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    Crowds Swarming a New Show at Galerie König Suggest NFTs Are Infiltrating the Art World Faster Than Ever

    The line snaked down the block when I strolled up to Galerie König on Tuesday night to see Refik Anadol’s new show at the gallery, which is causing a small sensation among a cross-section of the public that does not normally show up at art exhibitions. In the queue was a pair from the finance industry who were trying to get in for the third time. Up ahead, some Albanian tourists from the tech industry were also waiting, having heard about it online. In front of them, one girl said she was too stoned to talk.
    At least she had something to trip on while waiting between one and three hours to get in: projected onto König’s brutalist bell tower was an NFT by Anadol called Winds of Berlin, a giant, data-driven projection that warped constantly into vibrant cascades of color informed by real-time data collected from the city’s landscape and environment.
    Refik Anadol Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams at Galerie König, Berlin. Photo: Roman Maerz.
    Inside was another massive NFT work occupying an entire wall of the main upstairs gallery, the work’s light washing over the space. People lay around, basking in its glow. The 20-minute algorithmic data visualizations writhed inside what looked like a white box extending from the wall.
    Downstairs, a series of abstract digital paintings shifted through strangely bright colors that were indiscernibly culled from images of perennials, forests, and flowers. They pulsated on high-definition screens as crowds of people milled around. The other half of that floor, where traditional artworks are on view, was quietly cordoned off by a velvet rope.
    Christian Marclay debuted The Clock, an ambitious 24-hour film project that spliced thousands chronicling every single minute in a day, at White Cube’s London gallery in 2010. It had lines down the street too. David Zwirner’s show of Yayoi Kusama, “Every Day I Pray for Love,” clocked around 2,000 visitors a day in New York when it was on view. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams, which similarly warps time and space, has caused a bit of a scene on an otherwise quiet residential street, especially given that it’s coupled with buzzy crypto keywords. 
    Refik Anadol, Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams at Galerie König, Berlin. Photo: Roman Maerz.
    König seemed pleasantly stunned at the crowds, though he was also focused on his gallery’s and Anadol’s current auction through OpenSea, which ends this week. So far, the price of Anadol’s piece is at nearly 5 ETH (about $19,000)—a far cry from the $800,000 transaction König organized for a similar work by the artist at Art Basel Miami Beach this month.
    “Maybe we should have sold the work as a DAO so that more members of the public could collect the piece,” he ruminated. “We knew this would be risky.”
    DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations) are leaderless bands of internet users who are known to make collective decisions on the blockchain. That’s a whole other story, but the art industry began taking them seriously when one called ConstitutionDAO nearly nabbed the winning bid for a first edition of the US constitution at Sotheby’s this fall. Ironically, the crypto-buying conglomerate was scandalously beat by Kenneth Griffin, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been the subject of Reddit and retail investor rage since the whole GameStop saga earlier this year.
    The Anadol work shown in the U.S. went to a Miami collector in the usual way of an art deal, with handshakes and fiat money, not on a peer-to-peer NFT sales platform. Bridging these two worlds has been complicated for art dealers thus far, especially in Europe where know-your-customer laws, which are intended to minimize money laundering, are in place. 
    König’s own web platform, MISA, which will sell NFT editions via proof-of-stake (a consensus mechanism on blockchain), is figuring out those last kinks, but it can’t carry a titanic art piece like Machine Hallucinations, which is minted via proof-of-work, a method that takes a large amount of computational power. The difference? To use the metaphor of trad artworks, think of it like this: “Proof-of-work you would put into a climate-controlled crate and deliver by hand, the other, you ship with Fedex,” said the dealer.
    The two NFT sales Anadol made through König this month were not his first. He had his own direct NFT sale through Sotheby’s Hong Kong this fall, where he set a record by selling an immersive NFT for 18,325,000 HKD ($2.4 million). He also recently collaborated with MoMA in New York on another project. The Istanbul-born artist, who is based in Los Angeles, has also been working on his “Data” paintings for nearly a decade.
    Refik Anadol Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams at Galerie König, Berlin.
    Digital artists, of course, bring their own sets of rules, and their language is just as jargon-y as the artspeak of old. The rapid emergence of DAOs, NFTs, and the crypto art scene have been predictably confusing to traditional art-world gatekeepers—a cohort that König, who launched an NFT auction in Decentraland in March before setting up his own NFT marketplace this fall—seems keen to distance himself from. Nor is he the only Berlin dealer moving into the space: Galerie Nagel Draxler is opening a second space that will be called Crypto Cabinet next year, selling and showing all things crypto- and blockchain-related.
    The emergence of not one, but two, Berlin galleries keen on crypto is not surprising, given that the city is a new tech capital, soon to have its own Tesla factory on the outskirts of town and already filled with tech coworking spaces on seemingly every corner. Dealers have complained that it’s been hard to attract tech collectors who like money but tend not to cherish culture in the ways people expect. NFTs were the missing ingredient: Unlike a painting, “they are super liquid, so it’s easy to go into a market if you can exit again,” König said.
    The more I think about it, the more tired I become of the rapid dismissal of this nouveau riche who want to spend their wealth buying and trading art. And had König created a DAO, those collectors, and anyone else with some crypto, could have participated not just by visiting the show, but also by potentially owning a piece of it. While the aesthetic language may not please everyone, every art era has its conceptual artists, its sell-outs, and its blockbusters. König said some have compared Anadol to Monet, which even he finds a bit “heavy-handed” (I do too), but the Impressionists were also outsiders to the 19th-century art canon at first.
