencil from you and do his idea for what the arm or the leg should be right over your drawing. It was very European. But I learned how to draw with him. Really, I learned how to see.
Michelle Stuart, Islas Encantas: Seymour Island Cycle (1981–82). Photo courtesy of Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
It seems to me like your father’s work in mapping the landscape in preparation for installing water lines across California might have been an influence in the direction that your work ultimately took.
Well, yes and no. I was too young when he was doing that to really be influenced by that, but we traveled around California a lot. My father liked to show my mother and I the landscape, the desert, and the sea. And he gave me the gift of loving books. It takes a lot of different things to become an artist. Reading books and reading poetry, that’s part of the building structure of what you later feel when you see something.
How did you come to work as topographical draftsperson for the United States Army Corps of Engineers?
That happened because I needed a job. I got a job with an engineering and architectural firm as a draftsperson. I was good at it, and they were hired by the Army Corps of Engineers to map Korea, because the Korean War had started.
At that time, maps were translated from aerial photographs. But we had big aerial photos that were all over the wall, and we would make drawings with all the roads and where the buildings were situated. Once we inked them in India ink, then they were photographed. But I never saw the end product!
Michelle Stuart, El Florido (1978-79). Photo ©Michelle Stuart, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
Do you see any parallel between that work mapping the landscape and your work as an artist, literally translating the landscape onto paper you can hang on the wall?
I never thought about it actually. Everything you do influences your art. In a very obscure way, I ended up translating the surface of the earth. It’s a huge jump, but it’s not an impossible jump. But this is the first time I’ve ever explained what I did when I was drafting to anyone.
Well that’s my job as an art writer, to try and make connections, however obscure they might seem. But I’m curious then, what did give you the idea to use dirt, graphite, and other elements of the landscape for mark-making?
I can’t really say that one thing gave me the idea. Previously, I had been working in sculpture, and I started doing boxes of earth. I wanted to capture the earth. And at the same time, I was doing drawings of the surface of the moon. And then I took that and started thinking about the surface of the earth.
I used this heavier paper that I was actually familiar with from drafting. It’s muslin-backed, indefatigable paper. They don’t make it anymore, but it was it was made for mapmaking. I laid it on the surface of the earth and I started rubbing. I loved the way that it gave me itself. It embraced me as much as I embraced it. There was a kind of dialogue between the earth and me. That’s the only way I can put it.
After a couple of years, I went to McDowell Colony, where you could get away from New York City for a couple of months. They gave me a barn. I took all my paper up to this barn and I started putting the earth on top of the paper and smashing it in and rubbing it. It was not just the reflection of the rubbing of the earth. It was the indention of the earth, and the color of the earth.
Michelle Stuart working on one of her scrolls. Photo by Lorie Sebastian, courtesy of the artist.
Do you relate that work to the history of women’s labor and women’s work?
Are you reading Lucy [Lippard] now? [Laughs.] She does. I don’t, but that’s okay. I love Lucy. That’s her perception.
And is it true that the process would actually cause your hands to physically bleed?
That has, happened yes. Lucy said “masochistically”—but I certainly didn’t want that to happen. Some earth has so many hard edges, little pieces of quartz and things. I tried not to have that happen, but sometimes it did.
Michelle Stuart, Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns (1978-79). Photo ©Michelle Stuart, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
What was your relationship to the Land Art movement when it was first becoming part of the art discourse? Was it something you consciously considered yourself to be part of? 
I wasn’t actively thinking about it, but of course you can’t escape knowing a little bit about different concepts that are going on.
I was invited to Oregon to do a solstice piece in 1978 [at the now-defunct Portland Center for the Visual Arts]. And I said, “Can I do a Land Art piece?” And they said yes, but they only had a pittance amount of money for the show. So I had to pay to fly back and forth, but they got me an assistant, and they found a man who wanted to get rid of his rocks. He had horses, and they were always falling over them.
We went to see this gentleman. He gave us this pickup truck and said “take all the rocks that you want.” It was the best exercise in the world. Picking up all these rocks, taking them to the site, and building it was a great adventure. We camped out there.
We had to figure out where the north south axis would be, and where the sun was going to come up and where it would set. And it worked beautifully. [The final piece, titled Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns, is Stuart’s sole surviving earth work.]
