Exhibitions

A new art exhibition in Italy takes an oblique look at the life of the poet Dante Alighieri, whose banishment from his native Florence in 1302 serves as the narrative lynchpin of the show. 
Dante, who is most famous for writing the Divine Comedy, was a Florentine government official when he was exiled in 1302 by political rivals. Forced to wander the Italian peninsula, he passed through Rome, Verona, and Bologna before finally setting in Ravenna, where he died of malaria in 1321, one year after completing his most famous work.
The exhibition at the Museo d’Arte della Città in Ravenna (“Art in Times of Exile,” through July 4) marks the 700th anniversary of his death and looks at the major artworks Dante may have seen on his travels.
Installation view. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
The show includes works by artists who were revered in Dante’s time, including Cimabue, who is represented by an important mosaic.
Works on view were borrowed from an array of institutions, including the Louvre and the Uffizi Galleries. The latter sent two works: the Stigmata di San Francesco by Maestro della Croce and the Badia Polyptych by Giotto di Bondone.
Other artists in the show include Arnolfo di Cambio, Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, and Giuliano da Rimini, all of whom were known to Dante.
“To think that our wonderful Byzantine mosaics influenced and inspired Dante in writing the last cantos of Paradise arouses great emotion and pride in us,” Ravenna’s mayor, Michele de Pascale, said in a statement.
“Prestigious loans from all over Europe are both expressions of timeless beauty and extraordinary sources for Dante’s inspiration, which informed the greatness of The Comedy and of the entire production of this supreme poet.”
See more images from the show below.
Installation view. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
Venetian-Ravenna master from the late 13th-century, Madonna Enthroned with Child. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Sculptures, don. Jean-Charles Davillier. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
Installation view. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
Arnolfo di Cambio’s Bust of Pope Boniface VIII. On loan from Vatican City, Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano.
Giotto di Bondone’s Polittico di Badia (1295-1297). Installation view. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
Installation view. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
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One year ago, Rashid Johnson was holed up in a makeshift workspace in the basement of his Long Island home, churning out a series of apocalyptic oil stick drawings the color of a fire alarm. They belonged to his ongoing “Anxious Men” project, the artist told Artnet News at the time. He sounded anxious—as we all did then, a month deep into the pandemic, uncertainty still the dominant mood.
Now, as we prepare to return to a semblance of normalcy, Johnson has once again turned to that same anxious red color—but this time, he’s doing so to a more optimistic end.
Next month, the artist will unveil Red Stage, a new Creative Time-sponsored public art piece that will act as both a monumental sculpture and a participatory installation.
The work’s title doubles as a physical description: Installed at New York’s Astor Place, Johnson’s piece will take the form of a 30-foot-wide red platform backed by a 13-foot-tall proscenium.
Playing out on the stage for the project’s month-long run will be any number of activations, both planned and unplanned: Creative Time-organized programs, artist-curated takeovers, and what Johnson calls the People Days, in which the site will be turned over to artists and passersby to use it as they see fit—for rehearsals and performances, or maybe meditation. (A full programming schedule—including presentations by theater director Charlotte Brathwaite and the nightlife collective Papi Juice—will be announced in the coming weeks.)
Rashid Johnson working on an “Untitled Anxious Red Drawing” (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
“We are still contending with so much trauma and pain from what has been experienced during the course of the pandemic,” Justine Ludwig, Creative Time’s executive director, told Artnet News. “We’re back in the world and we’re thinking about the place that we want to be a part of. There’s a lot of tension that exists there.”
For three years, Ludwig and Johnson have been in discussions about a Creative Time presentation. Initially, the director explained, they were working on a “radically different project.” The pandemic changed that and their conversations pivoted. “Community, exchange, and collaboration, and thinking about how the city itself becomes a site of activation” became the new priority, said Ludwig. More

In a scene that seems ripped from the pages of a fantasy novel, a wooded forest has sprung up overnight in the urban jungle that is New York City.
But this is not the design of an evil sorcerer. The 40-foot-tall grove in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park is actually the work of artist and architect Maya Lin.
A warning about the dangers of climate change, Ghost Forest takes its name from the phenomena of the same name. Around the world, trees are dying because of insect infestations and rising sea levels, which can leave trees drowning in saltwater.
The work features 49 Atlantic white cedar trees from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. There, some 100 miles south of Manhattan, large swaths of decades’ old costal forests are being lost to salt water inundation.