    Something really is happening, and it’s not only speculative market fluff either. Just take a look at the scores of people shivering outside König’s gallery. This is art that seems to matter in a more public way, and we should celebrate that.
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    A New Survey of Contemporary Midwestern Artists Doesn’t Try to Pinpoint What Makes the Region Special—But It Does So All the Same

    The Midwest, like all geographic regions, is both a place and an idea. The phrase might conjure a set of symbols as much as it does a description of physical boundaries: a casserole, a cornfield, a chicken coop. 
    In organizing “The Regional,” the first multi-museum survey of contemporary Midwestern artists now on view through March 20, 2022, at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati, curators Amara Antilla and Jade Powers avoided all these and any other preconceived notions about the region or its artists. “We made a point not to go into this with a curatorial thesis or an overarching idea or set of themes in mind,” said Antilla, a senior curator at the CAC. 
    Instead, they decided, the shape of the show would rest entirely in the hands of its 23 artists, including Matthew Angelo Harrison, Devan Shimoyama, and Nikki Woods, among others. (Altogether, 14 different cities and 10 states are represented.)
    Hellen Ascoli, Touch Over Fear (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City.
    Early on in the process, the artists, along with the curators, all got together over Zoom for a group discussion. “It was an opportunity to talk about your practice, to think through how your work is related to someone else’s work who might be several states over,” said Powers, assistant curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, where the exhibition will travel in June of next year. She called the conversations “potent and generative.”
    Sure enough, it was there that the identity of “The Regional” really took hold, as the artists, who were initially bound together only by location, identified myriad common concerns. 
    Margo Wolowiec, Breaking News (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
    Land use, geographical borders, and the environment are major interests among the group, particularly for artists like Detroit’s Margo Wolowiec, who here turns both original and found photographs of contaminated waters into woven collages both dense and fragile; and Hellen Ascoli, a Guatemalan artist previously based in Madison, Wis., whose own patchwork textiles refer to the immigration crisis. 
    Ascoli’s efforts speak to another key theme as well: the immigrant experience. It’s overt in the work of Minnesota-based photographer Pao Houa Her, for instance, whose series Coming Off the Metal Bird (2006–09) comprises pictures of her Hmong community adjusting to life in America. “Instead of a narrative, [the project] was more about my own opinions and answering questions about life in America and what America is,” the artist explains in the exhibition’s digital catalogue.
    Meanwhile, for his part, the ceramist Jonathan Christensen Caballero, based in Lawrence, Kan., offers up an allegorical sculpture. Spanning more than 13 feet, it depicts two relatives on either side of a river sailing small boats toward one another, as if communicating across borders of both time and place.
    Pao Houa Her, Aunty Mai’s 3 daughters (2006–09). Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis.
    Antilla and Powers may have approached “The Regional” without a thematic conceit, but they weren’t without goals. In their joint essay for the catalogue, their aims were framed in the form of questions: “How might we support a regional conversation and prop up local artists?” they wrote. “How might we foster conversations between our cities and the many other vibrant hubs throughout the Midwest? What are the values of living and working outside of conventional ‘art hubs,’ financial and otherwise?” 
    In each case, the answers came back to a sense of community—something in which artists throughout the Midwest are particularly invested, the curators explained.
    “It was exciting to hear how interested these artists were in making those connections and getting to know other artists throughout the region,” said Antilla. 
    “Even though they are not on either coast, there is still a strong sense of community and artistic conversation,” Powers added. “There’s a real vibrancy in the Midwest art scene that maybe isn’t always recognized.”
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    Saudi Arabia’s Art World Has Long Been Isolated. With Its First Ever Biennial, It’s Looking to Usher in a New Chapter

    A dozen Riyadh-based dancers in cream-colored clothes moved to the blended guttural sounds of a South African Xhosa song, a Sufi chant, and a Fijiri folk song from the Arabian Gulf. Their asynchronous movements carried the explosive intensity of a simmering pot. Behind them stood a video installation of their bodies in aerial view. Marwah AlMugait, the artist who made this piece, called This Sea is Mine, looked around intrepidly at the hundreds gathered for Saudi Arabia’s inaugural Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale. People seemed compelled not just by the visceral choreography of women performing live, but by the act of witnessing this historic moment in the artistic life of a country.
    Attention to the plight of women was also a strong theme at the adjacent Tuwaiq International Sculpture Symposium, one of the government-backed programs of Riyadh Art. New Zealand artist Anna Korver’s abstract sculpture evoking draped female figures won an award on December 10 and her work is a part of the city’s first public initiative to build 1,000 permanent urban sculptures.
    These were paradigm-shifting moments as the art world congregated in Saudi Arabia for the inaugural biennial, called “Feeling the Stones” and the adjacent symposium in Riyadh, as well as Misk Art Week. In Jeddah, a new art space Hayy Jameel has opened.
    A sense of urgent transformation can be felt in the Middle Eastern nation, which was culturally insulated from the world until Prince Mohammed Bin Salman laid out Vision 2030’s social and economic reforms five years ago. Through its cultural endeavors, the newly formed ministry of culture has been articulating a position focused on enriching local cultural contexts while participating in the global art discourse.
    Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale launch event. Courtesy Canvas and Diriyah Biennal Foundation
    A New Center for Art
    The biennial, which is on view until March 11, 2022, spans six warehouses in the JAX district in the industrial part of Diriyah on the northwest fringes of Riyadh, an area that will be refurbished into an arts hub in the coming years.
