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      ‘I Discovered All Sorts of Things About Myself’: Artist Lubaina Himid on Mingling Works From Different Eras in Her New Survey

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      British artist Lubaina Himid was awarded the Turner Prize in 2017 and since then has been a quietly powerful presence in the art world.
      In 2019, she exhibited at the New Museum in New York and then at Wiels in Brussels in 2020. Now, in a homecoming moment, she has opened an eponymous survey of her work at Tate Modern. Featuring paintings, sculptures, installations, and sound works, the show lifts the lid on Himid’s practice beyond the most recent paintings for which she’s best known, revealing the journey that brought her to this point.
      “I suppose the last few years have been full of those sorts of things—not big risks, but those sorts of risks where it could go wrong, but where I discovered all sorts of things about myself,” Himid mused as we spoke at Tate Modern.
      The pandemic was an opportunity to slow down, she said. But it was also a chance to focus on painting and thinking about art after a whirlwind year that saw her on the frontline of debates about media representation, culminating in an unorthodox residency with the Guardian newspaper after she accused its staff of enforcing racial biases.
      “It gave me a chance to make a particular kind of painting and to do this collaboration that I did with Magda,” she said, referring to sound and film artist Magda Stawarska-Beavan.
      The resulting collaborative show at Wiels last year (“Lubaina Himid: Risquons-Toutwith”), which explored the color blue, its senses and its meanings, was inspired by the Joni Mitchell album Blue. Some of the show is also part of the Tate Modern exhibition, the sound design of which took place ahead of the curation of the rest of the work, providing a framework for the visual works in the show. The sound flows and bleeds from room to room, much like the sea, which is a theme throughout the show.
      Lubaina Himid, Blue Grid Test (2020) at Wiels. Photo © Lubaina Himid
      “What Magda and the sound the team did was sort of compose the whole space at once,” Himid said. “I think what it allows is audiences to go at a particular pace. You’re pulled [through], but you still have the memory in your body. You certainly have it because you can still just hear what’s behind you, but there is something else pulling you through.”
      In a sound work titled Blue Grid Test (2020), the soothing recital of “blue, blau, bleu,” with poetic evocations of the color blue, wrap the viewer in calm. But then you step out into open water, into the sound of the unrelenting movement of the ocean filling the next, huge room.
      Lubaina Himid, Tide Change (1998). Photo © Lubaina Himid Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens
      “When you leave The Blue Grid Test, that was the innocence for lost, safe space. But we gave you that and then you’re out in the open, where everything is dangerous. Then when you reach [a] big square, and you’ve got old boats, new money. A boat, a wave, the shore—the history of the capturing of Africans and the shipping of Africans.”
      Lubaina Himid, Man in a Shirt Drawer (2017–18). Photo Courtesy Tate © Lubaina Himid
      The show explodes in a later room with huge, beautiful paintings of figures in discussion. But somehow, their interior worlds speak more loudly than their gestures. There is tension in each painting, as though we have just missed something, or as if something pivotal will happen the moment we walk by.
      Two series dominate the selection. First is the “Pastry Chefs,” which deals with the inner dialogue and outer behavior of men, and the power dynamics they negotiate.
      “If you imagine, all day long, these men are in a fast and beautiful kitchen making fabulous creations of spun sugar and chocolate,” she said. “It’s not necessary, but it’s kind of fabulous.”
      Lubaina Himid at Tate Modern. Photo Sonal Bakrania Courtesy Tate
      The second series is the “Le Rodeur,” in which Himid imagines life on a fabled ship that came from West Africa to the Caribbean on which nearly everyone went blind. Upon arriving at their destination, an indigenous Caribbean tribe cured their sight. But who were the lucky ones, Himid asks? The ones who arrived to enslavement, or the one who were thrown into the sea on the way?
      “They don’t know what’s happening,” Himid said of the newly arrived enslaved men and women. “They don’t know where they are. They don’t know what the sea is. They don’t know what boats are. They don’t know whether they’re going to hell. They knew nothing—and on top of that, they’re going blind. And top of that, some of them, in their blindness, are being thrown overboard.”
      Lubaina Himid at Tate Modern. Photo Sonal Bakrania Courtesy Tate
      Himid intends these works and the entire show to raise more questions than it answers. She sees the non-chronological order as a risk worth taking. The works ask monumental questions of the viewer, but their vivid beauty—they are great paintings—hold you in a safe place as you contemplate them.
      Throughout the show are sails, pulleys, ropes, and waters, a constant theme of balance and navigation, the ever-moving waters and shifting sands of an identity thrown into chaos by a cataclysmic event.
      The show ends on a stark note, with a sound work in which the names of slaves are spoken aloud, accompanied by music with a connection to Blackness from Baroque to jazz. Nearby are a haunting sculpture, an empty bike, and smoking shelter graffitied with the phrase, “Do you want an easy life?” It’s a cliffhanger of an ending to what is essentially a show filled with emotion.
      “You have a shot at Tate Modern and then the temptation is to absolutely play it safe and play the same formula, because we know what works,” Himid said. “You know, start chronologically, go through the career, and end up with your recent work. But that’s not quite the way I think, or the way I work. It’s all, for me, about pushing things a little bit within the confines of a museum or an art gallery or within visual arts.”
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      The Next Gwangju Biennale Has Been Postponed to 2023 Following Meager Attendance at This Year’s Event

