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      Visiting Yayoi Kusama’s Sprawling New 70-Year Survey Is Like Stepping Inside a Frenzied Tik-Tok Feed… in a Good Way

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      There are only a handful of living artists as well known as Yayoi Kusama. The 92-year-old’s colorful hair and stern gaze in photos is as recognizable as her mirrored funhouses and spot-covered installations, which have made her one of the most in-demand artists in the world.
      But a major new retrospective at Gropius Bau in Berlin looks beyond that span of famous work. “A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe,” which opened today (but will temporarily close again due to a new lockdown), has recreated eight exhibitions that mark less-recognized turning points in the Japanese artist’s career.
      The indexical approach sheds light on the enduring complexities that hide in plain sight in Kusama’s obsessively painted and warping world. Though pleasurable for all the senses, a plunge into Kusama’s work offers little reprieve from the anxieties and shifting realities outside. Each decade of her oeuvre is packed with frantic energy and emotion. Boundaries are crossed, one’s psychological stamina is tested. There is a sort of endlessness to each installation that creates a frenzy of seeing as chaotic and constant as a TikTok feed.
      Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room — Love Forever (1966/94). Courtesy: Ota Fine Arts.
      The exhibition spans Kusama’s 70-year career, starting chronologically with her childhood in Matsumoto, Japan, where she had her first shows. Earlier pieces, many from the artist’s own collection, ring with a similar intensity to later works, but young Kusama was more somber. A lonely pair of trees is swallowed up by an ominous landscape in the 1950 painting Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner of Depersonalization).
      Revelations about abusive episodes from her childhood filter in a restaged version of her 1963 show “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats,” which was originally held at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York. The row boat, dressed up with Kusama’s signature stuffed phalli, touches on the artist’s self-described “fear of sex” that resulted from watching her father’s affairs at the behest of her mother. It is a disturbing story that importantly complicates the crazed landscapes of bulging sculptures that appear in the following rooms.
      There was a frenzy of touch in her 1960s and ’70s happenings, and her recreated exhibition “Love Room,” originally shown in The Hague in 1967, exemplifies Kusama’s utopian visions of blending boundaries between herself, others, nature, and the universe. She paints dots on naked visitors who move around the room in a recording from the opening.
      “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness,” Kusama once said.
      “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
      On the wave of that 1970s mood, the artist returned home to Japan but found the hippie revolution would not rise up there in quite the same way, the exhibition panels explain. With the jubilance of the times somewhat subsided, the artist leans into the prevailing anti-war politics that marked the post-Vietnam war era. In Japan in 1977, she made a series of work that cast an unrelenting look at the horrors of war, collaged paintings with mixed photos from Vietnam and World War II. That same year, Kusama committed herself to a psychiatric facility, where she still lives and works today.
      Of course, there’s a healthy dose of early and late Infinity rooms, the ultimate Kusama crowd-pleasers that, thanks to sensitive curating, are given an intellectual rigor. The artist’s first room, from her show “Peep Show or Endless Love,” in New York in 1966, features two small boxy “holes” that you can stick your head into, while someone else pushes their own face through another hole across the way. Together, socially distanced at the Gropius Bau, you can stare at each other, and into a never-ending optical illusion at the same time.
      It struck me all as a bit of a pharmakon. While Kusama offers a dazzling escape from mundanity, the feelings of the world are turned on and tuned up when you step inside it. Decades later, the artist still seems to know our own vices better than we do.
      “Yayoi Kusama: A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe” is on view at the Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, April 23–August 15.
      Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective, Installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau Photo: Luca Girardini
      “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
      “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
      “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
      “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
      Yayoi Kusama, The End of Summer (1980). Courtesy: Sammlung Goetz, Munich.
      “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
      “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
      “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
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      Sculptor Alex Da Corte Brought a Bright Blue Big Bird to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Rooftop—See Images Here