“I call them my gentle giants,” Lin said at the opening of the exhibition, the trees having been carefully planted amid a tangle of electric utility cables and sprinkler lines buried beneath the park’s lawn. “I wanted you to feel like you’re wandering through something intimate.”
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Maya Lin Studio, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
As a public art installation, Ghost Forest is somewhat of a departure for Lin, who remains best known for her 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., but has also created monumental earthworks like the undulating Wavefield at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York.
“I don’t do temporary works,” she said. “I’m pretty slow. I’m very site specific—I like to connect you to the land under your feet.”
So when Madison Square Park Conservancy chief curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport asked her to conceive a project for its public art program back in 2013, it was a while before an idea took root. Initially, Lin wanted to work with living trees, but realized planting them would take years to have the visual impact she was envisioning.
“It was stumping me,” Lin admitted, before catching and apologizing for the unintended pun.
It was in 2018, during her annual stay in Colorado, that Lin encountered stands of rapidly dying Ponderosa pine trees, sparking the idea for the work. She called Rappaport: “Could I bring a ghost forest to downtown Manhattan?”
The piece presented numerous logistical challenges. Bringing in trees that had sickened due to infestation was out of the question for obvious reasons. And then there was the issue of public safety.
The project, announced in November 2019, was originally set to take place last summer, featuring a grove of dying cedar trees that have been in decline since Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
But with a year’s delay, Lin had to find new trees, to ensure she was using green wood that wouldn’t rot or risk become a safety hazard. One of the 50 80-year-old trees initially earmarked for the installation was nixed at the last minute when inspector found that it was already beginning to decompose.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Andy Romer, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Luckily for the project—if unfortunate for the Pine Barrens—there was another set of trees that showed signs of saltwater tree rot from an overflowing river. Removing the entire stand, which would have died in a year or two, had the added benefit of allowing newly planted cedars to get the light they need to grow.
Debuting as New York City looks to rebound from the pandemic—as well as in the wake Lin’s own personal loss, with the death of husband and noted photography collector Daniel Wolf of a heart attack in January—Ghost Forest has also taken on added meaning since its initial conception.
“We’ve all shared in this pandemic. You can’t not think or look at these in a different way than a year ago. That does become part of the piece,” Lin said. “There is a sense of mourning.”
“There is a parallel between a global pandemic and climate change which is also a global threat to humanity,” she added. “By 2100, 50 percent of all species may go extinct due to climate change.”
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Maya Lin Studio, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
The trees arrived on site last month, before the leaves had begun to bloom in the city, and will remain on view until they fall again in autumn. “They will bear witness as the park goes from spring to summer and fall,” Lin said. “They’re sentinels.”
Each trunk was buried eight feet at its base, two feet deeper than recommended by a consulting engineer. Foresters snapped off all the lower branches and any limbs that appeared even slightly insecure, adding to the stark, spartan appearance of Ghost Forest.
“Each tree, I realized has a distinct personality,” Lin said. “When I put each tree in, it helped me determine which its neighbor should be.”
The making of Ghost Forest will be the subject of fall exhibition at the nearby Fotografiska museum, featuring preparatory sketches and materials as well as photographs of the installation process and finished work.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest preparatory sketch (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.
The project also has an audio component, with a soundscape featuring bird songs from endangered and extinct native species composed by Lin in collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Upstate New York.
But what Lin is perhaps most excited about is the public programming about the intersection of art and ecology, which will feature climate activists and experts on topics such as wetland remediation, forest restoration, and other conservation efforts.
“I didn’t want to talk about [climate change] without offering solutions,” Lin said. “I do believe there is hope we could turn this around.”
Lin also kept track of carbon emissions related to the project over the past three years, including her own travel and the work of landscape contractors. The resulting 5.3 tons of carbon will be offset thanks to 1,000 trees and shrubs being planted across the city in the fall.
“[Those plants] will absorb 60 tons of carbon over the next ten years,” said Lin. “Nature-based solutions can offer some really positive emissions reductions and also protect species.”
See more photos of the installation below.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Andy Romer, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Andy Romer, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Andy Romer, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest preparatory sketch (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Rashmi Gill, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest preparatory sketch (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021) at Madison Square Park, New York. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021) at Madison Square Park, New York. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
“Maya Lin: Ghost Forest” is on view at Madison Square Park, between Fifth Avenue and Broadway and East 23rd and 26th Streets, New York, May 10–November 14, 2021.