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      The 14th edition of the Gwangju Biennale, originally set for 2022, has been postponed by a full calendar year.
      While the delay coincides with a new wave of concern about global travel caused by the Omicron variant of Covid-19, today’s announcement from the show’s organizers stressed a more positive motive: the move is designed to move the art event to a new spot on the calendar, so as to extend its duration.
      The Gwangju Biennale, one of the most attended art events in the world, has traditionally run for 66 days starting on the first Friday of September during even-numbered years. Now, the next edition will be expanded to 94 days, kicking off earlier in the year. The rescheduled show is set to take place April 7 through July 9, 2023.
      “There were a number of people in the past who were disappointed that they have missed the Biennale due to its limited duration,” Gwangju Biennale Foundation president Yang-woo Park said in the statement. “It is our hope, as the longest Gwangju Biennale ever to take place, the 14th Gwangju Biennale will also contribute to the general expansion of culture and art.”⁠
      The previous edition was pushed from September of 2020 to the spring of this year, due to the Covid-19 crisis. Visitor numbers for this year’s iteration were severely depleted, and only a handful of participating artists could attend. 
      Not mentioned in the official statement were the very public controversies that have dogged the Biennale over the last 8 months. 
      A visitor walks past a poster for the 13th Gwangju Biennale at an exhibition hall in the city of Gwangju on April 1, 2021. Photo: Jung Yeon-je / AFP via Getty Images.
      Following the event this spring, the Foundation announced that it would not renew the contract of its president of four years, Sunjung Kim. The news came amid allegations from the biennial’s labor union that Kim had verbally abused and unfairly fired employees—claims which were subsequently investigated by Gwangju’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, as well as the South Korean Ministry of Employment and Labor.
      Kim officially vacated her position in June. Shortly thereafter, she spoke out against the accusations, calling them “unfounded claims and factual distortions,” suggesting that her critics were responding to the “long overdue systematic changes” she implemented during her tenure.
      “I have tried my best to oversee the administrative process and organizational structure of the foundation with fairness and due responsibility,” Kim said at the time. “I also did not hesitate to reform outdated practices where necessary.”
      Representatives for the Gwangju Biennale did not immediately respond to Artnet News’s request for information about the postponement of the 14th edition.
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      Looking to See Some Art Beyond a Fair Booth? Here Are 16 Museum and Gallery Shows to Visit During Art Basel Miami Beach 2021

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      During Miami Art Week (November 29–December 5), there will be plenty more to see beyond the Miami Beach Convention Center, the Ice Palace, and the beachside tents. As the city’s museums, nonprofits, private collections, and galleries return to form after the off year of 2020, they have saved some of their best programming for December, when they can seize the international art world’s attention. Read on for our picks.

      “There Is Always One Direction” 
       de la Cruz CollectionOngoing through 2022
      Installation view of “There Is Always One Direction” at the de la Cruz Collection. Photo courtesy of the de la Cruz Collection, Miami.
      Since 2009, collectors Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz have operated a private museum that showcases new selections from their holdings each year. The current outing takes its name from Gabriel Orozco’s sculpture Four Bicycles (There Is Always One Direction) (1994), which is on view alongside works by the likes of Tauba Auerbach, Hernan Bas, Wifredo Lam, Glenn Ligon, Christina Quarles, Sterling Ruby, Vaughn Spann, Reena Spaulings, and Christopher Wool.
      The de la Cruz collection is located at 23 NE 41st Street in the Miami Design District. Admission is free.

      “Will Ryman: The Situation Room, 2014” 
      Margulies WarehouseThrough April 30, 2022
      Will Ryman, The Situation Room (2014). Photo courtesy of the Margulies Warehouse, Miami.
      Mega-collector Martin Z. Margulies is staging no fewer than seven shows at his private museum this year, including ones dedicated to Arte Povera, new work by Anselm Kiefer, and Will Ryman’s life-size replica, in glittering black charcoal, of President Obama and his security council in the titular situation room during the covert Navy Seal operation that assassinated Taliban leader Osama bin Laden.
      The Margulies Warehouse is located at 591 NW 27th Street. General admission is $10.

      “Zhivago Duncan: Pretentious Crap”
      Pérez Art Museum MiamiNovember 30, 2021–September 25, 2022
      Zhivago Duncan, Pretentious Crap (2010–11). Collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, gift of Diane and Robert Moss.
      In addition to current shows by Jed Novatt, Meleko Mokgosi, and Marco Brambilla, and of African and African diaspora artists from the Jorge M. Pérez collection, PAMM is staging an installation of Zhivago Duncan’s elaborate multimedia work Pretentious Crap (2010–11), which Diane and Robert Moss donated to the museum in 2014. The piece is by the artist’s alter ego Dick Flash, the sole survivor of a global apocalypse who has forgotten life before the end of the world, collecting scraps from a ruined civilization he doesn’t understand. The resulting display, with vehicle parts spinning aimlessly in a massive cabinet, parallels contemporary artists’ struggles to make work that explains our complex world.
      PAMM is located at 1103 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami. General admission is $16.

