Exhibitions

As far as we can remember, there has never been a phenomenon like the immersive Van Gogh craze currently sweeping America
Maybe it’s the enduring popularity of the Dutch artist. Maybe it’s the hunger for in-the-world experiences after a year of quarantine. Maybe it’s that one scene in Emily in Paris… but whatever it is, the hunger to venture into a giant animated projection of a Van Gogh painting is real, and it’s everywhere.
Ads with “Gogh”-themed puns (“Gogh with Mom,” “It’s Safe to Gogh,” “Don’t Wait to Gogh,” etc.) are blanketing nearly 40 different cities across the U.S. and saturating social media feeds. In some cities, such as selfie-crazed L.A., upcoming immersive Van Gogh exhibitions are all but sold out well before they open.
Installation view of Beyond Van Gogh Image courtesy Beyond Van Gogh.
Some are already open. Others are about to open. Some don’t even have announced venues yet, but are selling out fast.
No fewer than five different corporate entities are currently dueling it out across the map for supremacy in the Van Gogh space, causing the Better Business Bureau to issue an alert to consumers to make sure they get the Van Gogh light show that they want. In cities like Detroit, one company has snapped up the website VanGoghDetroit.com while its nemesis owns DetroitVanGogh.com.
So what’s the difference between all these experiences? Here’s a breakdown.
Installation view of Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience. Image courtesy Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.
—Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience is the vision of Mathieu St-Arnaud, creative director of Montreal-based Normal Studio, a projection-mapping outfit that has previously worked with the Montreal symphony and brought the Diary of Anne Frank to life. Beyond Van Gogh promises “300 of Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic artworks,” brought to life with music and “the artist’s own dreams, thoughts, and words.”
—Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition claims to employ a signature technique of immersive projection so visceral that they do not show videos on their website, because this would fail to capture the experience. Conceived by Annabelle Mauger and Julien Baron, associated with the immersive attraction known as the Cathédrale d’Images in France, Imagine Van Gogh is an animated projected collage of some 200 paintings from the final two years of Van Gogh’s life, all accompanied by classical hits by Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Bach, Delibes and Satie. There is also a “pedagogical room,” conceived with art historian Androulla Michael.
—Immersive Van Gogh is the brainchild of Italian film producer Massimiliano Siccardi. It promises, via 100 projectors, an hour-long experience completely bathing visitors in Vincent Van Gogh’s greatest hits, accompanied by “experimental electronic music with pure, ethereal and simple-seeming piano” by composer Luca Longobardi (for the New York incarnation, Hamilton production designer David Korins has been brought on for extra oomph). Siccardi and Longobardi are the team behind the Van Gogh, Starry Night experience at Paris’s L’Atelier des Lumières seen in the Netflix show Emily in Paris, if that’s important to you.
—Van Gogh Alive comes courtesy Grande Experiences, also the braintrust behind such exhibitions as Monet & Friends and Planet Shark. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1890, it promises “more than 3,000 Van Gogh images at enormous scale” via 40 projectors, augmented to show the Dutch artist’s sources of inspiration and set to “a powerful classical score.”
—Finally, Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, a partnership between producer Exhibition Hub and “entertainment discovery platform” Fever promises to wrap you in more than 400 Van Gogh works using a trademarked video mapping technology. On top of the light show, there is a drawing studio, galleries that offer info about Van Gogh’s life and work, and an (optional) 10-minute VR experience called A Day in the Life of the Artist in Arles.
Phew!
Now, if you’re wondering whether a Van Gogh show is coming to your region (it probably is), here’s a round-up of nearly 50 U.S. shows based on the best available information.

Alabama

Birmingham
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBDDates: TBD

Arizona

Phoenix
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: July 29–November 28, 2021

California

Los Angeles
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: September 30, 2021–January 2, 2022
San Diego
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: Wyland Center at Del Mar FairgroundsDates: From January 2022
San Francisco
Immersive Van GoghLocation: SVN West San Francisco (Formerly the Fillmore West)Dates: March 18–September 6, 2021
San Jose
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBDDates: TBD

Colorado

Denver
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: September 30, 2021–February 6, 2022
Van Gogh AliveLocation: The Hangar at Stanley MarketplaceDates: July 9–September 26, 2021

Connecticut

Danbury
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceDates: TBDLocation: TBD

Florida

Miami
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: Ice Palace StudiosDates: May 27–July 11, 2021
Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: Olympia TheaterDates:  May 8–August 30, 2021
Orlando
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: October 6, 2021–February 6, 2022
St. Petersburg
Van Gogh AliveLocation: The Dali MuseumDates: November 21, 2020–June 13, 2021

Georgia

Atlanta
Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: Pullman YardsDates: May 19–September 26, 2021

Hawaii

Honolulu
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: Hawai’i Convention CenterDates: July 2–August 15, 2021

Illinois

Chicago
Immersive Van GoghLocation: Lighthouse ArtSpace at Germania ClubDates: February 15–November 28, 2021

Indiana

Indianapolis
Van Gogh AliveLocation: Indianapolis Museum of Art at NewfieldsDates: Summer 2021–Fall 2021

Massachusetts

Boston
Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive ExhibitionLocation: SoWa Power StationDates: December 21, 2021–February 20, 2022
Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBADates: September 24, 2021–January 30, 2022

Michigan

Detroit
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TCF CenterDates: June 25–August 15, 2021
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: October 21, 2021–February 6, 2022

Minnesota

Minneapolis
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: August 2–October 31, 2021

Missouri

Kansas City
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: December 1, 2021–February 6, 2022
Van Gogh AliveLocation: Nelson-Atkins Museum of ArtDates: October 23–December 31, 2021
St. Louis
Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBDDate: TBD