    The show title—“Feeling the Stones”—comes from a saying about crossing a river that Chinese revolutionary leader Deng Xiaoping used frequently during the 1980s. “He used it as a way of talking about economic and cultural reform, the platforms of his decade and a half in power,” said Philip Tinari, head of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and curator of the Diriyah Biennale alongside Wejdan Reda, Shixuan Luan, and Neil Zhang. “It was a time when China was reassessing its system and opening up to the world.”
    The saying was actually first coined in 1980 by Chen Yun, a leader of the Chinese Communist Party, in relation to garnering economic stability (it later became associated with Deng as he helped China become an economic powerhouse). “I felt like [the expression] has resonances with where things are in Saudi today in the aftermath of massive changes and big dreams on the horizon,” said Tinari. “It’s an abstract way of thinking about artistic experimentation and practice.”
    Installation view, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2021. Courtesy Canvas and Diriyah Biennale Foundation
    He added that many artists included in the exhibition work with a method “that’s iterative yet experimental, tentative yet directed, going from one side to the other by charting the course as it is traveled.” He noted that the biennial came together in a similar way, by putting in place “structures and processes at the same time as doing them.”
    This approach has allowed for magical encounters within the show itself such as Zahra Al Ghamdi’s sculpture Birth of a Place (2021), which was inspired by the ruins of mud-houses in Diriyah and which appears as a clever 3D extension of Xu Bing’s lightbox Background Story: Streams and Mountains Without End (2014), which itself mimics a traditional landscape painting though it is actually sculpted from newspaper and plant detritus.
    The rules of engagement for the cultural scene in what is an extremely conservative nation are still unclear. Tinari was likely tapped for his experience in running a museum in China, which requires the fine art of dealing with the People’s Republic and censorship.
    “What’s become clear to me is that any context has things that can and can’t be said,” said Tinari. “I always look back to working on ‘Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World’ at the Guggenheim [in 2017] and finding ourselves on the wrong side of animal rights, having to deactivate the presentations of three artists in New York City…The question is less what is censorship and more what is respect for cultural mores in a context that’s not your own?”
    Abdullah Al Othman, Manifesto, The Language & City (2021). Image courtesy Diriyah Biennale Foundation and the artist.
    A Bridge to the West and East
    More than half of the 64 artworks are by Saudi or Chinese artists—and nearly half the works are newly commissioned. The works are divided into six “chapters” that flow via pathways and ramps that link each of the thematic sections of a warehouse (the exhibition design is by Saudi architecture studio and participating artists Bricklab). The color of the rooms reflects the natural landscape beyond the show, and walls are punctured, letting in natural light and views of Wadi Hanifah. It is a thoughtful and considered showcase that does not sensationalize the seismic shift Saudi Arabia is experiencing but instead pushes on boundaries without breaking them.
    South African artist William Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), in which celebratory music is played by shadow projections, heralds the first chapter, “Crossing the River.” Here, one will also find Maha Malluh’s wall-sized World Map (2021) of 3,840 cassette tapes bearing religious sermons remain silent relics of an analog world of conservative Islam. It lies adjacent to Richard Long’s Red Earth Circle (1989/2021) made from red clay from Saudi Arabia that was first created in 1989 for Centre Pompidou’s groundbreaking “Magicians de Terre,” considered the first exhibition of global contemporary art.
    The biennial often juxtaposes the 1980s Chinese avant-garde with the historical emergence of art in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Yet Tinari emphasizes that there are important differences between these moments in the two nations. “A lot of artistic production in Saudi isn’t actually just about the question of nationhood or national identity, in a way that I think burdened the artistic production in China for a long time,” he said. He added that Saudi Arabia was more connected to the global scene than China during its transformation, “for better or worse.”
    Sarah Abu Abdallah and Ghada Al Hassan, ‘Horizontal Dimensions’, 2021, courtesy Canvas and Diriyah Biennale Foundation
    Elsewhere, unexpected threads unfold: prominent Chinese artist Wang Luyan’s miniature humanoid sculptures converse with Ayman Yossri Daydban’s paintings of alienated figures from the 1990s. There are conversations between Saudi artists as well—Ahmed Mater’s video installation of life before and after the oil boom in Desert Meeting (2021) is installed nearby Mohammed Al Saleem’s modernist ode to arid topography, Desert Spring (1987).
    Comments on the family unit, which in Saudi Arabia extends to the larger tribe and is traced through patrilineality, manifest in Dania Al Saleh’s That Which Remains (2021), which blurs computer-generated archival portraits with personal footage mixing official and personal narratives. It is set against Japan’s Koki Tanaka’s provocative Abstracted/Family (2020), which stages a mock nuclear family and comments on estrangement and minority politics. Manal Al Dowayan’s brass leaf installation of matrilineal lines, on the other hand, through the drawings and recordings of 300 women from Dammam, Riyadh, and Jeddah in Tree of Guardians (2014), brings invisible histories to light.
    But one of the most urgent sections was “Brave New Worlds,” which focused on the apocalyptic present of the world as a whole. A film by Ando Wekua focuses on a burning palm tree overlaid with screeching sounds and Ayman Zedani’s recorded intonations of the endangered Arabian Sea humpback whales laments a collective environmental demise. Mohannad Shono’s tired mark-making robotic sculpture and Lawrence Lek’s envisioning of an automated hotel depict a world without humans. Also on view was Sara Ibrahim’s video performance Soft Machines/Far Away Engines (2021) which traces dancers who multiply, heave, and touch, providing a bit of solace in this grim setting.
    Sarah Ibrahim Soft Machines/Far Away Engines. Image courtesy Diriyah Biennale Foundation and the artist.