      “Shattered Glass”
      Presented by Jeffrey Deitch at the Moore BuildingNovember 29–December 5, 2021
      Delfin Finley, Two Sides of the Same Coin (2021). Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch.
      After five years of teaming up with Larry Gagosian to bring blue-chip art to the Design District’s Moore Building, Jeffrey Deitch is going it alone this year with “Shattered Glass.” He’s re-staging a show of new art by emerging artists of color that debuted at his Los Angeles space back in the spring, which attracted more than 1,000 daily visitors in its final weeks. Curators Melahn Frierson and AJ Girard are expanding the exhibition to include 15 additional artists. It’s also the last time Deitch will occupy the space because, according to the dealer, its being taken over by a “concept creation collaborative” called Woodhouse.
      The Moore Building is located at 191 NE 40th Street, Miami Design District, Miami. Admission is free.

      “Witness: Afro Perspectives”
      El Espacio 23Through Winter 2021
      “Witness: Afro Perspectives” at El Espacio 23. Photo courtesy of of El Espacio 23, Miami.
      PAMM namesake Jorge M. Pérez opened his own private art space in Allapattah, the Dominican neighborhood that is also home to the new Rubell Museum. The second show, of over 100 works by African and African Diaspora artists, is guest-curated by Tandazani Dhlakama, of Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCA, in collaboration with Pérez Collection curators Patricia M. Hanna and Anelys Alvarez. Featured artists include Belkis Ayón, Lorna Simpson, and Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, tackling weighty themes such as systemic oppression and identity. A companion show, “Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection,” is also on view at PAMM (through February 2, 2022).
      El Espacio 23–Jorge M. Pérez Collection is located at 2270 Northwest 23rd Street, Allapattah, Miami. Admission is free.

      “Ellen Lesperance: Amazonknights” 
      ICA MiamiNovember 30, 2021–March 27, 2022
      Ellen Lesperance, Amazonknights. Womonspirit. Womonpower. Glory. (2017). Collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; museum purchase with funds from Helen Kent-Nicoll and Edward J. Nicoll. Photo: Dan Kvitka.
      In addition to “Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight,” which opened in late October and runs through April 17, 2022, the ICA is unveiling a quintet of solo presentations by Ellen Lesperance, Shuvinai Ashoona, Harold Mendez, Hugh Hayden, and Anthea Hamilton during Miami Art Week. Inspired by the women weavers of the Bauhaus, the Pattern and Decoration movement, and 1970s and ’80s feminist art, Lesperance has made paintings and sculptures based on hand-knitted garments worn by women activists who took part in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp protests against nuclear weapons in Berkshire, England, between 1980 and 2000.
      The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami is located at 61 NE 41st Street, Miami Design District. Admission is free.

      “Alex Israel x Snapchat”
      Bass Museum of ArtNovember 29, 2021–May 1, 2022
      Alex Israel, Self-Portrait (Pelican with Fish) (2019). Courtesy of the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach.
      Alex Israel’s collaboration with Snap, which debuted at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2019, uses augmented-reality technology to create five AR experiences that each correspond to one of his “Self-Portraits.” At the museum, viewers can take in the physical paintings with their eyes, and then download the AR “lenses” to view the work though their smartphone, watching as the works come to life. A sixth AR work activates the museum’s Art Deco facade, transforming the entire building into a pedestal for a giant virtual sculpture of Israel himself.
      The Bass Museum of Art is located at 2100 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach. General admission is $10.

      “My Name Is Maryan”
      MOCA North MiamiThrough March 20, 2022
      Maryan, Personnage (Soldat), 1974. Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.
      Polish-born artist Maryan was a survivor of the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, where he sustained injuries that necessitated the amputation of his leg. After the war, he studied to become an artist in Jerusalem and Paris before moving to New York in the 1960s. His paintings, sculptures, drawings, and films often feature fictional figures he called his personnages, from the French word for character. This exhibition surveying his four-decade career, curated by Alison Gingeras, opens with an installation that re-creates Maryam’s studio at New York’s Chelsea Hotel, where he lived during the 1970s.
      Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami is located at the Joan Lehman Building, 770 NE 125th Street, North Miami. General admission is $10.

