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      In Pictures: See Crowds Lose Themselves in Artist Tomás Saraceno’s Immersive Spiderweb Environment at the Shed

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      Ever wondered what it would be like to live the life of a spider? For eight minutes at a time, visitors to the Shed in Manhattan can climb onto a giant trapeze-like installation that simulates the vibrations of a spider spinning its web underneath you. A soundtrack plays in the background featuring the amplified sounds of spiders communicating with one another and moving in their surroundings.
      The experience is the main feature of “Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s),” the artist and activist’s largest U.S.-based exhibition, on view through April 17. The installation, commissioned by the Shed and titled Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web, extends across the entire 17,000-square-foot McCourt space, with other works by the artist taking over the second- and fourth-level galleries.
      “At the heart of Tomás Saraceno’s work is a new way of inhabiting and experiencing the world, one that centers on an ecologically post-fossil fuels future,” Shed curator Emma Enderby said in a statement. “Tomás presents the necessity to reevaluate how we perceive and operate in the world and what to expect from it, which he achieves through interconnected, nonhierarchical collaborations across the human and nonhuman.”
      Tomás Saraceno, We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air (detail), (2019–22). Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo courtesy the Shed.
      The artist’s concerns with “activating ideas toward post-fossil fuel life on Earth” have led him to enact many long-term projects that are both a call to action for like-minded activists, and analyses of how different demographics are affected by climate change.
      In the work We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air, Saraceno was inspired by medical ethicist Harriet A. Washington to conduct research on the uneven distribution of pollutants based on geopolitical affiliation and race. In the iteration of the work on view at the Shed, the artist collected filter tapes from regulation agencies in the U.S. to find the highest concentration of pollutants by region.
      Described as “readymades created by the atmosphere itself,” the paper strips capture particulate matter, otherwise invisible, to help visualize the unseen forces in the atmosphere.
      Another highlight is the DIT (Do-It-Together) sculpture Museo Aero Solar, a pulsing accumulation of plastic bags—a patchwork of capitalist consumption reclaimed and transformed into art. The sculpture, made of thousands of bags from more than 30 countries, floats in the air without fossil fuels, modeling a world that Saraceno is hoping to help build.
      See more images of the exhibition below.
      Tomas Saraceno. Photo: Robert Rieger.
      Installing “Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web,” 2022. © Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2022.
      Tomás Saraceno, A Thermodynamic Imaginary, (2020). Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Neugerriemschneider.
      Tomás Saraceno, Printed Matter(s), (2018). Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; Andersen’s, Copenhagen; Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa; Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Courtesy the Shed.
      : Tomás Saraceno, A Thermodynamic Imaginary, (2020).Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
      Tomás Saraceno, Webs of At-tent(s)-ion (detail), (2020).e. Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; spider/webs; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo courtesy The Shed.
      Tomás Saraceno, How to entangle the universe in a spider/web?, (2020). Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist and Aerocene Foundation; Andersen’s, Copenhagen; Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa; and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Courtesy The Shed.
      Tomás Saraceno, Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web (2022). Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Commissioned by The Shed. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; Neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Andersen’s, Copenhagen; Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires; and Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa. Courtesy The Shed.
      Tomás Saraceno and Aerocene, Museo Aero Solar (detail), (2007-). Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy AeroceneFoundation. Photo courtesy The Shed.
      Tomás Saraceno, A Thermodynamic Imaginary, (2020).Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin.
      Tomás Saraceno, Museo Aero Solar (2007-). Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy Aerocene Foundation.
      “Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s)” is on view at the Shed, 545 West 30th Street, New York, February 11–April 17, 2022.
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      A Moving New Play About Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Collaboration With Andy Warhol Explores the Price of Artistic Immortality

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      Arriving at London’s Young Vic theater to see a new play about Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, I was thrust into the thick of 1980s New York. Basquiat’s signature SAMO tags were scrawled throughout the theater, while a record-scratching DJ was spinning hip-hop and disco in an effort to recreate the electricity of Studio 54. Onstage sat several reproductions of Basquiat paintings. “That’s the $110 million Basquiat—there,” I whispered to my partner as we sat down.