    A Dizzying Transformation
    Despite the curatorial prowess of the show, it would be a mistake to consider this biennial as completely unprecedented. Although there is now a shining focus on the capital Riyadh, Jeddah has enjoyed a thriving art scene for decades, which began underground with the independent collective Edge of Arabia in 2003 and continued with the private philanthropy of the Saudi Art Council in 2014. What is new, however, is the openness to developing deeply collaborative curatorial models at an international level. In addition to the biennial, which brought on Beijing-based Tinari and other UCCA curators from China, Hayy Jameel co-curated an exhibition on food futures called “Staple: What’s on your plate” together with the U.K.-based Delfina Foundation.
    That show was bustling like the biennial, with 1,650 visitors attending its opening on December 6. “Jeddah is a cosmopolitan city, a gateway for pilgrims,” said Antonia Carver, director of Art Jameel. She added that the exhibition, which includes artists from South Asia, Barbados, Bangladesh, and the Congo is “less about a nation-to-nation” discourse and more about “the city’s connections to elsewhere.” The history of Jeddah, she said, is “intertwined with other places, defying the stereotype as a place that’s closed off.”
    Xu Bing, Background Story Streams and Mountains Without End (2013). Image courtesy Diriyah Biennale Foundation and the artist.
    These dramatic moves in bringing both Riyadh and Jeddah onto the world stage are somewhat dizzying. While the biennial has most certainly become a catalyst for the Kingdom’s role in the region’s artistic landscape, a major question looms about the extent to which cultural production will be grounded by local government bodies and infrastructures of power as this art scene attempts to situate itself within the globalized art world.
    Rashed Al Shashai’s contribution to the biennial, Cultural Wall (2021), a spiraling sculpture of wicker and steel, alludes to the structural problems implicated in such moments of progress. Even as a local, he says the future shape of Saudi Arabia’s culture scene is anything but clear: “It’s like trying to make sense of hazy shapes out from a fast-moving car.” What is sure, in any case, is that this indeterminate present is a new starting point for Saudi Arabia, one that will usher in an artistic era that is not seen as a counterpart to the Global North but which is very much coming into its own.
    The Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale is on view in Riyadh until March 11, 2022.
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    The U.K.’s First Permanent Immersive Digital Art Gallery Will Open Next Year With a Show of A.I. Space Imagery, Courtesy of NASA

    The U.K. is getting its first permanent immersive digital art gallery. The space, which opens in Coventry in April 2022, arrives as experiential light shows like the Van Gogh Experience are drawing millions of visitors around the globe. Eager to get in on the action, local officials and the national government are backing The Reel Store, which will occupy the former home of the Coventry Evening Telegraph newspaper.
    The Reel Store’s inaugural exhibition will present a project by the fast-rising digital art star Refik Anadol. The show, “Machine Memoirs: Space,” is the product of a long-term collaboration with NASA. Its arrival coincides with Coventry’s term as the U.K. City of Culture and the host of this year’s Turner Prize exhibition.
    To create the work, Anadol uses A.I. to sort and analyze two million publicly available images of space taken by NASA satellites, telescopes, and the International Space Station. Then, his A.I. produces new digital interpretations of the furthest reaches of outer space. The resulting imagery will be presented in a “360 cinematic experience” accompanied by “3D audio,” according to organizers.
    “‘Machine Memoirs: Space’ invites us to dream of an alternative universe where machines collaborate with humans to speculate our existence and create an alternative future,” the artist said in a statement. “This is a hopeful future where machines and humanity, in combination, are agents for healing.”
    The Telegraph Hotel, home of The Reel Store. Courtesy The Telegraph Hotel
    The Reel Store takes its name from the building’s former life (newspaper reels were stored there before being printed). The postwar building is typical of the 1960s architecture that comprises much of Coventry’s city center. The gallery will house a spatially adaptive sound system and an 800-square-meter (8,610-square-foot) fixed projection mapping canvas with 14 4K laser projectors.
    While many emerging artists are working with NFTs, non-commercial spaces with the capacity to display their technically demanding work are few and far between. The support for the gallery, which has the backing of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and Coventry City Council, is a testament to authorities’ growing belief that such projects can serve as an economic engine for a region.
    “The key for me,” said David Welsh, a cabinet member in charge of the arts at Coventry City Council, “is that although we know it will be a fabulous attraction for visitors, all of our communities in Coventry will also have a completely unique arts venue on their doorstep.”
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    Idol Worship: The Brooklyn Museum’s Important New Warhol Show Casts the Pop Artist in a Spiritual Light

    Andy Warhol famously instructed an interviewer to “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” But it’s been a long time since the pioneering Pop artist has been seen simply as an empty cipher.  In the years since his death in 1987 Warhol has been reborn many times. The ever-multiplying Andys include social critic Andy, queer Andy, proto-postmodern Andy, reality TV Andy, and commercial Andy.
    “Andy Warhol: Revelation,” currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, homes in on Catholic Andy. Originally organized for the Warhol Museum by its chief curator José Carlos Diaz and overseen in its Brooklyn incarnation Carmen Hermo, the exhibition draws a line from Warhol’s religious upbringing as a Byzantine Catholic (he later took up Roman Catholicism) through the twists and turns of his career to his last major undertaking, a set of over 100 paintings based on Leonardo’s Last Supper.