      “Reginald O’Neal: As I Am”
      Rubell MuseumNovember 29, 2021–October 2022
      Reginald O’Neal, Thyself (2020). Courtesy of Spinello Projects, Miami.
      At the last proper Miami Art Week, in 2019, the opening of Don and Mera Rubell’s private museum was one of the most hotly anticipated events of the year, putting the city’s Allapattah neighborhood on the art-world map. This year’s offerings are from 2021 artists-in-residence Kennedy Yanko, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Cajsa von Zeipel, and Reginald O’Neal, a figurative painter whose work focuses on the Black experience. The Rubells commissioned two new paintings from the Miami-based artist, and will show them alongside works from his solo debut “At the Feet of Mountains,” held last year at Miami’s Spinello Projects. O’Neal will have a simultaneous show, “They Dreamt of Us,” at the gallery (through January 15.)
      The Rubell Museum is located at 1100 NW 23th Street, Miami. Admission is free.

      “Every Wall Is a Door”
      SuperblueThrough 2022
      Es Devlin, Forest of U, (2021). Installation view of “Every Wall is a Door,” Superblue Miami, 2021. Photo: Andrea Mora.
      Superblue Miami’s inaugural exhibition—named after stage designer Es Devlin’s immersive mirrored environment of the same name—opened in May, adding even more visual star power to the Allapattah neighborhood. The show also includes one of James Turrell’s light-based Ganzfeld works and Drift’s kinetic installation Meadow, plus a digital experience from TeamLab.
      Superblue Miami is located at 1101 Northwest 23rd Street, Miami, Florida. General admission is $36. 

      “Bernadette Despujols: I Love You, Man”
      Spinello Projects
      Through January 15, 2022
      Bernadette Despujols, Andres (2021). Courtesy of Spinello Projects.
      Bernadette Despujols has previously painted naked women, creating works that confront society’s objectification of the female body. Here she turns her painter’s eye on the closest men in her life, creating intimate portraits of her friends, family, and lovers.
      Spinello Projects is located at 2930 NW 7th Avenue, Miami. 

      “Nadia Hironaka, Matthew Suib: Field Companion” 
      Locust Projects
      Through February 5, 2022
      Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, Field Companion, still. Courtesy of Locust Projects, Miami.
      Locust Projects, a highly regarded nonprofit alternative art space, reliably hosts some of Miami Art Week’s most interesting offerings. This year, Philadelphia-based artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib have created an immersive film installation of Field Companion, a film loosely inspired by the forests of the New Jersey Pine Barrens but filmed in a terrarium in the artists’ studio. Mirrored walls make it seems as through the microcosmic film set, captured with a motion-controlled camera, stretches into infinity. Fantastical (digitally rendered) creatures inhabit this tiny world, which speaks to issues of coexistence and sustainability, and the the importance of nature.
      Locust Projects is located at 3852 North Miami Avenue, Miami. Admission is free.

      “Dominga’s Photo Studio” 
      Wolfsonian–FIUDecember 1–8, 2021
      Photo: Juan Luis Matos. Courtesy of the Wolfsonian FIU, Miami Beach.
      It’s not just wealthy art collectors who can leave Miami Art Week with an original piece of art. In exchange for posing for a photographic portrait with Juan Luis Matos during his weeklong residence at the Wolfsonian’s Bridge Tender House, you’ll get a a print of the work. Each portrait’s pose and setting will be inspired by images in the Wolfsonian collection. The project is a collaboration with Bakehouse Art Complex and Miami Beach Open House.
      The Wolfsonian–Florida International University is located at 1001 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach. General admission is $12.

      “Retrospectrum: Bob Dylan”
      Patricia and Phillip Frost Art MuseumNovember 30, 2021–April 17, 2022
      Bob Dylan, One Too Many (2020). Private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.
      Beloved singer-songwriter and Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan gets his first U.S. retrospective of his work as a visual artist. The show, which originated at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, features more than 180 paintings, drawings, ironwork, and ephemera, and teases out the connections between his material output and his music and lyrics.
      The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University is located at 10975 SW 17th Street. Admission is free.

      “Margarita Cano: 90 Years”
      NSU Art Museum, Fort LauderdaleThrough February 13, 2022
      Margarita Cano, The Tumbler (1997). Collection of the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; gift of Isabel Hernandez in memory of Benjamin Holloway. © 2021 Margarita Cano.
      Entirely self-taught, the Cuban-born, Miami-based artist Margarita Cano turned 90 this year. This exhibition celebrates her celestially inspired oeuvre, which includes miniature books, votive portraits, landscapes paintings, prints, and photographs.
      Nova Southeastern University Art Museum is located at 1 East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale. General admission is $12.