An exhibition about the making of the work will be on view at Fotografiska, 281 Park Avenue South, New York, September–November 2021. 
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Sanford Biggers is taking over New York’s Rockefeller Center this spring with a campus-wide art installation headlined by Oracle, a monumental bronze sculpture that—standing 25 feet tall and weighing in at over 15,000 pounds—is the Harlem-based artist’s largest work to date.
Delayed from a planned September debut, Wednesday’s unveiling “was amazing just because of the sheer size and magnitude of the work itself,” Biggers told Artnet News. “To open right now, as the city is starting to open up and the weather is getting nice, and to leave this as a gift in the city I live in is an extreme honor.”
Biggers first started talking with Art Production Fund, which organized the show with New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery, about staging a public art project over a decade ago, and the current project has been in the works for about four years. When the APF team suggested Rockefeller Center as as a possible site, Biggers was immediately enchanted.
“It was like a lightbulb popped up over my head,” he said. “When Raymond Hood was designing this complex, he was grabbing from stories from antiquity, mythology, art… to wind up with this beautiful Art Deco monument. I wanted to reference various cultures and histories as well.”
Sanford Biggers, Oracle (2021) at Rockefeller Center. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy of Art Production Fund.
Biggers sees his work as as a companion of sorts to three of Rockefeller Center’s most prominent artworks: the Zeus relief sculpture at the entrance of 30 Rock, the gold Prometheus sculpture by Paul Manship overlooking the skating rink, and Lee Lawrie’s monumental Atlas on Fifth Avenue.
“Because of all those mythological references,” Biggers said, “having this work here that has a lot of African elements to me is sort of completing the rest of the story.”
Oracle is the latest in the Biggers’s “Chimera” sculpture series, which merges African masks and European figures. The seated body is inspired by the ancient Temple of Zeus, while the head is based on masks and other sculptures from various African cultures, including Luba art and the Maasai religion.
Sanford Biggers, Just Us (2021) at Rockefeller Center. Photo by Diane Bondareff/AP Images for Tishman Speyer
On the Oracle throne, there is the image of a lotus blossom, a recurring motif in the artist’s work where each of the petals is actually the cross-section of a slave ship.
The lotus also appears in photographic works Biggers has throughout the complex, which feature details from works in his “Codex” series, paintings and sculptures made from antique African American quilts featured in his recent exhibition at the Bronx Museum. (The show which will travel this summer to the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.)
A Sanford Biggers vitrine at Rockefeller Center featuring one of his “Chimera” sculptures against a photo background of a still from the video series “Shuffle, Shake, Shatter.” Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy of Art Production Fund.
“The quilts have a craft background, but so do small African masks and figurative pieces—and when blown up to a monumental scale, it has a different dialogue with the history of public sculpture,” Biggers said.
Biggers has also created work for the Rockefeller Center flagpoles, featuring a wave-like pattern inspired by Japanese kimonos and Buddhist mandalas. The waves, which seem to move as the flags blow in the wind, are meant to represent the slave trade’s Middle Passage and the flowing of water.
Throughout Rockefeller Center, “there are smaller symbols of the triangle trade and the slave trade. You see references to tobacco and cotton and sugar,” Biggers noted. “I wanted to put a piece here that.. is actually looking past that at the magnificent and powerful influence that African diasporic culture has had on New York City throughout its history.”
Sanford Biggers, Seigaiha (2021) at Rockefeller Center. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy of Art Production Fund.
Biggers says he felt empowered to remix classical sculpture in part because our contemporary understanding of these forms is already so flawed. The classical European sculptures we know today as sparkling white marbles were once brightly painted, while African masks were originally beaded, pigmented, and adorned.
“So you have a white-washed version of the European objects and a black-washed version of the African objects,” Biggers said. “Editing, cutting and pasting, chopping and screwing has been happening the entire time.”
Sanford Biggers, Oracle (2021) at Rockefeller Center. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy of Art Production Fund.
In the coming weeks, Oracle will also begin to live up to its name with the launch of an interactive component allowing viewers to consult the sculpture about their future after activating a QR code. The sculpture will be voiced by “various celebrities,” according to Biggers, although he declined to name names.
Visitors will be able to ask the oracle anything they want, and if the oracle is “in,” they’ll get a live response from the day’s celebrity.