The difference [from the larger Land Art movement] was that most of my works were of the moment. I didn’t do things that I wanted to last forever. People were building monumental earthworks and they bought they land so they would be there as long as possible. That was not in my mind. For me, these were transitory works, for those who wanted to go and participate in them.
Michelle Stuart, Niagara Gorge Path Relocated (1975). Photo by George MacDonald, ©Michelle Stuart, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
That was certainly the case with Niagara Gorge Path Relocated, one of your best-known earthworks, which you created in 1975 at Artpark in Lewiston, New York.
It was the first large piece that I did. It lasted about a month. It was all about time, land and time. I researched the area and found it had been the original site of Niagara Falls 12,000 years ago. So I reiterated the falls with one of my scrolls, but it was 460 feet long. The paper came in 30-foot increments and I had to sew all the segments together by hand.
But I have to admit, I had helpers. It’s the only time that I’ve ever done [rubbings] that I ever shared the experience. I was doing the piece up on top of the plateau, and these young people would come by and they said, “oh, what are you doing? Oh, we love that!” So I said “here, join the club!”
Putting the piece down was kind of hair-raising. But it was a lovely endeavor, and all the other artists in Artpark helped out—all of them guys, of course.
And the site there, it was an escarpment where you could see all the different layers of stratification in the earth. You’ve also done work with quarries. What appeals to you about the way that the landscape reveals layers of history just by looking at it? 
The landscape shows you things you never pay attention to. They’re all taken for granted. A 1,000 years can be a little strain of strata that goes through the earth. When you have a gorge or there’s been a big dig in a quarry, it opens up the world as it appeared before us, millions of years.
When I was a child, my father used to take me to Rancho La Brea, which is now La Brea Tar Pits. LACMA was not there. It was all tar pits where animals of the Pleistocene Age had gone to get water and been caught in the tar. There were extinct animals and plants, and it was revelatory to me as a child. They have a museum now with a big elephant, but when I was a child, they only had a concrete sculpture of a saber tooth tiger.
The incredible beauty of the stratification of the earth gives us is insight into our past. Different time produced different colors and different minerals. It’s a song of the past, really, when you think about it. Most people do not look at the landscape that way. But the real landscape is time. It’s a timescape.
La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles, California. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images.
One of the pieces in the show, Extinct, has all these plant specimens that you collected. I wonder when you’re looking at this history of the earth, are you looking ahead to the future with the fear of the consequences of human activity? 
Of course, I’m very interested in that. It’s hard to delineate those ideas. Just as its hard for artists to do political proselytizing without being incredibly boring, it’s hard to make art and say what you profoundly feel about what we’re doing to our planet. You have to do a kind of a dance between the poetry of life and the kind of disaster we’re heading for.
It’s very hard to be subtle about something like extinction. I try to be, because I want it to be art, but it’s hard to make it art and make it strong so that people feel it. It’s hard to make it say something, and still have it be art.
But those were not really extinct plants—there was a rose in there. It was a metaphor. It was taking plants that we love and saying, “there’s a possibility these will no longer exist.” But that was 1990 or ’91 when I made that work, and now it’s true. Now we’re really at the abyss.
Michelle Stuart, Extinct (1992). Photo ©Michelle Stuart, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
On a different note, that piece is also a great an example of the way that you kind of use an organizing grid, creating almost like an inventory that feels very scientific in its approach. Where does that come from?
I always liked science. I was very interested in it when I was in school. I half considered archaeology as a profession, but I was better at art and I was terrible at math. I always liked the structure of things. The grid gives me a beautiful structure. It’s there to hang chaos on. You can use to talk about time, because the breaking up of space is calendrical.
My seed drawings started as a calendar thing. I thought of their growth period. A seed is so positive. Embedded within it is everything it is, and it grows to repeat itself, so it lives forever. It’s kind of immutable.
I remember reading about an archeological dig in China where they found all those clay soldiers. The archaeologists on that dig unearthed a boat, and there had been some lotus seeds in the boat. They said to themselves, “I wonder if these seeds still are viable.” And in fact, they were. They were thousands years old, but a couple of them sprouted. And I thought, this is the most beautiful, positive thought. We can destroy everything. And yet buried somewhere, there is going to be the life force.
So I started doing those calendars, which I think are kind of positive views of our badness.