      “Judy Chicago: Judy Chicago In Glass”
      Nina JohnsonNovember 30, 2021–January 15, 2022
      Judy Chicago, Hand on Fire (Hands—Studies/Ancillaries) (2004). Courtesy of Nina Johnson, Miami.
      Pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago may be notorious for the ceramic plates she made for her massive installation The Dinner Party, but she has also developed her own techniques for painting on kiln-fired glass. Her second show with the Nina Johnson gallery will mark the debut of Mortality in Glass, her largest glass piece to date, as well as works from her glass sculpture series “Head’s Up” and “Hands.” Chicago has also re-fabricated Zig Zag, a Minimalist sculpture originally from 1965, in powder-coated steel.
      Nina Johnson is located at 6315 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami. Admission is free. 
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      How Doug Aitken, Andy Goldsworthy, and Other Artists Turned a Former Retreat for San Francisco Elites Into a Stark Reminder of Climate Change

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      It’s almost impossible to think about San Francisco without thinking about its landscape: the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, the 1989 Earthquake. California’s Golden City, a boom-and-bust town with an economy, immigrants, and urban identity so tied to its environment, that the climate itself is a central character in San Francisco’s story. 
      It was no surprise then that when For-Site Foundation founding director Cheryl Haines began to consider the next exhibition for the Bay Area-based organization, the climate crisis would be its central query. In the last decade, the city has been plagued by drought and fire, they too becoming local residents in the psyche of San Francisco. But it was when the National Park Service all but tossed Haines the keys to Cliff House, the Victorian-era landmark leisure complex on the Pacific Ocean, that the theme of the new exhibition, titled “Lands End,” really began to take on tones that might otherwise not be there. 

      Cliff House, once the gilded getaway of the wealthy and later an overpriced tourist trap and wedding venue, fell prey to the pandemic and shuttered its doors on the last day of 2020. It remained unoccupied until last month, when For-Site opened the show there. It will occupy the space through March, free and open to the public, at which point the National Park Service hopes to have a new tenant.
      Haines and her team had about six weeks to pull the exhibition together, and only in early September did they begin to install the works by 26 artists, including Doug Aitken, Andy Goldsworthy, Olafur Eliasson, and Ana Teresa Fernandez.
      Despite the urgency and tattered timeline, Haines, who was also behind the 2014 Ai Weiwei show at Alcatraz, felt the exhibition was a necessary endeavor for the foundation: “Because we’re a project-based organization, we disappear in between projects,” she said. “We can’t stay financially viable if we’re quiet for too long.”

      It felt uncomfortably ironic that the day I visited “Lands End,” while it was being installed last month, the Bay Area had just been battered by historic rainfall (effectively ending fire season, the other end of the region’s climate crutch). The water-logged fire alarm inside Cliff House wouldn’t stop beeping throughout the hour Haines took me around. (Sounding the alarm? So on the nose it could have served as a piece of art itself.)
      Instead, inside the 1960s travel lodge rehabbed into a 1990s corporate structure, you’ll find sculpture, painting, video, and social practice works by an impressive roster of bold-named artists in a complete utilization of all spaces (including the trash room!). It’s evocative and ghostly, as well as quite literally a confrontation of our climate. 
      Brian Jungen, Tombstone, (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver, B.C.
      Haines personally installed some of the commissions for artists who weren’t able to travel. Of his Geophagia, an experiment in California Kaolin clay, Goldsworthy said: “I wanted to see if it would be possible for me to make this work from a distance—it’s difficult for an artist for whom place is so important. Cheryl would have to be my hands.”  
      The clay is laid over dining tables in the former cafe space, cracking as it dries, and evoking the many themes of California: topography, drought, fault lines, fragile resources, and, as Goldsworthy said, “a reminder that when we dine, we eat earth.” 
      Meanwhile, Ana Teresa Fernandez’s site-specific On the Horizon (2021) is a series of six-foot-high plexiglass tubes, filled with ocean water collected in buckets from outside, materializing the projected sea-level rise. 
      Ana Teresa Fernández, On the Horizon,(2021). Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.
      Andrea Chung offered Sea Change, a cyanotype not made with the climate in mind, but in her interest exploring Caribbean colonial histories. Hung near huge picture windows facing the ocean, Chung’s work echoes ideas of the “reshaping of land because of colonialism. What we know of the Caribbean is all imposed fantasy of trying to create the garden of Eden, and there are consequences to that that people don’t consider in altering the land.“  
      Though the exhibition is one of discovery—especially of art in unlikely places—that sparks dialogue about the changing nature of our world, “the artists I select don’t hit you on the head,” Haines said. “They’re not aggressive in their messaging, they’re inviting you to consider, and asking questions more than presenting answers.” 
      With a topic as existential, anxiety-provoking, and seemingly insurmountable as climate change, it was important that Haines frame the curation intentionally. “Beauty and seduction of beauty is always a device I’ve used to bring people to big ideas,” she said, “but I’m feeling it more in this show than I have in the past.”
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      ‘They’re Just Really, Really Absurd’: Watch Sculptor Jes Fan Make Art With Testosterone and Melanin to Challenge Our Assumptions About Identity