      It’s hard to talk about Basquiat these days without nodding to the insatiable appetite for his work on the contemporary art market. Written by Anthony McCarten and directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, The Collaboration—which, after its run in London ends on April 2 will head to Broadway, before being adapted for the Hollywood screen—knows this.
      The drama gives us a fictionalized take on the real collaboration between two titans of art history. It also advances something of a cautionary tale about the toll that the cynical forces of the art market take on artistic expression.
      The action opens at Bruno Bischofberger’s eponymous downtown gallery. The Swiss art dealer and Warhol are taking in work by Basquiat, whose star is rising fast. “He’s mine now,” Bischofberger declares, as he announces a scheme to pair the two artists together in a selling exhibition, a cynical PR stunt which he hopes will generate a healthy profit.
      Jeremy Pope and Paul Bettany in The Collaboration. ©Marc Brenner.
      McCarten has written both artists as reluctant to collaborate, which is a simplification and less than historically accurate—but their hesitation opens the space to establish one of the central tensions of the play: both are disenchanted, in their own ways, with the mercantile machinations of the contemporary art market.
      Paul Bettany’s laconic, whiny Warhol acridly bemoans the art world’s tendency to move onto the next hot thing. Jeremy Pope’s restless, babyish Basquiat, meanwhile, is already fed up with a “so white” establishment and his place within it as a Black man. Why can’t his talent survive on its own without hitching his wagon to Warhol’s star? And how come his graffiti is elevated to art that sells for $60,000 when equally talented contemporaries, such as his friend Michael Stewart, are arrested for defacing public property?
      The titular collaboration itself begins in Andy Warhol’s ascetic studio, conjured in Anna Fleischle’s set design using recreations of Warhol’s Marilyns and Campbell Soup cans to adorn the walls. There, it becomes apparent that the two artists have very different ideas about what art should be.
      Basquiat, who paints with spiritual fervor and believes paintings can be imbued with supernatural powers declares Warhol’s mechanically reproduced works to be bereft of soul. “I’m Dizzy Gillespie, blowing a riff, he’s one of those pianos that plays all by itself,” he shrugs. For his part, Warhol defends his theory of art: “I’m trying to make art that forces you to ignore it, the same way we’re ignoring life.”
      The second act is where the play really comes to life, as the action jumps forward a couple of years to Basquiat’s messy downtown studio. The two men have grown closer. Their walls have come down and a few tender moments relay their character outside of their cultivated public personae. Basquiat’s infectious spirit has disrupted Warhol’s detached performance of himself, exposing his self-loathing and trauma after being shot a few years earlier. 
      Meanwhile, Basquiat is deteriorating. Grappling with his own trauma, a worsening heroin addiction, and the indifference of the art industry, he turns to nihilism, stuffing his fridge full of cash, Cristal, and caviar.
      The climax of the play comes after Michael Stewart is brutally beaten by police in a subway station, and Basquiat begins to paint his friend in an effort to heal him—the work ultimately becomes Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart). When Basquiat finds out that his friend has died from his injuries, he explodes at Warhol, distraught at his art’s inability to resurrect the dead.
      Jeremy Pope in The Collaboration. ©Marc Brenner.
      In a review of Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film, Basquiat, the curator Okwui Enwezor once derided the painter-turned-director for reducing the nuances of Basquiat’s life to a simplified narrative about a Black artist losing a “Faustian wager with fame, money and the white art world.” Schnabel was wrong; Basquiat didn’t sell his soul to the art market. But nearly three decades on, the market has taken it anyway. Basquiat the man has been totally swallowed up by Basquiat the brand. (Perhaps Schnabel’s film even played a role in cementing that brand.) McCarten and Kwei-Armah’s drama gets this. It resurrects Basquiat the man briefly—but doesn’t stop reminding us of what is to come either. 