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      In the 1985 film Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird, Big Bird gets kidnapped by a traveling circus. Its owners paint him blue, cage him, and force him to sing the song “I’m So Blue” for their audience.
      Thankfully, Big Bird seems to have made his escape in Alex Da Corte‘s new roof garden commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He perches in all his feathered glory atop a crescent moon and clutches a ladder as he floats through space, balanced atop a fully functioning Alexander Calder-style mobile. The ladder suggests that he is not stranded, and that he has the ability to end his isolation.
      “It’s a surrogate for where we are collectively at this moment, kind of contemplating a future and not knowing what we’re facing—really, a sense of vulnerability,” Shanay Jhaveri, the museum’s assistant curator of international Modern and contemporary art, told Artnet News. “It’s about this idea of looking out at new horizons.”
      The sculpture, As Long as the Sun Lasts, is named for a Italo Calvino’s short story about intergalactic travelers searching for a planet to call home.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      “Alex began the project at the height of the pandemic,” Jhaveri said. “He thought the work should speak to the future and also encapsulate our own sense of vulnerability and confronting uncertainty.”
      The 40-year-old artist chose to paint Big Bird’s feathers blue not only because of the Sesame Street film, but also in reference to the Muppet’s Brazilian cousin, Garibaldo, who Da Corte watched as a child in Venezuela, as well as the color’s traditional associations with sadness.
      The piece’s melancholic feel is offset with a sense of whimsy, with the base of the mobile built to look like the interlocking plastic walls of a Little Tykes Outdoor Activity Gym—another ’80s relic. It’s signed with Da Corte’s take on Calder’s signature monogram, and the number 69, in reference to the year of the moon landing, the first episode of Sesame Street, and when Da Corte’s father immigrated to the U.S.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      “Alex wanted to touch upon the liveliness and the unpredictability that is so much at the heart of Calder’s practice, but also the playfulness,” Jhaveri said.
      Fabricating the piece was a challenge, from producing Big Bird’s 7,000 individually placed aluminum feathers to achieving the perfect balance of the mobile, which spins gently in the breeze.
      “It was very important that it had to move, but not be mechanized,” Jhaveri said. “It had to be something that  responded to the air currents and moved intermittently, because in life, things happen intermittently—it’s not instant.”
      See more photos of the work below.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
      “The Roof Garden Commission: Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, April 16–October 31, 2021. 
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      in Exhibitions

      ‘When You’re Isolated, You Hear More’: Watch Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson Describe How a Frightening Illness Transformed Her Art

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      When artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson was five months into her pregnancy in 1965, she developed breathing problems stemming from cardiomyopathy, and was forced to finish out her nine months confined to the hospital, living inside an oxygen tank. Spending most of her days alone in the hospital, the artist became acutely aware of her fragile state.
      “When you are experiencing the threat of death, you become so aware of time,” Leeson says in an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the New York Close Up series, “that’s really a gift, to become so sick early in my life.”
      In the interview, which premiered as part of the tenth season of Art21’s show Art in the Twenty First Century, Leeson recounts her early work in the 1960s and ’70s, and how it was inspired by her health problems.
      During her recovery, Leeson took a night course in wax casting at UCLA, where she began creating casts of her own face. As her breathing improved, she decided to add a sound element to the resulting works. “When you’re so isolated, you hear more,” she tells Art21. Ultimately, the wax sculptures featured both sounds of the artist’s breathing and dialogue.
      When the artist was invited to show in a group exhibition at UCLA, she included a selection of the talking wax sculptures, which proved unnerving to observers. “Within two days, the museum closed the show. They said ‘Media isn’t art.’ ‘Sound isn’t art.’”
      Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Drawing Breath.” © Art21, Inc. 2021.
      But that institutional rejection actually prompted Leeson to keep working. She describes the experience as “the best thing that happened to me,” adding, “the cultural experience of having your voice suppressed has made having a voice really important to what I do.”
      In June 2021, the New Museum in Manhattan will present the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s wide-ranging video and sound work in “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted.”

      Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. The artist’s solo exhibition, “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted” will be on view at the New Museum from June 2021.
      [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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      in Exhibitions

      Olafur Eliasson Just Flooded Switzerland’s Fanciest Museum With Pond Water and Invited Wildlife Inside—See Images Here

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      Museums are generally secure spaces, hermetically sealed off from the outside world and its fluctuating temperature, humidity, and light—not to mention its winds, rains, and wandering birds.
      But the Danish–Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has removed those barriers in an ambitious new project at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel.
      For the project, titled Life, Eliasson has flooded the museum’s outdoor pond, letting it flow inside by having the institution’s exterior glass facade removed.
      The museum, now only a shell, is left open to the elements—and it is also open to visitors around the clock, day and night, until July.
      The artwork “is never the same and it will continue to transform throughout the duration of the exhibition,” Sam Keller, the director of the Fondation Beyeler, told Artnet News.
      “What is surprising is the great variations of emotions, reflections, and interactions of visitors… The [health] crisis has revealed new layers of meaning and has made obvious how strongly our lives are entangled with other humans and non-humans alike.”
      The show (which features uranine, a non-toxic dye and compound the artist first used in 1998, when he poured it into various rivers) looks a bit like a wet reinterpretation of the artist’s acclaimed exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 2014, where he redrew the museum by installing a stoney riverbed inside.
      In Basel, a breeze blows through Renzo Piano’s building from the museum’s gardens, as dwarf water lilies, shellflowers, and water ferns float in bright green water throughout the space.
      After a year in which much of the Western art world spent its time living behind screens, the shows offers a visceral experience to those who can attend.
      But it also gives those still mostly engaging with art online—such as this writer—a chance to see the show by way of five live-streams.
      By blending the boundaries between the virtual and the actual, Eliasson said the exhibition becomes more visibly entangled with the world: “This entanglement is our way of being.”
      See more images of the show below.
      Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
      Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
      Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Mark Niedermann.
      Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
      Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
      Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
      Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Mark Niedermann.
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      After Initially Declining to Participate, David Hammons Unexpectedly Added Never-Before-Seen Works to His Drawing Center Show

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      David Hammons has made a surprise intervention in a show of the artist’s influential “Body Prints” series at the Drawing Center. 
      More than two months into the show’s run, the artist has added six never-before-seen prints from his personal collection—including one made this year of a dark, spectral figure that appears to be wearing a mask. (The addition happens to make a misnomer of the show’s title, “Body Prints, 1968–1979.”)
      David Hammons, Untitled (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
      Drawing Center director Laura Hoptman had organized the show without Hammons’s participation, or what she called the artist’s “benign neglect” in the introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue. So it came as a surprise when she received a call from Hammons a few weeks ago with a plan to send more art.
      But then again, it wasn’t that surprising. “This is what he does,” Hoptman tells Artnet News, explaining that while Hammons rarely participates in the process of putting together shows of his older work, he will often put his stamp on them after the fact. (At every stop in her career, including stints at MoMA, the Carnegie Museum, and the New Museum, Hoptman has proposed solo shows to the artist, and each time he has declined.)
      Installation view of “David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979,” at the Drawing Center, 2021. Courtesy of the Drawing Center.
      Hoptman describes the gesture as an “intervention,” but that’s not Hammons’s own term. “I think we lack the language for what this is,” Hoptman says. And when asked if she had any insight into the intentions of the famously elusive artist—whether he intended the move as a playful rejoinder to curatorial decisions, or a correction, perhaps—she simply laughed and said “No!”
      Considered to be among the most important works of his career, Hammons began his series of “Body Prints” in the late ‘60s by greasing himself up with margarine or baby oil, pressing himself against a piece of paper or other material, and then spreading charcoal or powdered pigment on the imprint. What emerged was a powerful index of the Black body—sometimes sensual, sometimes trapped.
      David Hammons, Untitled (1976). Courtesy of the artist.
      Whereas other artists had applied paint to their bodies in the past, Hammons’s more visceral technique was all his own. “It was a formidable innovation,” New York Times critic Will Heinrich wrote recently. “Instead of the vague, if graphic, smudges a painted body would produce, these soft-edged, X-ray-like images caught every last detail. They look less like ordinary artworks than like the Shroud of Turin.”
      Until this month, Hoptman and her team believed that Hammons hadn’t made any “Body Prints” since the end of the ’70s. That he had continued the work, and was willing to show it, proved to be more of a revelation than the “intervention” itself. 
      “I think it’s an exquisite and moving reminder of the fact that his genius is still alive,” says Hoptman, who has on many occasions referred to Hammons as “the greatest living artist in the United States.”
      “I don’t see it as a revision of his history, but rather an assertion of the artist’s voice in the making of that history,” she said. “I think that’s something that Hammons has always stood for and that, as a curator, I deeply respect.” 
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      What If an Artist Were Your History Teacher? A New Photography Exhibition at the Guggenheim Questions How We Depict the Past