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      Jes Fan’s media of choice might make other people squirm. Instead of paint or clay, Fan makes art with E. coli, semen, melanin, testosterone, blood, and urine.
      After developing some of these culturally loaded materials in a lab with the help of scientists, Fan transforms them into sculptures with glossy finishes and near-erotic shapes. The result walks the line between beauty, absurdity, and the grotesque. And for Fan, that’s the point.
      “A lot what I’m trying to do with what we consider as gendered materials, or racialized materials, they’re just really, really absurd,” the artist said in a 2020 interview for Art21’s “New York Close Up” series. “I was thinking a lot about how race, especially in the U.S., is seen as infectious. Think about China and coronavirus. Think about SARS and being in Hong Kong. And think about Jim Crow era, not sharing bodies of water. That idea of it being infected.”
      Production still from the Art21 “New York Close Up” film, “Jes Fan: Infectious Beauty.” © Art21, Inc. 2020.
      By injecting decaying biological matter into smooth, bulbous forms, Fan hopes to challenge viewers to examine closely held assumptions about what our culture values and what it rejects. “That eroticness seduces you,” Fan says. “It’s beauty in the gloss, and the possibility to see your own reflection in it. At the same time, you’re actually staring at something that repulses you, that actually is considered infectious or unclean.”
      The artist, who was born in Canada, raised in Hong Kong, and now lives in Brooklyn, tackles these same themes in a video included in the New Museum Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone,” on view at the New York museum through January 23, 2022. Xenophoria (2018–20) chronicles Fan’s pursuit of eumelanin pigment, the molecule responsible for skin color.
      As Fan dissects squid, harvests fungi, and locates moles in the film, the artist underscores the absurdity of the fetishization of a molecule that has caused centuries of racial discrimination, showing how it exists within all of us.
      Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. “Soft Water Hard Stone” is on view at the New Museum in New York through January 23, 2022. 
      [embedded content]
      This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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      ‘Love, Friendship, and Unashamed Social Climbing’: A New Show Reveals the Story Behind Fabergé’s Opulent Egg-Making Atelier

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      Easter is coming early this year, thanks to an exhibition that just opened at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), dedicated to the Russian goldsmith Carl Fabergé and his iconic eggs. After an extensive tour, the show is touching down in London, where the largest collection of the Imperial Easter Eggs will be on display, many for the first time in the U.K. The show also has a a section dedicated to the little-known branch of Fabergé’s firm that was located in London, and catered to a sophisticated and elite swathe of Edwardian society.
      “The story of Carl Fabergé, the legendary Russian Imperial goldsmith, is one of supreme luxury and unsurpassed craftsmanship,” exhibition curators Kieran McCarthy and Hanne Faurby said in a statement. Through the opulent creations he created, the curators added, the show “explores timeless stories of love, friendship and unashamed social climbing.”
      Fabergé’s premises at 173 New Bond Street in 1911. Image Courtesy ofThe Fersman Mineralogical Museum, Moscow and Wartski, London
      With more than 200 objects on display, the show focuses on the man behind the jewelry brand, its almost synonymous association with Russian elegance and the Imperial family, and the Anglo-Russian bond forged in part by Fabergé works. The Romanovs, Russia’s ruling family, were important patrons of Fabergé, and helped cement his role in high society as the official goldsmith to the Imperial court. His custom-made gifts, made from crystal, gold, rose-cut diamonds, often incorporated miniature portraits of family members and were exchanged between relatives.
      The second part of the exhibition explores how Fabergé succeeded his father at the family firm and helped catapult it to new heights, by fostering an atmosphere of creativity and unparalleled craftsmanship. Ultimately, the firm that had once catered to the likes of Russia’s Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, as well as England’s King Edward VII, King George V, Queen Mary, and Queen Victoria, was forced to pivot to aiding the war effort when Russia entered World War I in 1914, when it began to supply munitions instead of miniature treasures.
      Although it ceased production, the legacy of Fabergé has endured, and will surely continue to fascinate visitors as they discover the history behind the design house.
      Below, see highlights from the exhibition, on view through May 2, 2022. 
      Romanov Tercentenary Egg, Fabergé. Chief Workmaster Henrik Wigström (1913) Photo: © The Moscow Kremlin Museums.
      The Moscow Kremlin Egg, Fabergé (1906). Photo: © The Moscow Kremlin Museums. Courtesy of the V&A.
      The Alexander Palace Egg, Fabergé. Chief Workmaster Henrik Wigström (1908). Photo: © The Moscow Kremlin Museums. Courtesy of the V&A.
      Hen Egg (1884-85). Courtesy of the V&A.
      Mosaic Egg (1913-14). Courtesy of the V&A.
      Basket of Flowers Egg (1901). Courtesy of the V&A.
      Colonnade Egg (1909-10). Courtesy of the V&A.
      Red Cross with Triptych Egg, (1914-15). Courtesy of the V&A.
      The Diamond Trellis Egg (1891–92). Courtesy of the V&A.
      Installation view, “Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Courtesy of the V&A.
      Installation view, “Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Courtesy of the V&A.
      Installation view, “Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Courtesy of the V&A.
      Installation view, “Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Courtesy of the V&A.
      Installation view, “Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Courtesy of the V&A.
      Installation view, “Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Courtesy of the V&A.
      Installation view, “Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Courtesy of the V&A.
      Installation view, “Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution” at the V&A. Courtesy of the V&A.
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      in Exhibitions