      The drama comes to a close shortly after Warhol emotionally implores “Jean-Michel Basquiat… I order you to live forever…” There are layers of dramatic irony to this line; we all know Basquiat tragically died of a heroin overdose at 27. We also know that Warhol’s prophecy comes true—but in true Warholian fashion. The exhortation calls back to the first act, when Warhol hits us over the head with a more cynical message: “We’re not painters anymore, Jean. We’re brands. Well, you’re almost a giant brand, and after this exhibition with me you will be too. Then just watch the language change, Jean. People will have to ‘have you’ suddenly… And not you. Not you. Your paintings.”
      The Collaboration doesn’t get into the lukewarm critical reception the pair’s joint show actually received, which played a role in Basquiat’s subsequent decline. The omission is possibly because to today’s audience, that hardly matters anymore. It’s the Basquiat brand that has been immortalized. He is today’s top-selling contemporary artist, and his work is used to sell everything from skateboards to Tiffany’s diamonds.
      As the lights fade at the Young Vic, you hear the voice of Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker come over the speaker, a snippet of the historic moment in 2017 when that same skull painting I picked out at the beginning of the play sold for “$98 million!” That would be the highest ever price ever for a U.S artist—finally unseating Andy Warhol. It’s haunting.
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      Both Reviled and Revered, La Malinche Has Been Called the Mother of Mexico. A New Exhibition Explores Her Evolving Image

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      Temptress and turncoat. Mother of a new nation. Chicana heroine. 
      La Malinche has lived many lives in the cultural imagination since her death in the 16th century, as generations of people have appropriated her image to promote their own political agendas. Now, a landmark exhibition at the Denver Art Museum (DAM) explores the complex legacy of the woman and her impact on artistic culture on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border—the first major scholarly presentation to do so.
      An enslaved Nahua woman who became Hernán Cortés’s interpreter and consort during his conquest of the Aztec Empire, La Malinche proved to be a key actor in one of the defining moments of world history. Whether she did so willingly or not, we don’t know. In fact, there’s much we don’t know about her life. And yet, for five hundred years, La Malinche has loomed large in modern Mexican legend.   
      That much is evidenced by the 68 artworks that make up “Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche,” on view at DAM through May 8, 2022. (Following its presentation at DAM, the exhibition will travel to the Albuquerque Museum and the San Antonio Museum of Art). It’s an important presentation that doubles as a statement unto itself.
      Antonio Ruiz, La Malinche (El Sueño de la Malinche) (1939). Photo: Jesús Sánchez Uribe.
      The show took six years to pull together, with independent curator Terezita Romo working along with Victoria I. Lyall, DAM’s curator of Art of the Ancient Americas, and Matthew H. Robb, chief curator at the UCLA’s Fowler Museum. 
      “This is the first time there’s ever been an exhibition like this,” explained Romo. “Even in Mexico, La Malinche’s story is always connected to Cortés—it’s always about the conquest. This exhibition really pushes that out. It’s more about this young indigenous teenager and what she did in terms, not only surviving, but of actually changing history.” 
      The show is broken down into five sections, each devoted to a different personification of La Malinche’s legacy. The first, “La Lengua” (or “The Interpreter”), examines her role as an interlocutor between the Aztec and Spanish peoples, from Cortés’s first written description of her as “la lengua que yo tengo” (“my tongue”)—an appellative he used instead of acknowledging her name—to posthumous depictions of her as a woman empowered by language. 
      Next comes “La Indígena” (“The Indigenous Woman”), which looks at how the racial designations imposed upon her by conquistadors forms the foundation of her mythology, an otherized object of beauty from a defeated people; and “La Madre de Mestizaje” (“The Mother of a Mixed Race”), an exploration of how, in the wake of the Mexican revolution, the country adopted La Malinche, the mother of Cortés first son, as as a symbol of a new mixed race. 
      Santa Barraza, La Malinche (1991). © Santa Barraza. Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
      By far the biggest section of the show, “La Traidora” (“The Traitor”), focuses on the way La Malinche was depicted throughout much of the 20th century—as a person who turned her back on her people, inviting generations of ethnic cleansing. (Roma points out that the most prominent examples of this depiction “mainly came from men, which is not a coincidence.”) It was during this time that the word “malinchista” was popularized as a pejorative term for someone who prefers foreign cultures to their own. Even today, it’s through that word that most Mexicans know La Malinche at all. 