“They’ll respond as an oracle would,” Biggers said, “in mysterious, poetic vagaries which will hopefully be, if not helpful, at least mystifying.”

“Sanford Biggers” is on view at Rockefeller Center, Rockefeller Plaza between West 49th and 50th Streets, New York, May 5, 2021–June 29, 2021.
“Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch” will be on view at the California African American Museum, in Exposition Park, 600 State Drive, Los Angeles, July 28, 2021–January 23, 2022.
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Could the next Whitney Biennial be curated by artificial intelligence? A new online art project based on data from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial attempts to imagine 64 different curatorial statements and artist lists for future exhibitions, all “curated” by a robot.
“The Next Whitney Biennial,” reads the description of biennial number 45, “should reflect the vacillation of New York right now—unable to connect both its manufacturing and financial back-rooms—and operate within the bureaucratized discourse of de-postcapitalization…”
Each alternate universe is characterized by art speak that straddles the line between high brow and utter incomprehensibility and is based on data drawn from actual Whitney and Liverpool Biennials past.
“It uses the exhibition descriptions, art spreadsheets with demographics, all of the materials we had available in the database,” Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of digital art, told Artnet News. “So many of them are interesting in their approaches. I like the kind of absurdist mix.”
Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett, and Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine (2021), screenshot. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The project is hosted on Artport, the Whitney’s website devoted to commissioning and displaying web-based art that Paul has curated since it was founded in 2001.
A collaboration by artists Ubermorgan, digital humanist Leonardo Impett, and curator Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine is the second joint commission from Artport and the Liverpool Biennial, and is also part of the biennial’s current edition, “The Stomach and the Port,” which, after a year’s delay, opened its outdoor installations on March 20.
Entering the website, viewers are greeted by a swirling black-and-white Op art animation covered with spinning gears. Clicking each one opens a new biennial universe, with a new video background and an accompanying musical clip, each of which comes from a TikTok playlist. (Selections include “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice, “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga, and a clip of Alfalfa singing “You Are So Beautiful” from the 1994 film The Little Rascals.)
The A.I. curator runs on B3(NSCAM) software, a group of technical machine-learning processes programmed by Impett.
Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett, and Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine (2021), screenshot. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
“We ran into some interesting challenges,” Paul said. “We noticed the language the A.I. wasn’t very interesting. It had this kind of academic, curatorial voice to it.”
To spice things up, the artists added articles from Rolling Stone to the dataset.
“We definitely wanted to investigate what curating can learn from A.I., and what A.I. can learn from curating,” Paul noted. “You have a reflection of curatorial desires and goals that are embedded in the data.”
From recent biennials, for instance, the machine learning picked up language surrounding identity politics. And it was easier for the A.I. to pick up on trends from the Liverpool Biennial, rather than from the massive stores of data from the much longer-running Whitney Biennial.
Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett, and Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine (2021), screenshot. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Each biennial features a list of fictional artists, often with variations on the same first or last name—biennial 32, for instance, includes Lilijana Lieurance, Lilijana Gitlewski, Lilijana Tucknott, and so on—to ensure that real-world artists wouldn’t be the project’s biggest talking point.
“A framework of particular artists makes you judgmental by nature. You might say ‘oh, it’s all the usual suspects again,’ or ‘oh, it’s nonsensical because who would put those artists together?’” Paul said. “But all of these fictional artists are generated based on actual artists bios, so sometimes you can still see where that’s coming from. There may be moments where you can recognize an artist just by sentences from the bio.”
Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett, and Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine (2021), screenshot. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The Whitney has no plans to stage any of these A.I.-generated biennials in the real world, but an A.I. named Jarvis has been tapped to curate next year’s Bucharest Biennial.
Does that mean actual human curators are in danger of being obsolete? Paul isn’t worried.
“I think A.I.-curated exhibitions, which will happen more in the future, will be artworks in and of themselves,” she said. “As curators, we have no desire for machines to replace us, and an A.I. could never have the granular contextual frameworks we as curators have through our interactions with artists.”
Famous last words?
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exhibitionIn 1969, tired of the lack of exhibition opportunities for Black artists, Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis took matters into their own hands and opened Cinque Gallery, a nonprofit exhibition space on Astor Place in New York’s East Village.
Cinque—named for Joseph Cinque, who led the 1839 revolt on the Amistad slave ship after being kidnapped in Sierra Leone—quickly became a thriving community of young and mid-career artists.