      To Combat a Rising Tide of Islamophobia in France, the Government Has Organized 18 Islamic Art Exhibitions Nationwide

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      Turning to the unifying power of art, the French government is rolling out a cluster of simultaneous exhibitions about Islamic art and culture as part of a wider effort to combat a rise in Islamophobic sentiment within the country. The exhibitions, which opened in 18 French cities this week and will run for four months, aim to showcase the diversity of Islamic culture.
      Titled “Islamic Arts: A Past for a Present,” the government initiative is being organized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais, and led by the head of the Louvre’s Islamic art department, Yannick Lintz.  Some 210 works borrowed from national and regional museums are on view, including 60 masterpieces loaned from the Louvre.
      “Curating Islamic art today means also dealing with Islamism, and Islamophobia,” Lintz told Artnet News. “It’s not just a French problem, but it’s a reality for every curator and director of Islamic art now in museums.” 
      Lintz added that after the September 11 attacks in New York, the recent terrorist attacks in France, and the war unfolding in Syria, the word Islam often conjures up associations with violence and terrorism. “I think that it’s important, as curators specialized in Islamic civilization and Islamic art, to give another message about what is the historical reality of Islam, through 13 centuries of art, civilization, and intellectual life.” More

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      In Her Experimental Hirshhorn Retrospective, Laurie Anderson Proves That She’s Still the Artist of Our Virtual Moment