      “One of the things we wanted to accomplish with the retelling of this story was to have those visitors who are familiar with her story reexamine their preconceived notions and to really understand how pernicious some of those metaphors can be,” said Lyall. “That her name is the basis of a slur that’s quite popular—this is a way of passively emphasizing the sexist and misogynistic view of a woman’s influence.” 
      In response to this period of denigration, La Malinche was reclaimed as an icon of the Chicana movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. This is the subject of the fifth and last part of the show, a section that extends to today, looking at how her image has been embraced by a number of different communities, from feminists to trans activists.
      Jesús Helguera, La Malinche (1941). © Calendarios Landin.
      Despite the myriad ways in which La Malinche’s mythology has been exploited, she’s always resisted reduction, explained Romo. 
      “That has always been the core of what has interested me about her—she was such a complex being,” the curator said. “It’s what makes her so powerful: she elicits these different representations from people.” 
      Thanks to their work, more people will be bringing their own contemporary interpretations to her story. Prior to the opening of the show, DAM launched a series of outreach programs, trying to both gauge the perception of La Malinche in the community and educate people about her story.
      “The best comment we had was, ‘How come there isn’t a Disney princess movie about her?’” Lyall recalled, laughing. “That was definitely not the avenue we wanted to go, but to me it really underlined how, even if our visitors don’t know who La Malinche is, once they hear her story, they are hooked.”
      Jorge González Camarena, Lapareja (The couple) (1964). © Fundación Cultural Jorge González Camarena, AC. Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
      “Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche,” is on view at the Denver Art Museum now through May 8, 2022. It will travel to the Albuquerque Museum from June 11–September 4, 2022, and the San Antonio Museum of Art from October 14, 2022–January 08, 2023.
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      The Artists and Curator Behind the Russia Pavilion Have Pulled Out of the Venice Biennale Amid the Ongoing War in Ukraine

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      The artists and curator responsible for the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale resigned over the weekend as the Russian Federation’s offensive into Ukraine continued for a fourth bloody day. The pavilion in the Giardini will now remain closed for the 2022 edition of the prestigious art world event.
      Artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov, and the pavilion’s curator, Raimundas Malašauskas, each announced their immediate resignation from the pavilion on social media on Sunday, February 27. The commissioning body behind the pavilion also acknowledged the move on its Instagram, confirming that the pavilion would remain closed for the 59th Venice Biennale, which opens in mid-April.
      “There is nothing left to say, there is no place for art when civilians are dying under the fire of missiles, when citizens of Ukraine are hiding in shelters [and] when Russian protestors are getting silenced,” Savchenkov wrote in an emotional statement posted to Instagram. “As a Russian-born, I won’t be presenting my work at Venice.”
      The news of their withdrawal comes just days after the team behind the Ukrainian pavilion also announced that they had to stop all work on their exhibition due to the invasion. “I would do the same in their place,” Pavlo Makov, the artist who was set to represent Ukraine, told Artnet News, in response to the Russians’ announcements.
      On February 24, Russia invaded the neighboring European nation of Ukraine with a multidirectional attack across the country. The attack has spurred a refugee crisis, causing more than 500,000 people to flee the country in just four days. Those remaining in the country, and especially the major cities, are under constant threat of air strikes.
      “This war is politically and emotionally unbearable,” wrote curator Malašauskas, a Lithuanian who was born in the Soviet Union, in his statement. He added that the “people from Russia should not be bullied or cast-away solely due to their country’s oppressive policies.”
      On Monday, the Italian organization acknowledged the decision in a statement to the press: “La Biennale expresses its complete solidarity for this noble act of courage and stands beside the motivations that have led to this decision, which dramatically epitomizes the tragedy that has beset the entire population of Ukraine,” it said.