    This is touted as the first exhibition to explore this aspect of Warhol’s work. However, it is not exactly a new take—the catalogue references both art historian John Richardson’s paean to Warhol’s “secret piety” in his 1987 eulogy and Jane Daggett Dillenberger’s 1998 tome The Religious Art of Andy Warhol. I will modestly add here the chapter I devoted to Warhol’s Catholicism in my 2004 book Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art. Another precursor is Arthur Danto, whose ideas about the transfiguration of the commonplace hover without attribution in labels that discuss Warhol’s sculptures of Heinz Ketchup and Delmonte Peaches boxes.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
    But if the idea of a Warhol immersed in spiritual concerns has been around for some time, newly unearthed materials from the archives of the Warhol Museum have deepened the case. Discoveries include an unfinished film that would have been funded by the Catholic Church, a never completed series of images of nursing mothers, a set of drawings of angels by Warhol’s mother Julia Warhola, as well as religious objects, letters, and clippings that give context to the snippets of text and found images that appear in Warhol’s paintings.
    In addition, the show leans heavily on recent scholarship by Warhol Museum curator Jessica Beck that places Warhol’s late Last Supper paintings in the context of his terrified response to the concurrent AIDS Epidemic. These materials, combined with revelations first made by Richardson of Warhol’s regular church attendance, his financial support of a nephew’s studies for the priesthood, and his participation in a soup kitchen provide a picture of Warhol much at odds with more familiar representations of the artist as an indifferent societal mirror or cultural sieve.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    The show opens with a wealth of materials that underscore the degree to which religion saturated Warhol’s childhood. On display are holy cards, religious statuettes, and crucifixes from his home, several religious paintings borrowed from his childhood church, and even a painting by a very young Warhol in which his childhood living room is presided over by a prominent cross.
    The show then builds its case with thematic sections that consider other aspects of Warhol’s debt to Catholicism. One set of works and ephemera consider his rather problematic relationship with women. These include his obsession with Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, whose portraits have long been seen as counterparts to the Byzantine icons of his childhood; his friendship with Candy Darling, Warhol superstar and transgender icon; and his near assassination by Valerie Solanas, the Factory hanger-on and author of the SCUM Manifesto (a piquant acronym for the Society for Cutting up Men). More surprising are drawings and photographs depicting breastfeeding mothers. Inspired, presumably, by the countless Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child, these were intended for a never realized painting series.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    Another section documents Warhol’s 1980 visit to the Vatican and his five-second meeting with Pope John Paul II amid a throng of other worshipers. The exhibition ties this to a number of Warhol drawings of huge crowd scenes. A section documenting his borrowings from various Renaissance paintings (and pointing toward the late Last Supper paintings) tries to make the case for Warhol as a latter-day Renaissance man. A section of an unfinished film originally destined for a 1968 World’s Fair in San Antonio is comprised of poetic images of the setting sun accompanied by a crooning voiceover by Factory chanteuse Nico. Commissioned by the Catholic Church, it bears a striking resemblance to Paul Pfeiffer’s 2001 film Study for Morning after the Deluge, in which the rising and setting sun also becomes a metaphor for the cycle of life and death.
    But most crucial for the exhibition’s argument is a section titled “The Catholic Body.” Here the show ties the essential carnality of Catholicism, a religion whose doctrines, art, and literature center on very literal representations of the “Word Made Flesh,” to Warhol’s bodily obsessions and his conflicted existence as a gay man in a faith that condemns homosexuality.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    Two works introduce these ideas. Richard Avedon’s iconic photograph of Warhol’s bared torso riven with the scars left by Solanas’s attack becomes, in this context, a modern-day version of the many Renaissance representations of the martyr Saint Sebastian, whose muscular arrow riddled torso has made him a gay icon. A lesser known Warhol silkscreen painting from 1985-86 titled The Last Supper (Be a Somebody with a Body) also presents a juxtaposition of religious and homoerotic imagery, this time by layering images of the Christ from the Last Supper and an image, clipped from a newspaper ad, of a buff, half-dressed body builder.
    Which brings us to the exhibition’s centerpiece. “Andy Warhol: Revelation” pivots on Warhol’s Last Supper paintings. Arranged like a horseshoe, the layout leads one through the above-mentioned material to a voluminous quantity of Last Supper imagery. The Last Supper paintings were commissioned in 1984 by art dealer Alexander Iolas for display in a space in Milan across the street from Leonardo’s masterwork. But Warhol went far beyond the confines of the original commission. He collected multiple images of the Last Supper, including a lenticular version and a very kitschy sculptural rendition documented here in polaroid photographs. And he used the imagery in many ways, including on a series of punching bags that were collaborations with Jean Michel Basquiat and in paintings emblazoned with logos or comprised of fragments of Leonardo’s mural.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    At the Brooklyn Museum, two full-scale versions of Warhol’s Last Supper are presented in an almost chapel-like space. They spread over opposite walls separated by a bench where, on the day I visited, visitors were obediently sitting in contemplative silence.  This is a reminder of the ambiguity embedded in this work—and for that matter, all of Warhol’s work. Depending on which Andy they are highlighting, critics have tended to locate Warhol’s imagery on a scale that runs from blank irony to heartfelt sincerity. The Last Supper paintings pose a particular problem. Are they just another pop culture image, not unlike the like soup cans, dollar signs, or portraits of Chairman Mao, appropriated precisely because of their ubiquity and banality? Or are they vessels full of personal meaning? In an essay referenced in the catalogue, Jessica Beck makes the case for the latter, arguing that these late paintings were created in an atmosphere suffused with the threat of AIDS.  Many of Warhol’s friends and associates were dying of the disease. In response, Beck maintains that Warhol “gave AIDS a face—the mournful face of Christ.”