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      “Fake news” will be a tempting aperture through which to approach “Off the Record,” a new group show at the Guggenheim that looks at the ways in which artists consider, critique, or otherwise manipulate “official” documents of history and state power. 
      It wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to take that tack. But it’s not what was on curator Ashley James’s mind as she organized the show—her first since becoming the museum’s first full-time Black curator in 2019.
      “I’m less interested in speaking to the specificities of our contemporary historical moment than in thinking about a certain position in relationship to history as such,” she tells Artnet News over the phone. She pauses as construction noises from the show’s installation clang behind her.
      “It’s about a point of view,” she continues as the din dies down. “It’s about a kind of posture toward history and documentation that is something that’s applicable to the past, to the present, and to the future. It’s more about a methodology.”
      Sara Cwynar, Encyclopedia Grid (Bananas) (2014). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
      Heavy on photoconceptualism, “Off the Record” comprises some 25 works—all but one of which were pulled from the museum’s own collection—from artists including Sadie Barnette, Sarah Charlesworth, Hank Willis Thomas, and Adrian Piper. It’s a group that represents a wide swath of generations, interests, and artistic practices. What unites them here, explains James, is a shared “skepticism of received history.”  
      But how that sense of skepticism manifests in the work varies with each artist. For Sara Cwynar, represented in the exhibition by three pieces from her 2014 Encyclopedia Grid series, it’s an intellectual exercise. Taking a cue from the John Berger classic Ways of Seeing, the artist has culled various pictures of the same subject (bananas, Brigitte Bardot, the Acropolis) from multiple encyclopedias and rephotographed them—a process that shows us, without judgment, the representational quirks and biases of the supposedly objective resources. 
      Sadie Barnette, My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation (2017). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
      Lisa Oppenheim, meanwhile, sees creative potential in the document’s deficiency. For a 2007 photo series, the artist reimagined details redacted from a group of Walker Evans’s Great Depression-era negatives, which were hole-punched to prevent publication. Oppenheim’s own small circular photographs, paired next to Evans’s originals, read as a kind of revisionist history—albeit one that is just as flawed as its source material.
      Other examples are more charged, such as prints from Carrie Mae Weems’s iconic 1995-96 series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” in which the artist appropriates ethnographic photos of enslaved people to show how photography was used to reinforce racial inequality. Each is paired with a pointed phrase: “DESCENDING THE THRONE YOU BECAME FOOT SOLDIER & COOK,” reads one.
      Hank Willis Thomas, Something To Believe In (1984/2007). © Hank Willis ThomasPhotography. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
      Like these examples, almost all of the artists in the exhibition draw on material from generations past. But that’s not to say that the show doesn’t have something to say about the contemporary moment, James points out—even if its message has little to do with the Trump era specifically. 
      Best exemplifying this is the one work in the show that doesn’t belong to the museum’s collection: a 2020 wall-hung assemblage by Tomashi Jackson, in which an archival print of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act is overlaid with paint and campaign materials for a 2018 gubernatorial race. 
      It’s a piece that literally fuses the past with the present, the “official” with the unofficial. And it alludes to another theme that ties together the various pieces in the show: “power,” says the curator, ”whether that power is because of the institution itself or power in a narrative that has been received in a certain way over time.” 
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      The Guggenheim’s New Show of All-Star Photoconceptualists Questions Official Records and How We Depict the Past