      The biennale statement added a condemnation of “all those who use violence to prevent dialogue and peace.”
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      As Four Major Italian Museums Sell NFT Reproductions of Masterpieces, Some Say Digital Editions Could Be Better Than the Real Thing

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      Cash-strapped museums suffering from a drop in visitor numbers and income during the pandemic may have found a lifeline in the form of a new partnership with a tech company and a commercial gallery.
      Four major Italian museums, including the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, have signed onto an ambitious project that will see them sell editioned digital replicas of priceless masterpieces from their collections as NFTs.
      The project debuted at London’s Unit gallery, in an exhibition titled “Eternalizing Art History,” which displayed digital replicas of six famous Italian masterpieces by the likes of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. These authorized digital copies are shown on digital screens set within handmade replicas of the artworks’ original frames. Each of the digital works (dubbed DAWs by the tech company that made them, Cinello) has been certified on the Ethereum blockchain and can be traded as an NFT. They are available in editions of nine—a common edition size for sculptural works—that are priced at between €100,000 and €250,000 ($114,000–$284,000) apiece.
      The participating museums—Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera and Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, and the Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta di Parma—have signed off on the reproductions in exchange for 50 percent of the net revenue from the sale of the works, which will fund their art conservation programs. (The remaining 50 percent is split evenly between the gallery and its tech partner).
      Leonardo da Vinci, Ritratto di Musico (Portrait of a Musician), conceived in 1490, digitized in 2021 DAW® (Digital Artwork). Image by Eva Herzog.
      The move is part of a broader effort to tour works that cannot be moved due to their fragile state of conservation, and to show them to audiences experiencing more limited travel options. But, as professor Guido Guerzoni of Bocconi University said at the unveiling of the exhibition, the commercial endeavor is about more than just reaching new audiences.
      “Museums need revolution if they want to survive,” he said. “In one year of the pandemic, European museums lost 70 percent of their visitors, and between 70 and 80 percent of their revenues. These numbers are impressive but the Italian situation was even worse. If we consider only state-owned museums [… ] this was 85 percent of visitors and almost 90 percent of their revenue.”
      The professor added that while the pandemic forced museums to reconnect with local audiences, this strategy is not sustainable in the long run for museums like the Uffizi, which rely on revenue from international tourism. In the absence of physical visitors, museums rushed to deploy digital strategies to reach audiences—which themselves require a huge investment—but few of these digital initiatives have actually been successful revenue generators. Initiatives like this, which may have been regarded as “unthinkable” a few short years ago, are now being lauded as entrepreneurial solutions to the real world problems institutions are facing.
      Joe Kennedy, director of Unit London, told Artnet News that there has been “overwhelming interest” in the project so far, with five sales confirmed, and a further 12-15 expected to be confirmed by next week.
      Raffaello Santi (Raffaello Sanzio), Madonna del Cardellino (Madonna of the Goldfinch). Conceived in 1506, digitized in 2021 DAW® (Digital Artwork). Courtesy of Le Gallerie degli Uffizi (Florence) and Cinello.
      Audiences at the opening were divided on a philosophical question: whether experiencing the digital reproductions could ever be considered a like-for-like experience with standing in front of their originals. “The DAWs are not intended to compete with the original paintings. It’s important to recognize that they are reproductions,” Unit’s Joe Kennedy told Artnet News, adding that their mobility allows them to reach new audiences and reveal the fascinating history and context of the original paintings. “They act as a storytelling tool which ensures these iconic works live on through new generations of art enthusiasts and only enhances the magical experience of viewing the original painting in person.”
      But in an age where the metaverse and NFTs are in fashion, this view of the sacredness of the original—while perhaps shared by this reporter—might not be the only answer to this question. Panelist Serena Tabacchi, Cinello’s partnership manager, considered the experiences indistinguishable, and artist Misan Harriman postulated that getting up close and personal with the high quality copies could offer an “even better” experience for audiences. 