    And yet, as the exhibition now moves down the other prong of the horseshoe layout, closing the show out with works that provide a Catholic context for some of Warhol’s more familiar imagery, one can’t help feeling that interpretation is a little too pat. The exhibition consciously resists the tendency, evident both in the Richardson eulogy and the Dillenberger study, to present an overly sanctified Warhol free of the bedeviling contradictions that continue to make him such an elusive subject. But at the same time the approach here seems overly hermeneutic.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    By that I mean that texts and images are treated like hidden messages to be deciphered as one might the theological exegeses embedded in Renaissance religious paintings or medieval manuscripts. Such an approach seems to dismiss the deliberate insouciance of Warhol’s own commentaries as well as the obvious ironies that underlie so many works. And it makes it necessary, to use just one example, to reframe the overtly blasphemous and sacrilegious references in Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, screened in full here, as modernizations of Christ’s embrace of outcasts and misfits.
    It seems more true to the Last Supper paintings to acknowledge that they exist, like all Warhol’s works, in a continuum between irony and sincerity, partaking simultaneously of both. Warhol could be both vulnerable and cruel, spiritual and profane. Perhaps it might have helped to delve a bit more into the contradictions between the carnal and the spiritual inherent in Catholicism itself. The section “The Catholic Body” starts to do this, but doesn’t touch on the homoerotic overtones of Catholic stories and imagery that would have fired Warhol’s imagination. This is, after all, a religion whose central image is a near naked man on a cross.
    Warhol was not alone in finding the mix of ritual, sensuality, and homoeroticism in Catholicism irresistible, even as its official dogma condemned his sexual being. Robert Mapplethorpe, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and David Wojnorowicz are three gay artists whose work is increasingly being considered in terms of their Catholic upbringing. Of particular relevance to this exhibition is the way that Wojnarowicz used the face and body of the crucified Christ to denote suffering and to evoke society’s callous disregard for the ravages of AIDS while also roundly condemning the Catholic Church’s complicity in the crisis.
    Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
    Moving on from the Last Supper sanctuary, the show winds down with sections that bring us some of the more familiar aspects of Warhol’s work. In light of what has gone before, these now also take on a Catholic tinge. The “Skulls,” “Shadows,” “Electric Chairs,” and “Death and Disasters” evoke Warhol’s death obsession. A section titled “The Material World: What We Worship” offers a nod to his valorization of consumption, now seeing Warhol as the chronicler of “the desires, hopes, and prayers of modern life.” One series, “Guns, Knives, and Crosses” from 1981-81, makes a particularly ambiguous statement about the relationship of religiosity and violence.
     Whatever its shortcomings, this is a thought-provoking and deeply researched show. And, given the way it foregrounds the tension between Warhol’s homosexuality and his Catholic faith, it must be added that it is also a brave one. These days it is easy to raise the censorious hackles of cultural arbiters from both ends of the political spectrum. By presenting a frank acknowledgement of the complexities of sexuality and faith, Andy Warhol: Revelation opens up new avenues in the often fraught discussion of the relation of art and religion.
    “Andy Warhol: Revelation” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, through June 19, 2022.
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    The Biggest Survey of Bob Dylan’s Visual Art to Hit the U.S. Is Now Open in Miami—See Images Here

    “Got to hurry on back to my hotel room where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece,” Bob Dylan sang in 1971. “She promised that she’d be right there with me when I paint my masterpiece.”
    It’s unclear if the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter ever got around to that masterpiece, but if he did, it’s almost certainly on view now in “Retrospectrum,” a survey of Dylan’s artistic output from the late 1960s through to today, which opened last month at Florida International University’s Frost Art Museum in Miami.
    More than 180 paintings, drawings, and sculptures make up the show, much of which has never been seen by the public before. And that’s what makes the show special: The artist is one of the most famous humans on the planet, but its offerings will be largely new to audiences, especially in the U.S. The show marks the first time the artworks have been shown together stateside. (A previous version of the show was held at the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai in 2019.)
    Bob Dylan, Rainy Night in Grand Forks (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
    “Seeing many of my works years after I completed them is a fascinating experience,” Dylan said in a statement about the retrospective (a straightforward reflection from a man who, now in his sixth decade of making idiosyncratic music and art, rarely offers them). 
    The insight gets even more Dylanesque from there: “I don’t really associate them with any particular time or place or state of mind, but view them as part of a long arc; a continuing of the way we go forth in the world and the way our perceptions are shaped and altered by life. One can be as profoundly influenced by events in Morretes, Brazil, as they can be by the man who sells El País in Madrid.” 
    Much like his music, Dylan’s visual oeuvre spans a broad swath of styles and genres. But whereas his nasal voice would give away even the most out-there tune as a Dylan original, no such clue connects his artwork. From painted depictions of cramped urban cityscapes (think Edward Hopper) and yawning Western vistas, to a series of sculptural gates made from welding together a hodgepodge of metal materials, they don’t necessarily seem to be from one man’s hand.
    Bob Dylan, Night Time in St. Louis (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
    “I think what distinguishes Dylan as a songwriter is his willingness to take disparate literary and musical strains and incorporate them into his unique vision. You can see the same kind of open-mindedness and willingness to experiment in Dylan’s visual work,” the exhibition’s curator, Shai Baitel, told ARTnews last month. (Baitel is the artistic director of the Modern Art Museum Shanghai and organized Dylan’s 2019 show there.) 
    “I am convinced that creativity, no matter in which field or context, comes from the same deep place within us,” she went on. “And the difference in its articulation through different art forms only serves to deepen our understanding of that creativity.”
    Also on display is Dylan’s newest body of work, a series of paintings inspired by famous movie scenes called Deep Focus. 
    “All these images come from films,” the artist explained. “They try to highlight the different predicaments that people find themselves in. Whether it’s James Cagney or Margaret Rutherford, the dreams and schemes are the same—life as it’s coming at you in all its forms and shapes.”