Michelle Stuart, Seed Calendar: One Month Five Days in Bali, Java and Sulewesi 1994). Photo courtesy of Galerie Lelong and Co., New York.
I want to note that you’ve collected these seeds and other natural materials from your travels around the world. What are some of the challenges of working this way?
Sometimes it’s impossible! I went to Hawaii, and they wouldn’t let me take anything. California doesn’t like it either. New York doesn’t give a shit. You can bring almost anything into New York. This city is not agricultural. I’ve brought stuff in from South America, from all over, but I don’t take it from anyplace where I would damage anything, and I don’t bring back any bugs. You have to be careful about that.
And how do you pack? Is your carry-on suitcase just full of dirt? 
I just put it in boxes. And I’ve been known to hide it!
“Michelle Stuart: The Imprints of Time, 1969–2021” is on view at Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, New York, February 24–March 26, 2022.
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It sounds like a riddle: What kind of opera house has no stage, and what sort of library has no books?
The answer is the Haskell Free Library, which sits on the border between the United States and Canada. The site doubles as the set for a new film by former Turner Prize joint-winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan, which debuts this week at the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA). 
The Victorian-era building, which hosts an opera house and a library, was originally constructed to provide education and cultural enrichment to the border communities located directly on the 45th parallel in between Rock Island, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont.
One half of the structure, including most of the opera seats, is located on U.S. land; the other half, which includes the library and the stage, is in Canada. (Now you understand the joke about it being the only library in the U.S. without books and the only opera house in the U.S. with no stage.)
Jeffrey Gibson, I AM YOUR RELATIVE, MOCA Toronto (2022). Co-commissioned by MOCA and the Toronto Biennial of Art. Photos Toni Hafkenschied.
What makes this library and opera house so resonant, according to artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, is the way it illustrates how borders are in fact not lines, but rather densely layered legal and judicial spaces. Such questions about space, race, national identity, and land are at the heart of the entire edition of this biennial, which, after a year of pandemic-related delays, runs from March 26 through June 5. 
“​​What Water Knows, The Land Remembers,” curated by Candice Hopkins, Katie Lawson and Tairone Bastien, features work by more than 40 artists and includes formats ranging from workshops, guided walks, and artist talks to podcasts and storytelling sessions. 
A total of 23 projects across nine venues were commissioned specifically for the occasion. “We are a commissioning biennial and conceive of exhibitions and public/learning projects alongside each other,” Patrizia Libralato, TBA’s executive director and founder, told Artnet News. “We see ourselves as a convening organization, bringing partners together with a collaborative approach critical to all we do.”
One of those commissioned projects is Hamdan’s film, 45th Parallel. The work introduces viewers to the library, which has no entrance from Canada (there is, however, an emergency exit on the Canadian side of the building and patrons from Canada are permitted to enter the U.S. door without reporting to customs). The film also revisits a tragedy that took place against the backdrop of the library in 2010, when a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot an unarmed 15-year-old Mexican national across the border.
Judy Chicago in collaboration with Pyro Spectaculars by Souza, Diamonds in the Sky (2021). Fireworks performance, Belen, NM. © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; © Donald Woodman/ARS, New York
Hamdan is not alone in exploring local history and institutions in this edition of the biennial. Artist Judy Chicago is preparing Tribute to Toronto, a new site-specific performance on June 4. Visible from the shores of Lake Ontario, the work—part of her ongoing “Atmospheres” series—consists of non-toxic colored smoke released from a barge. It’s Chicago’s first-ever work on water.
“One of my goals is to offer viewers the opportunity to look intently at the glory of the natural environment,” Chicago told Artnet News, “one that is threatened with the destructive forces of climate change and human encroachment.”
The biennial is also presenting a number of research-intensive projects. The curators found themselves repeatedly returning to and sharing with partners a text by Mohawk artist Ange Loft, “Indigenous Context and Concepts for Toronto,” which the biennial commissioned for its 2019 edition. They also plan to distribute a new commission, a Black History Navigational Toolkit, by artist Camille Turner and writer Yaniya Lee. 
Camille Turner, Nave (2021–22). Video installation. Commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art.
Summing up the ethos of the biennial, curator Tairone Bastien said it “is unique in its commitment to unpack the complex historical context where the biennial takes place.”
All of TBA 2022’s events, programs, and exhibitions can be viewed here.
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