      “I don’t know if the aura of the original is the same thing in our time,” art historian and Unesco Florence director Carlo Francini said, referencing Walter Benjamin’s seminal text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which argued that the “aura”—or the unique aesthetic authority of a work of art—is absent from a mechanically produced copy. “Maybe now we are totally evolved digital spirits.” 
      Installation view, “Eternalizing Art History,” Unit London, Image by Eva Herzog.
      Indeed, if the “Immersive Van Gogh” phenomenon has taught us nothing else it is that people—some of whom may never have an interest in seeing the originals—will flock, and pay well, to experience digital reproductions. To some of these audiences, the copies of masterpieces by Leonardo, Caravaggio, Rafael, Modigliani, and Francesco Hayez could hold just as much sway as their originals. 
      While the initiative seems like a no-brainer for museums, which have educational missions, and bank accounts to fill, the idea raises an interesting quandary. Considering the fragile state of conservation of many of these masterpieces—cited as one of the motives for the project—it is very well possible that these digital copies could outlast their original counterparts. Which in turn begs the question of institutional responsibility concerning ownership of these priceless objects, and whether they should be so cavalier about them disappearing into private hands.
      “Eternalizing Art History: From Da Vinci to Modigliani” is on view at Unit London through March 19. 
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      Walter Price, Julie Mehretu, and Amy Sillman on the Works They Made in Honor of Toni Morrison for a New Exhibition on the Author

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      The late, great Toni Morrison, a giant of U.S. literature, died in 2019, at the age of 88. (Her 90th birthday would have been this Friday.) Her absence looms large in the American culture—which is why the author was a natural subject for New Yorker critic Hilton Als’s latest curatorial outing at David Zwirner Gallery.
      The group exhibition, “Toni Morrison’s Black Book,” is named after her 1974 book, a visual scrapbook presenting a variety of historical sources about African Americans. (It follows Als’s Zwirner tribute to another Black writer, James Baldwin, as well solo shows he organized about Alice Neel and Frank Moore.)
      There was no shortage of artists eager to participate in the tribute to Morrison. The final list includes Walter Price, Julie Mehretu, Amy Sillman, Joseph Cornell, Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, Helen Marcus, Chris Ofili, Irving Penn, and James Van Der Zee, among others.
      We spoke to Price, Mehretu, and Sillman about their relationship to Morrison’s work, the importance of her legacy, and how the author inspired their contributions to the exhibition.

      Walter Price
      Walter Price, Thinly coded language (2019). © Walter Price. Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York.
      I had not heard of the The Black Book before being approached by Hilton. From the beginning, I thought Hilton’s concept was profound. He made a show that we can see and feel, a show that brings together great artists to express the gratitude of Toni’s legacy. Within those cold white walls, Hilton has given us the warmth of emotions.
      When I made the works for the show, I was specifically thinking about The Black Book. I thought about the magic of Henry Box Brown escaping [slavery] in a three-foot box. I thought about Jack Johnson’s strength and shamelessness to continue to box under unfair rules. I thought about Bessie Smith being a pioneer of the blues.
      Toni Morrison is such an important author because she has expressed the complexities of Black life. She speaks to the Black audience, while diminishing the role of the white audience. I think that is very clever and important. Toni Morrison’s writing resonates with me for because I can feel it!

      Julie Mehretu
      Julie Mehretu, A Mercy (after T. Morrison) (2019-20). © Julie Mehretu. Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman.
      I have known of The Black Book for a long time. There are archives of blackness that are essential pillars of the culture. The Black Book, along with The Image of the Black in Western Art, FESTAC ’77 by Chimurenga, the 1619 Project by Nicole Hannah Smith, and many more, are crucial books and collections of visual archives.
      I made the painting for this show specifically in response to re-reading A Mercy during the late spring weeks of quarantine, just after Hilton approached me about the project. It is a book that goes back to the origin of the making of this country and the various struggles and violences in that endeavor. We were in the midst of a wildly out-of-control pandemic with a criminally absent and vacant leader at the helm of the most powerful nation of the world. The precarity and far-right nativist political vertiginousness of our time was extremely palpable and terrifying.