    Bob Dylan, Abandoned Motel, Eureka (2015–16). Courtesy of the artist.
    “Retrospectrum: Bob Dylan” is on view now through April 22, 2022 at the Frost Art Museum in Miami.
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    Artist Simone Leigh Reveals Her Plans for the Venice Biennale, Including a Major Symposium of Black Thinkers and Makers

    The title of the U.S. pavilion at next year’s 59th Venice Biennale will be “Simone Leigh: Grittin“—and come fall, the artist will host a major convening, “Loophole of Retreat: Venice,” for the occasion.
    The new details about the eagerly-anticipated exhibition—Simone Leigh is the first Black woman artist to represent the U.S. at the prestigious event—were revealed today by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the pavilion’s commissioner, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston.
    “This will be the first time the U.S. Pavilion is entirely dedicated to the experiences and contributions of Black women,” Jill Medvedow, the ICA’s director, said in a statement. “Global in its research and references, intergenerational and collaborative in its lines of inquiry, Leigh’s exhibition will leave an indelible mark on all who visit the pavilion.”
    And while many in the art world will make a pilgrimage to Venice for the biennale’s opening in April, Leigh hopes audiences will book a return trip in the fall. Just as she did during her 2019 solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the artist is holding an event—this time a three-day affair—that takes its name from the 1861 autobiography of the formerly enslaved Harriet Jacobs, who christened the crawlspace she lived in after gaining her freedom a “loophole of retreat.”
    Simone Leigh, Las Meninas (2019). Photo: Farzad Owrang, courtesy of the artist and the Cleveland Museum of Art, © Simone Leigh.
    Featuring performances, film screenings, and conversations, as well as an international slate of scholars, artists, and activists, the symposium is organized by Rashida Bumbray, director of culture and art at the Open Society Foundations, with curatorial advisors Saidiya Hartman, a professor at Columbia University in New York City; and Tina Campt, professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
    Key themes include maroonage, magical realism, and medicine. The event “continues [Leigh’s] work of making Black women’s intellectual labor more visible,” Bumbray said. “‘Loophole’ will elevate a global conversation on Black feminist thought in order to nurture the intergenerational and interdisciplinary connections between Black women thinkers and makers.”
    The artist’s inspirations reflect the African diaspora, from 19th-century West African art to colonial history, and will become all the more resonant in Venice, given its long history of intercontinental trade and cultural exchange. Her presentation will feature a new series of figurative sculptures representing Black women in bronze and ceramic, including works that Leigh is making at a Philadelphia foundry.
    Simone Leigh. Photo: Shaniqwa Jarvis.
    “Most artists who have the opportunity to work in large-scale bronze will make a cast in clay that then the bronze foundry will scale up to cast into bronze,” explained Eva Respini, the ICA’s chief curator. “Simone is working with the clay models at 100 percent scale, which is incredibly rare…her hand touches everything, and the result of her hand being present in all stages of the process of making is that the works are extremely resonant in person. The attention to every detail, every surface, translates to works that are once personal and human.”
    The exhibition’s title is meant to evoke the dual meanings of “grit,” both the physical quality of sand but also the spirit of resolve and determination even in the face of obstacles. More specifically, “grittin” is an African American Vernacular English term that means adopting a posture of protection. For Leigh, it represents the perseverance and stoicism embodied by her figures, as well as the earthen materials she uses to make them.
    Following the conclusion of the biennale in November, the pavilion’s contents will be packed up and shipped to Boston, where the ICA will host Leigh’s first museum survey, opening in 2023 and subsequently touring to other venues across the U.S.
    Leigh signed last week with New York’s Matthew Marks Gallery after an abrupt split from mega-dealer Hauser and Wirth last month.
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    How an Aluminum Mine in Jamaica Became the Conceptual Core of Breakout Artist Jamilah Sabur’s New Miami Show

    Jamilah Sabur approaches her artistic practice the same way a mathematician solves an unproven theorem: through a slow, methodical “long exploration,” as she calls it, done over many years.
    Since her time as an undergrad, “it feels like I’ve been working through the same thing,” Sabur says. “It’s like this one, continuous [line where] everything folds into itself.” And it will take her “50 or 60 years,” she guesses, to really make sense of what that thing is. So at the age of 34, the artist is only just getting started.
    Given the depth of Sabur’s conceptual preoccupations, it is no surprise that she refuses to confine herself to one medium. She once said she has “an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach,” putting “every damn thing in there like a mind map.”
    Early in her career—around the time she was working on an MFA degree at UC San Diego— she was dabbling in experimental filmmaking, but Sabur refuses to be hogtied to the genre. Two years after her debut solo show at Miami-based Nina Johnson Gallery, which featured a series of sculptural wall pieces, her latest exhibition there, “DADA Holdings,” focuses on paintings and should be considered in tandem with Bulk Pangaea, Sabur’s video installation in this year’s edition of Prospect New Orleans. Her work has also been included in “The Willfulness of Objects,” a group show featuring works by an all-star line-up of artists from the Bass Collection in Miami Beach.
    Jamilah Sabur, Ust Luga (2021).
    Given the back-to-back culmination of these projects, Sabur admits to feeling a bit frazzled; she feels like she’s now “deep underwater.” The reference seems fitting given how strongly geology factors into her practice. Sabur often uses science as an entry point for examinations into the social, political, and climate conditions throughout history of any given place. And according to Sabur, her latest projects—the paintings and the video installation—are about “the relationship between colonial and postcolonial extraction.”