Over its 35-year existence at various spaces across the city, the organization showcased the work of some 450 artists of color, including Emma Amos, Dawoud Bey, Sam Gilliam, and Whitfield Lovell—all of whom are featured in the first-ever exhibition celebrating the legacy of Cinque Gallery at the Art Students League of New York.
“This is unprecedented,” Susan Stedman, the exhibition’s guest curator, told Artnet News.
An art administrator and close friend of the gallery’s founders, she was closely associated with Cinque throughout its history, and since 2017 has been working on an oral history of the gallery, building on the records held by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
The show at the league grew out of a 2019 event at the Harlem School of the Arts organized by the Romare Bearden Foundation to mark the gallery’s 50th anniversary. Stedman was a panelist, along with Nanette Carter, who became Cinque’s first artist in residence.
Norman Lewis and students at the Art Students League of New York. Photo courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Among those in attendance that night was Genevieve Martin, then the league’s director of external affairs. The discussion caught her attention because many Cinque Gallery artists studied, and, in some cases, taught, at the league. At the end of the night, Martin approached Stedman and Carter and proposed putting on a show about Cinque and its ties to the Art Students League.
The first African American teacher at the league was Charles Alston, who joined the faculty in 1950 and later showed at Cinque. The school also employed Cinque artists Richard Mayhew, Jacob Lawrence, Al Loving, and Hughie Lee-Smith, as well as all three gallery founders. Bearden had also previously taken classes at the Art Students League, as did many Cinque artists including Elizabeth Catlett, Ed Clark, Mavis Pusey, and Charles White.
Highlighting those connections is a thread that runs through the show, but Stedman did not limit herself to league artists.
“I also wanted to seek out some of the elders, such Otto Neal, Frank Wimberley, and Bill Hudson, who are still working today, as well as women like Cynthia Hawkins, Debra Priestly, and Robin Holder,” she said. “Bill Hudson makes a point of saying he has only had two solo shows in New York—both at Cinque. His work should be more widely known. I wanted to have a mix of those who are still under-recognized with those who are now well known.”
“We want people to know about this space and how Cinque was instrumental in a lot of artists’ careers,” Carter, the guest programming curator for the show, told Artnet News.
Carter had first visited Cinque in the early 1980s after hearing about it from other African American artists. She was immediately blown away. “I thought, ‘wow, this is fantastic,’” Carter said. “They exhibited artists of color, including Asian artists and Hispanic artists, at a time when there were very few places showing our work. Artists from near and far would try and be selected.”
Bill Hudson, Ten Series #10 (1991). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Her residency took place when she was still fresh out of grad school, offering her a stipend that made it possible to focus full-time on her studio practice. But Cinque afforded similar opportunities to artists who had been pursuing their career for much longer.
“Cinque was supposed to be a gallery for emerging artists, but back in the 1960s and ’70s, you could be 50 or 60 and still be ’emerging,’” Carter said. “Many of these African American artists had been working all their lives but had not exhibited.”
And although Cinque provided an invaluable platform for artists of color, it still took years before many of them were widely recognized for their work.
Romare Bearden, Culture: Hartford Mural (1980). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
“I use the term cultural apartheid to describe the extent to which mainstream institutions and most dealers resisted any attention to these artists,” Stedman said. “Cinque didn’t have a dramatic or visible impact on the world of museums and galleries at the time.”
The exhibition is largely drawn from the league’s collection, with loans from various private collections.
“I deliberately did not include museums among the lenders, because museums have been overlooking and ignoring the work of Black Americans too long,” Stedman said. “This neglect continued for years and years and years, and it’s still a problem. I wanted to demonstrate that there are these other significant sources—Black collectors specifically—that are and were supportive of African American artists.”
“I’m hoping that on the heels of this show, people will think about doing further research about Cinque,” Carter said. “Someone could put together a mammoth museum show.”
See more works from the exhibtion below.
Norman Lewis, Untitled (1976). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Robert Blackburn, Youth (1944). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Robin Holder, No Toy Guns (1998). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Nanette Carter, Cantilevered #39. Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Otto Neals, Young General Moses (1984). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Mavis Pusey, Decaying Construction. Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Otto Neals, Young General Moses (1984). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Charles White, Mother (Awaiting His Return), 1945. Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Ernest Crichlow, The Strengths of Black Families (ca. 1970–73). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.

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For years, the Tate has held a trove of artworks by 20th-century British artist Eileen Agar without even necessarily knowing it.