      The underpainting of this piece was created from a Rorschach of the inverse of an image from the white supremacist United the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. It’s a blurred image that creates spectral forms that play with the subliminal and the visceral haunting and fear being regurgitated by white supremacy, and generated by the years of the Trump administration. The painting is a direct response to both to those sources and the book A Mercy.

      Amy Sillman
      Amy Sillman, Paradise, (An Alphabet for Miss Morrison) (2021). © Amy Sillman.
      In response to Hilton’s invitation, I had the idea to invent an alphabet for Toni Morrison, or a set of letters somewhere between an alphabet and hieroglyphics. I made a big stack of drawings based on the bodies in her novels, how they appeared, moved, leaned, etc. Then Hilton and I collaborated by arranging nine of the letters into a word to be “read” from left to right.
      When I saw the whole show, I realized that Hilton had created a whole in-between zone, somewhere between a written essay and a visual exhibition, where everything was transitive: figures became letters, sculptures became stories, photographs were narratives, a handwritten letter was a picture, artworks were artifacts, and vice versa, all crisscrossing back to the work of Toni Morrison, whose powerful imagination invokes a world in which all conditions and relations could be different.
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      An Immersive Art Installation Designed to Be Experienced With Closed Eyes Will Headline a Rebranded Festival of Brexit in the U.K.

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      An ambitious immersive artwork designed “to be experienced with your eyes closed” will begin touring around the U.K. in May as part of the rebrand of a pricey initiative originally planned for the celebration of Brexit.
      Inspired by an experimental 1959 creation by artist-inventor Brion Gysin, Dreamachine promises audiences—with their eyes closed—an opportunity to experience colorful, kaleidoscopic patterns and hallucinated visions created by flickering light. The experience will be accompanied by a tailor-made soundscape, as well as what organizers describe as one of the largest scientific research projects to take a deep dive into the collective human psyche.
      Bryon Gysin, right, and his Dream Machine, with William Burroughs, ca. 1970, London.
      The work is a collaborative effort spearheaded by Collective Art, which brings together Turner Prize-winning artists Assemble and Grammy- and Mercury-nominated composer Jon Hopkins together with a team of technologists, scientists, and philosophers. It is one of the 10 projects commissioned as part of “Unboxed: Creativity in the U.K.,” formerly known as the “Festival of Brexit,” the £120 million ($163 million) extravaganza initiated by Theresa May’s government to celebrate British culture after the country cut ties with the European Union. The festival is funded by the four governments of the U.K.—England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales—and commissioned in partnership with Belfast City Council, Creative Wales, and EventScotland.
      The work will tour London, Cardiff, Belfast, and Edinburgh between May and October 2022, presented with Cardiff Council, Northern Ireland Science Festival, W5 Belfast, Edinburgh International Festival, and Edinburgh Science Festival. More than 100,000 visitors are expected to be able to experience this mysterious work for free.
      Collective Art, Dreamachine (2022). Photo: Christa Holka.
      Gysin’s original vision was to create a device that could replace television, allowing each individual to “create” their own cinematic experiences by immersing themselves into the images generated by the flickering light. Gysin hoped such unique viewing experiences could keep people away from passive consumption of mass-produced media.
      More than six decades later, Collective Art pushes Gysin’s vision further, creating an immersive environment woven from layers of music, technology, neuroscience, philosophy, and architecture. Visitors are led to a room and seated in front of the machine with their eyes closed. A soundtrack by Hopkins, who has worked with Brian Eno and Coldplay, guides visitors to a transcendental state.
      Audiences will be asked to participate in the science research project “Perception Census” to look into “the unseen diversity of the nation’s inner worlds,” organizers said. Details of the project, as well as dates, ticketing information, and venues, will be announced in late March.
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      in Exhibitions

      The Most Significant Hans Holbein Show to Grace a U.S. Museum in 40 Years Is a Rare Chance to Bask in His Splendorous Paintings

      by

      He might technically be “the younger,” but he still died 500 years ago. He’s also responsible for the best painting show in New York right now.