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      There may be no better preparation for the looming corporatized “metaverse” than the current slew of immersive art shows. You can meld with the paintings of Van Gogh or Monet as they are projected at gargantuan scale over the walls and floors of enormous galleries. You can see yourself splintered hundreds of times in the ever-proliferating versions of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms. Or you can visit the Laurie Anderson exhibition currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum. 
      Not exactly a retrospective, “The Weather” is a reminder that Anderson has been at the immersive trade for a very long time. Her multimedia extravaganzas incorporate poetry, music, film, visual projections and dance to enfold audiences in waves of light, color, sound, and words. At its best, Anderson’s work interweaves sensory and mental information to open new avenues of thought. 
      Since the surprise success of the single “O Superman” off her 1981 debut album Big Science, she has pioneered a unique take on performance that is at once intimate and communal, microscopically focused on the ironic detail and expansively exploding to conjure a sense of cosmic unity. 
      The open-ended nature of her narratives is a central part of their appeal. Anderson provides a mélange of real or imagined memories, snippets of oddball news reports, offbeat descriptions of quotidian experiences, clever wordplay, and clichés repeated so many times they become newly strange, all tied together by her sonorous voice and hypnotic electronic music.
      Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt.
      Presenting her oeuvre in a gallery setting is an almost impossible task, so Anderson and curators Marina Isgro and Jaya Kaveeshwar have opted instead to present a series of installations that follow some of her persistent themes. To make her multimedia practice suitable for gallery viewing, they have accentuated the visual. 
      Words—one of Anderson’s essential tools—are splashed over the walls in hand-written scrawls, shredded and rewoven in literal heaps of paper or plastered as long, printed texts on the walls of the gallery. Sound is another integral part of the exhibition, but often it comes second, taking the form of a soothing bath of words and music that operate as the exhibition’s soundtrack. 
      Anderson had hoped to include several VR works but was thwarted by Covid restrictions that prohibit the sharing of equipment. Instead, she transformed a 2017 VR work titled Chalkroom, created in collaboration with Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang, into a mesmerizing environmental installation that is the centerpiece of the Hirshhorn’s show. 
      Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang, Chalkroom (2017).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Photo by Ron Blunt.
      One enters through a doorway swept with moving projections of graffitied words and images that quite effectively mimic the sensation of moving through VR space. Inside, more images and words are scribbled in white paint on the black walls and floor. Unlike the projections, they are fixed in place, but the streams and eddies of white marks become almost as destabilizing as the moving images. 
      Reportedly, Anderson spent several weeks alone inside this room painting the texts and images herself. One on hand, they might be seen as a transliteration of the random thoughts and pictures snaking through her mind. But they also suggest the porous nature of the boundary between any internal consciousness and external stimuli. 
      Laurie Anderson, The Witness Protection Program (The Raven) (2020).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt.
      The writing that spills over drawings of figures, landscapes, and objects has a stream-of-consciousness quality. It ruminates on the nature of death and dying: “They say you die three times. First when your heart stops. Second when they put you in the ground. Third, the last time someone says your name.” They present sardonic suggestions: “Once you’ve gotten the message, hang up the phone.” They ask questions: “What is the purpose of panic?” or “Who owns the moon?” And they quote figures like John Cage, Charles Dickens, the Beatles, Sigmund Freud, and the 13th-century Zen master Dogen. 
      Anchoring the swirling currents of words and images are three large sculptures created for this exhibition. A huge, black raven hunches ominously—a tribute both to the foreboding creature in Edgar Allen Poe’s eponymous poem and a Biblical reference to the bird sent out from the ark by Noah to look for life, never to return. 
      Laurie Anderson, To Carry Heart’s Tide (The Canoe) (2020).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Photo by Ron Blunt.
      A leaky and partially patched life-size gold canoe has been tasked, according to its title, To Carry the Heart’s Tide. A large green parrot with a moving beak clings to a metal perch. It is the source of a long eclectic monologue on the nature of things. Recited in a tinny electronic voice, its disjointed commentary converges at times with the written texts on the floor below. 
      A final sculpture is affixed to one wall. Titled What Time Can Do, it comprises a wooden shelf containing a lineup of various cups and vessels that shakes periodically as if from a passing train. It offers an illustration of a little parable, scrawled on the wall below, that describes the inevitable replacement of beautiful things with their most banal substitutes. 
      Laurie Anderson, What Time Can Do (Shaking Shelf) (2021).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Photo by Ron Blunt.
      None of the other works in the show have the razzle-dazzle of the Chalkroom. Nevertheless, there is plenty of food for thought. In a poignant story printed on one wall, a narrator (perhaps Anderson, perhaps not) recounts the sudden return of a lost memory of the constant presence of death in an ICU, where she spent several weeks as a child. 
      A row of tiny clay figures on which videos of real people have been projected create an enigmatic symphony as they wordlessly rub knives against a sharpening rod. A long bed of paper shredded from a copy of Crime and Punishment becomes the screen for flickering video clips of uncertain origin. A book contains Anderson’s version of the Bible created by a supercomputer that has mixed the sacred text with Anderson’s own writings. Darkly apocalyptic, it is full of vivid phrases and images that almost begin to cohere into a cogent text. 
      Laurie Anderson, Habeas Corpus (2015).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt.
      A sense of unease and anxiety permeates the show. This becomes overtly political in two works that reflect on one of this century’s darkest chapters. Habeas Corpus is a reinstallation of a 2015 work, originally created for the Park Avenue Armory, about Mohammed el Gharani, the youngest of the detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Fourteen years old at the time of his capture, he spent seven years in captivity before he was finally released for lack of evidence. He remains haunted by memories of his incarceration and dogged by shadowy agents of various countries. 
      Because el Gharani is barred from entering the U.S., Anderson has him speaking about his ordeal through a projected image of him sitting in an armchair. In a particularly poignant moment, he recounts his visit to a slavery museum, where he recognized the essence of his experience in the shackles and cells on display. 
      Laurie Anderson, From the Air (2009).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt. Clay fabrication by Maria Dusamp.
      A second work, From the Air (2009), provides the flip side to this tale of fear and insecurity. In a video projected over tiny clay figures of Anderson and her dog, she turns the tale of her beloved pet’s fearful reaction to a vulture attack into a parable about America’s heightened sense of vulnerability in the wake of the September 11 attacks.  
      While “The Weather” is billed as a non-retrospective, it doesn’t fully abandon the conventions of that format. There are posters and ephemera from various earlier projects, a selection of the rejiggered instruments Anderson has used over the years, and a set of video excerpts from selected performances from 1975 to 2018.  Also included are a group of oil paintings that will evidently serve as backdrops for an upcoming performance. While competent expressionist abstractions in their own right, they seem out of place in this otherwise technology-driven show. 
      Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt.
      More interesting are a group of staged photographs documenting a very early performance project. For the Institutional Dream Series, created 1972-73, Anderson had a friend photograph her as she attempted to sleep in various public places. Her stated purpose was to discover if location colors the nature of one’s dreams. But the project, with its images of Anderson curled up in such sites as public restrooms, a park bench and a beach, speaks to the origins of feminist performance art in the 1970s.  
      As exemplified by artists like Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, and Valie Export, that style of performance encouraged interactivity and emphasized the physicality and vulnerability of the female body in a patriarchal society. Institutional Dream Series shares this sensibility, but Anderson would soon diverge from that kind of self-exposure. Instead, her work presents the body as an extension of ever more advanced technologies, as she experiments with synthesizers, Artificial Intelligence, and VR. Even when she performs on stage, her body seems a small thing, overtaken by an electronically enhanced voice that wants to flood the world.
      Laurie Anderson, My Day Beats Your Year (The Parrot) (2010/2021) on view in “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Photo by Jason Stern.
      All of which makes her the perfect artist for our immersive moment. Anderson speaks to an existence in which the physical body is merely a portal to other digital realities and identity is a construct made up, as Roland Barthes would say, of a tissue of signs and quotations from other centers of culture. Even in a museum setting where viewers go in person to interact with actual artworks, Anderson manages to evoke this brave new world where the corporeal is dissolving into the virtual. 
      Yet, despite the fact that “The Weather” celebrates a career that has relentlessly pursued the most advanced forms of electronic communication, ultimately Anderson seems to be presenting a cautionary tale. The marriage of real and virtual consciousness doesn’t seem to have made us any better or any smarter. Instead, Anderson has her nattering Parrot mutter: “They say that if you think technology can solve your problems, then you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand your problems.”
      “Laurie Anderson: The Weather”, is on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., through July 31, 2022. 
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