      by

      “Fake news” will be a tempting aperture through which to approach “Off the Record,” a new group show at the Guggenheim that looks at the ways in which artists consider, critique, or otherwise manipulate “official” documents of history and state power. 
      It wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to take that tack. But it’s not what was on curator Ashley James’s mind as she organized the show—her first since becoming the museum’s first full-time Black curator in 2019.
      “I’m less interested in speaking to the specificities of our contemporary historical moment than in thinking about a certain position in relationship to history as such,” she tells Artnet News over the phone. She pauses as construction noises from the show’s installation clang behind her.
      “It’s about a point of view,” she continues as the din dies down. “It’s about a kind of posture toward history and documentation that is something that’s applicable to the past, to the present, and to the future. It’s more about a methodology.”
      Sara Cwynar, Encyclopedia Grid (Bananas) (2014). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
      Heavy on photoconceptualism, “Off the Record” comprises some 25 works—all but one of which were pulled from the museum’s own collection—from artists including Sadie Barnette, Sarah Charlesworth, Hank Willis Thomas, and Adrian Piper. It’s a group that represents a wide swath of generations, interests, and artistic practices. What unites them here, explains James, is a shared “skepticism of received history.”  
      But how that sense of skepticism manifests in the work varies with each artist. For Sara Cwynar, represented in the exhibition by three pieces from her 2014 Encyclopedia Grid series, it’s an intellectual exercise. Taking a cue from the John Berger classic Ways of Seeing, the artist has culled various pictures of the same subject (bananas, Brigitte Bardot, the Acropolis) from multiple encyclopedias and rephotographed them—a process that shows us, without judgment, the representational quirks and biases of the supposedly objective resources. 
      Sadie Barnette, My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation (2017). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
      Lisa Oppenheim, meanwhile, sees creative potential in the document’s deficiency. For a 2007 photo series, the artist reimagined details redacted from a group of Walker Evans’s Great Depression-era negatives, which were hole-punched to prevent publication. Oppenheim’s own small circular photographs, paired next to Evans’s originals, read as a kind of revisionist history—albeit one that is just as flawed as its source material.
      Other examples are more charged, such as prints from Carrie Mae Weems’s iconic 1995-96 series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” in which the artist appropriates ethnographic photos of enslaved people to show how photography was used to reinforce racial inequality. Each is paired with a pointed phrase: “DESCENDING THE THRONE YOU BECAME FOOT SOLDIER & COOK,” reads one.
      Hank Willis Thomas, Something To Believe In (1984/2007). © Hank Willis ThomasPhotography. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
      Like these examples, almost all of the artists in the exhibition draw on material from generations past. But that’s not to say that the show doesn’t have something to say about the contemporary moment, James points out—even if its message has little to do with the Trump era specifically. 
      Best exemplifying this is the one work in the show that doesn’t belong to the museum’s collection: a 2020 wall-hung assemblage by Tomashi Jackson, in which an archival print of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act is overlaid with paint and campaign materials for a 2018 gubernatorial race. 
      It’s a piece that literally fuses the past with the present, the “official” with the unofficial. And it alludes to another theme that ties together the various pieces in the show: “power,” says the curator, ”whether that power is because of the institution itself or power in a narrative that has been received in a certain way over time.” 
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      in Exhibitions

      Dia Chelsea’s Deft Expansion May Start a New Trend in the World of Museum Renovations: Subtlety