      I’m speaking, of course, of Hans Holbein the Younger, the German-Swiss artist who pushed Renaissance painting to new heights in the 16th century. Beginning in Basel, and later in England, where he served as court painter to King Henry VIII, Holbein made his mark with portraits of nobles, merchants, and scholars. Many of these works form a quietly momentous survey currently on view at the Morgan Library and Museum.
      “Holbein: Capturing Character,” as the show is called, is billed as one of the only major solo exhibitions dedicated to the painter ever mounted in the United States. It might be the last we’re treated to in our lifetimes, too, being the product of the kind of intercontinental, inter-institutional collaboration that is exceptionally rare and exceptionally expensive.
      “Holbein’s paintings and drawings are the crown jewels of museums that own them,” the show’s organizers, John McQuillen and Austėja Mackelaitė, said in a joint email to Artnet News. “Such institutions can be reluctant to part with their most prized pieces. Many of the works are also fragile, which can make travel difficult or even impossible.” 
      Hans Holbein the Younger, A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (Anne Lovell?) (ca. 1526–28). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
      Indeed, logistical concerns with loans, transport, and insurance were among the biggest obstacles McQuillen, Mackelaitė, and their fellow organizer, Getty Museum curator Anne Woollett, had to overcome in putting the show together. The multi-year process was made all the more complicated by the pandemic. 
      The Holbein exhibition actually debuted last fall at the Getty in Los Angeles, but that version and the one on view at the Morgan differ in significant ways. Some institutions only agreed to loan certain prized pieces for a short period of time, allowing for inclusion in one, but not both, shows. The Frick, for example, lent Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More to the Morgan, and his painting of Thomas Cromwell to the Getty. Both pieces rank among the portraitist’s best. 
      All in all, the exhibition features loans from 10 U.S. institutions and collectors, and 13 from overseas. Roughly 60 pieces spanning the artist’s entire career are included view, 31 paintings among them. Particularly significant gets for the museum include Holbein’s portraits of Erasmus of Rotterdam (circa 1532), A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (Anne Lovell?) (circa 1535–40) and Simon George (circa 1535–40). 
      Hans Holbein the Younger, Simon George (ca. 1535–40). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
      The Morgan and the Getty were responsible for the last American exhibition dedicated to Holbein, a smaller display of the artist’s drawings that took place in 1983 and 1984. “The fact that it has taken almost 40 years for a more comprehensive overview of Holbein’s artistic practice to be assembled in the U.S. speaks to the difficulty of negotiating loans of the artist’s works,” McQuillen and Mackelaitė said.
      For the curators, Holbein’s work is just as compelling now as it was then—and perhaps even more so. 
      “Holbein is one of the few artists who was extremely successful and popular in his own time, and whose work has never gone out of fashion,” they said. “His extraordinary mastery over the medium of oil paint led him to create highly naturalistic images, which are filled with tactile, closely observed details that simultaneously delight and seduce.”
      Those details, the curators explained, are what make the artist’s output special. Whereas other painters focused on their sitters’ features, Holbein honed in on their physiognomy—the physical traits, that is that can reveal a person’s desires, disposition, or social status—as well as their garb. They are also the central preoccupation of the show (hence the title, “Capturing Character”).
      “Although Holbein was not the only Renaissance artist who used portraits to create statements of visual identity for his patrons, the intensity of his preoccupations with these issues distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries,” the curators said.   
      See more works from the Morgan’s exhibition below.
      Hans Holbein the Younger, The Wife of a Court Official of Henry VIII (ca. 1534). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
      Hans Holbein the Younger, Preparatory drawing of Simon George (ca.1535). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
      Hans Holbein the Younger, Erasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1532). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
      Hans Holbein the Younger, Terminus, Device of Erasmus (ca. 1532). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
      Hans Holbein the Younger, A Court Official of Henry VIII (ca. 1534). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
      “Holbein: Capturing Character” is on view now through May 15, 2022 at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
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