    For her installation at Prospect, Sabur, who was born in Jamaica in 1987, started by asking herself, “Well, what is the geology of New Orleans?” That simple query set off a series of discoveries that tied New Orleans to Jamaica—and incorporated Belgium through the image of an escarpment (a cliff or steep slope), which the Belgian army once used to defeat Napoleon, just as freed African slaves living in Jamaica had against the British almost a century early.
    Sabur’s explorations started with the Michaud fault, a geological formation that runs underneath the eastern part of New Orleans. Through her research, Sabur then learned that NASA builds their rockets in a manufacturing facility located directly on the fault. And what are the rockets made from? Aluminum. Wondering where the aluminum came from, Sabur found out that it was partially supplied from Jamaica, where she lived until she was 4 years old.
    Sabur then traveled to Jamaica to film the aluminum mine, the mountainous rainforest surrounding it—where enslaved workers once attempted to escape from British and Spanish colonizers—and the ship that exports the natural resource to Louisiana.
    Jamilah Sabur, In this Act (2021).
    Converting stills from Bulk Pangaea into stereoscopic images, Sabur’s paintings and text works in “DADA Holdings” are an “object-base[d] exploration,” she says, of the same themes. The works reference the Jamaican mining act of 1950, which cemented the island’s role as the major supplier of aluminum to North America. Continuing her deep dives into “networks of extraction across the planet,” she explained in an email, Sabur feels as though “the actual sites of extraction are just the shadows of what has already happened.”
    To that end, this work is, for one, “a commentary on how this extraction of natural resources is very similar to the colonization of certain spaces, and her thinking about the impact of both extraction and colonization on indigenous people” Erin Christovale, the Hammer Museum curator who organized her first major solo museum presentation in 2019, told Artnet News.
    Jamilah Sabur, Black Forest, Bauxite, Black Sea (2021).
    Clicking Into Place
    Sabur’s exhibition at the Hammer was her breakout moment. Familiar with her work since visiting her 2014 thesis show at UC San Diego, Christovale felt like Sabur’s films “always needed to branch out, to be multi-dimensional and function more as an installation or an environment.” So the curator let Sabur take over the Hammer’s project space with Un chemin escarpé (“a steep path”), an immersive, five-channel video installation.
    The work is something that viewers “can really inhabit,” Sabur said, rather than simply just watch, and the videos mainly show landscape images, with no linear narrative or dialogue, only a score the artist herself composed. The installation is also a sort of precursor to Bulk Pangaea now on view at Prospect, mining “geographical spaces as a way to think through colonization, environmental justice, and the politics of immigration,” as Christovale noted in her announcement of the show on Instagram.
    Prospect curator Diana Nawi has been following the evolution of Sabur’s practice for nearly a decade. Of late, she feels as though “Jamilah has landed on forms and ideas that I think can really carry her through her practice for a long time,” she said. “They’re timeless but also so relevant to our moment.”
    Jamilah Sabur, Nord Stream (2021).
    In the last few years, her “ideas around place, science, geography, and geology have become more expansive within her practice,” she continued. “I think her Hammer Project and what she’s done for Prospect both really speak to that.”
    Her piece for Prospect, in particular, is also deeply personal. Incorporating images of various Jamaican landscapes, along with the symbolic use of the rhomboid shape—a reference to the threshold of her mother’s old home on the island—Sabur not only leans into her history as a citizen living primarily outside of her home country, but also addresses the idea of feeling stuck between two places.
    She also utilizes her background in performance, engaging in deliberate, ritualized movements in the videos, which give viewers the sense they’re not only inhabiting the installation space, but also crossing through a portal into Sabur’s innermost psyche.
    What Christovale was immediately drawn to in Sabur’s videos was how they “really challenged what you assume of a Black experimental video artist,” she says, in that “there’s a very specific Black American history [with] various signifiers that are not really expressed or seen in her work.”
    Instead, Sabur re-centers Black history through a primarily Caribbean lens, “often pulling from landscapes and ideas and languages that are not American, but that obviously have direct ties to her personal history,” Christovale adds. “So it doesn’t always quite register as an American work.”
    Jamilah Sabur, Cockpit Country (British Army base 1728-1795) (2021)
    The Perpetual Outsider
    Sabur’s work doesn’t register as American for a reason—until recently, she wasn’t one. After moving from Jamaica to Miami with her family, she grew up as an undocumented immigrant, only obtaining her American citizenship in 2018. Her personal struggles with “feeling stateless,” as she put it, have been significant.
    In that way, she has often felt like she doesn’t quite belong to either culture. Ultimately, much of her Jamaican identity “has been formed in this relationship to memory, my parents retelling of this landscape of this place,” she said.
    In Un chemin escarpé, she uses memory as a way to see “a landscape from another vantage point,” she wrote in an email, scrutinizing how bodies move through and encompass multiple dimensions in time and space.
    Sabur creates her art as someone whose perspective isn’t clouded by any ties or allegiances, as though she’s removed enough to be an objective observer, someone attempting to provide answers to questions that those steeped in a single cultural heritage don’t even think to ask.
    After getting her BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009, she considers her time in grad school at UC San Diego as a real turning point in her practice.
    “I went there following the legacy of Allan Kaprow and Lorna Simpson,” she says. What she found “was this program rooted in these conceptual practices”.
    That experience continues to shape her thinking, and has led to what ultimately keeps her practice going: the search. Which she is only a fraction of the way into. Similar to how she goes about her work, Sabur takes a bird’s-eye view of her practice as a whole. When asked how she wants it to grow, she wrote: “I just plan to continue this evolution of thought.”
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