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      For major museums and galleries, a renovation is a statement. The announcements usually look the same: X starchitect will lead Y’s redesign that cost Z millions of dollars. Z is always a big number.
      But the Dia Art Foundation has opted to tweak the traditional formula—instead of going big, it has opted to go subtle. The Minimalism-focused organization opens its renovated 20,000-square-foot home in West Chelsea, New York, on Friday after a two-year renovation.
      In 2018, when Dia first announced a fundraising campaign to upgrade its campuses, including a redesign of its three contiguous industrial buildings in Chelsea, it said the goal was to raise $90 million. That’s a big number, to be sure. But only $20 million—an uncharacteristically small figure for such a prominent project—was put toward the renovation in Chelsea. The rest was put back into the organization’s endowment for future use. (Money from the fund will also be used for the construction of Dia’s new 2,500-square-foot exhibition space in Soho starting next year.)
      The restraint and foresight to squirrel away money for safekeeping looks even more canny today, two years and one pandemic-induced financial crisis later. It also expresses the ethos of the redesign, which is about preserving what you have. 
      Dia Chelsea, New York. Photo: Elizabeth Felicella. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation,New York.
      Led by Architecture Research Office, Dia’s industrial properties, which were in rough shape prior to construction, weren’t whitewashed in pursuit of the big, boxy aesthetics we’ve come to associate with flashy renovations. Instead, the buildings were left more or less intact. Broad wood beams span the ceilings, bisected by windows that fill the place with natural light. The walls are brick; the floors, concrete. 
      “The modesty of this was very intentional,” says Dia director Jessica Morgan, who, upon taking the director job in 2015, scrapped her predecessor’s flashier renovation plan. “These buildings are remarkable, particularly for showing art—even more so, I would argue, than some spaces that are deliberately designed that way, which often end up competing with the art that they are showing.” 
      The goal, Morgan adds, was to find a “way to do it that was practical, achievable, and that would allow us to put more money into the institution.”
      Lucy Raven, Casters X-2 + X-3 (2021), installation view, Dia Chelsea, New York City. © Lucy Raven. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. Courtesy of Dia ArtFoundation, New York.
      A suite of newly commissioned works by American artist Lucy Raven, on view through January of next year, inaugurates the new galleries. Dia’s first room is illuminated by two wall-mounted spotlights, which the artist calls Casters. Attached to moving armatures—a technology that was invented for war before being appropriated by big-budget filmmakers—each one projects a beam of light that roves around the space as if simultaneously searching for an escaped convict and promoting a Hollywood premiere. 
      Sitting in the second gallery, meanwhile, is a massive movie screen, recalling those found in drive-in theaters. This one plays Raven’s slick new black-and-white film Ready Mix, which depicts the process by which minerals become concrete. It was shot with an anamorphic lens—another military invention adopted by the movies. 
      The artworks occupy all 20,000 square feet of street-level exhibition space, which may come as a surprise when you see just how minimal they are in their installation. But granting artworks like Raven’s the space to breathe is something Dia, which is best known for its sprawling converted Nabisco factory space in Beacon, upstate New York, has long prioritized.  
      Lucy Raven, Ready Mix (2021), installation view, Dia Chelsea, New York City. © Lucy Raven. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation,New York.
      Early on in the renovation process, Morgan turned to friends like Zoe Leonard and Roni Horn, both of whom have shown with the foundation before, for an artist’s perspective on what to do with the space. Both preferred a minimal approach that embraced the industrial vibe; anything else would be like putting lipstick on a pig—and in this case, the pig wasn’t a bad place to show art in the first place.
      “They really encouraged me to dig into what would be possible by staying here and using what we had rather than thinking about building anew,” the director explains. “Ultimately, these are galleries and we want to make sure that artists are inspired by these spaces.” 
      “It’s not about what I think is necessarily a good space,” she continues, “it’s about what artists think is a good space.” 
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