“Interestingly, [her assemblages are] in their archive, not in their collection of artworks,” says Laura Smith, the Whitechapel Gallery curator who organized an Agar retrospective opening this May. “But she made them as artworks.”
Eileen Agar wearing a “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse.” The picture was taken in 1936. © The estate of Eileen Agar.
This misplacement isn’t entirely the Tate’s fault. Agar’s assemblages are hard to define and full of natural curios, like a shell calcified to the top of a sea urchin or small vertebrae glued to string.
They’ve been at the Tate archive along with Agar’s unpublished stories and around 1,000 photographs that she took from the mid-1930s onwards. Few of her photographs of fellow artists or sculptural rock formations in Brittany have ever been publicly seen.
Eileen Agar’s photograph of “Bum and thumb rock” in Ploumanac’h (1936). © Tate Images.
“The majority of her photographic archive exists as negatives, rather than prints,” exhibition co-curator Grace Storey wrote in the show’s catalogue. Around 50 of these negatives have been printed for the first time for “Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy,” the artist’s retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery, and are, like her unseen assemblages and the rest of her obscure work, slowly coming to light.
“Angel of Anarchy,” which coincides with the release of a brief Agar biography published by Eiderdown Books, is the largest exhibition of Agar’s work to date, and is named after two sculptures she made in the 1930s by shrouding plaster busts with silk blindfolds, burlap, beads, and turquoise feathers.
Eileen Agar, Angel of Anarchy (1936–40). © Tate Images.
“It’s a description of Eileen as much as it is a title for the show,” Smith said. Frustrated by how Surrealists liked to peg women artists as their muses, the unconventional Agar wanted to flip that stereotype with these heads, which were molded after the face of her partner, Joseph.
Though Agar didn’t quite change the gender imbalance outside her Kensington studio, her retrospective and a simultaneous Whitechapel Gallery show devoted to British women of Surrealism fall within a wave of exhibitions attempting to correct that movement’s art-historical record.
Last year, “Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo” at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt exhibited a group of 34 female Surrealists, and in 2019 the Tate Modern hosted solo shows for photographer Dora Maar and painter Dorothea Tanning. In 2015, a solo exhibition was dedicated to painter Leonora Carrington at Tate Liverpool.
Dorothea Tanning, Voltage (1942). Collection Ulla und Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin. © The Estate of Dorothea Tanning/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020. Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin
Agar isn’t as big a name as some of her peers, partly because she remained in England after World War II, unlike other Surrealists who moved on to places like Spain, Mexico, and Paris.
But the bigger issue is that her work is tricky to pin down. “The way that she brought abstraction and Surrealism together, with this approach to color and nature and joy, it creates a very unique style that doesn’t exist anywhere,” Smith said. “She didn’t waver or change what she was doing to fit into any particular tendency, which, historically has probably been difficult.”
Agar’s work is an idiosyncratic combination of painting, photography, collage, and sculpture—fused in original configurations and using bizarre materials.
Photograph of “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse.” 1936. © The estate of Eileen Agar.
“I surround myself with fantastic bric-a-brac in order to trigger my imagination,” Agar wrote in her autobiography, A Look at My Life (1988), of the fossils, textiles, leaves, and bones that she found and brought home. Collage was a central part of her practice that she described as “a displacement of the banal by the fertile invention of chance or coincidence.” 
Agar also liked mixing non-figurative elements with the playful irrationality of Surrealism, and by 1939 was showing regularly at international Surrealist exhibitions.
In her Erotic Landscape, a collage from 1942, for example, Agar combined abstract patterns with recognizable images of fish and a nude woman. A cut-out piece of red paper could be a tendrilled bit of seaweed, or a purely abstract shape.
Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape (1942). © The Estate of Eileen Agar. Photograph courtesy Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. © Doug Atfield.
“I see nothing incompatible in that,” Agar said. “Indeed we walk on two legs, and for me, one is abstract, the other surreal—it is point and counterpoint.” 
Agar always marched away from convention, and towards the mysterious. “Above all she wished to avoid the banal,” critic and curator Andrew Lambirth wrote in the exhibition catalogue, based on his weekly visits to Agar’s studio during the last six years of her life. (She died in 1991.)
“Agar leads us to a new place, not quite on this earth though very much of it, a world of wonder, play, and glory. She gives us access to the kingdom of the imagination.”
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