Nevada

Las Vegas
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: July 1–September 6, 2021
Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: Area 15Dates: May 27–July 5, 2021

New York

Buffalo
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: Eastern Hills MallDates: August 10–October 3, 2021
New York City
Immersive Van GoghLocation: Pier 36Dates: June 4–September 6, 2021
Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceSkylight on VeseyFrom: June 4–September 6

North Carolina

Asheville
Van Gogh AliveLocation: BiltmoreDates: November 5, 2021–March 5, 2022
Charlotte
Immersive Van GoghLocation: Camp North EndDates: June 17–September 12, 2021

Ohio

Cleveland
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: October 1, 2021–February 6, 2022
Columbus
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: October 28, 2021–January 2, 2022

Oregon

Portland
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBDDate: TBD

Pennsylvania

Philadelphia
Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBDFrom: August 2021
Pittsburgh
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: September 23–November 28, 2021

Tennessee

Nashville
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDFrom: November 4, 2021–February 6, 2022

Texas

Austin
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: The Starry Night Pavilion at Circuit of The AmericasDates: June 18–August 8, 2021
Dallas
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: June 17–September 6, 2021
Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBDDates: July 5–November 28, 2021
Houston
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: August 12–October 10, 2021
Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBDDates: August 30, 2021–January 2, 2022
San Antonio
Immersive Van GoghLocation: TBDDates: November 18, 2021–February 6, 2022

Utah

Salt Lake City
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBDDates: TBD

Washington

Seattle
Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBDDates: September 10, 2021–January 30, 2022
Tacoma
Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive ExhibitionLocation: Tacoma ArmoryDates: December 18, 2021–January 30, 2022

Washington, D.C.

Van Gogh: The Immersive ExperienceLocation: TBDDates: July 23, 2021–January 26, 2022

Wisconsin

Milwaukee
Beyond Van Gogh: An Immersive ExperienceLocation: Wisconsin CenterDates: July 21–September 19, 2021
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A peculiar object sits on a plinth at the center of Deana Lawson’s new exhibition at the Guggenheim: it’s a hologram of a torus, or a geometric ring formed by a circle rotated around a central axis. Stand in front of it and you might see a bagel, but walk around and it comes alive like something otherworldly—a portal, perhaps, perpetually rotating in on itself. 
A spectral sculpture made from the same technology that brought Tupac to Coachella is perhaps the last thing you’d expect from Lawson, an artist known for her naturalistic portraits of diasporic Black culture that draw on the visual language of documentary and vernacular photography. But there it is, very much at the heart of “Centropy,” the show awarded to the artist along with the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize. 
That was Lawson’s choice, said Katherine Brinson, one of two Guggenheim curators who organized the show. During the installation process, “Deana spoke about how, in relationship to the photographs surrounding it, [the torus] becomes a force that both draws on and reinforces the power and the potential represented in her subjects,” the curator explained.
Installation view, “The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, May 7–October 11, 2021. © Deana Lawson. Photo: David Heald.
There’s a lot of power to go around. Lawson’s subjects—all Black people in domestic settings—radiate it.
That has a lot to do with the artist’s careful staging, which recalls the stuff of both family photo albums and art-historical masterpieces, and her eye for light. In a 2018 New York profile—one of the most memorable pieces of photographic writing in recent years, to be sure—author Zadie Smith spoke of how Lawson’s lens liberates her subjects from the earthly constraints of capitalism and colonial histories, turning them into gods.   
“Deana Lawson’s work is prelapsarian—it comes before the Fall. Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory, in which diaspora gods can be found wherever you look: Brownsville, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Addis Ababa,” Smith wrote. “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”
Deana Lawson, Barrington and Father (2021). © Deana Lawson. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
The torus isn’t the only hologram in the show; you’ll also find them embedded in several large-scale photographs. For those who have followed Lawson’s career, the juxtaposition may come as a surprise. But the two media inform each other, said Ashley James, who curated the exhibition with Brinson. 
“The holography allows us to reflect back on the photographs,” James explained. The former asks us to consider how the latter “can both reflect the real and approximate the superreal. I think that’s a question that guides the work.”
Both holography and photography also require harnessing the power of light, a central concern of the artist—for reasons beyond those that occupy most photographers’ minds. 
Installation view, “The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, May 7–October 11, 2021. © Deana Lawson. Photo: David Heald.
Light, for Lawson, is “an index of the divinity of human beings,” Brinson said. In other words, it alerts the viewer to the presence of a spiritual force. “There’s a relationship between what is visible and what is unseen. Although the images might show an everyday environment with the familiar contour of domestic life, there are often what the artist calls portals that indicate the presence of this more spiritual realm.”   
Brinson points to the little halo on the wreath of roses above a woman and her three grandchildren in Young Grandmother (2019), for instance, or the billowing curtains behind a crowned, seated man in Chief (2019).
“When I make a picture, it is about being in communion or trying to access an unseen truth,” Lawson said in a short film produced for the exhibition.  
Deana Lawson, Chief (2019). © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
“Centropy” takes its name from the thermodynamic theory of how particles are stimulated into a system of organization by electricity. It’s how the chaos of matter is codified into life, some say. In Lawson’s world, a similar phenomenon takes place.  
“I think for Deana there’s a metaphoric relevance of centropy in the organizing gaze of the camera as her medium,” Brinson said. It’s also about “bringing renewal to social disorder through the creative act.”
Sure enough, “Centropy” has a powerful energy to it. It’s the energy that’s produced when an artist at the top of their game pushes their practice one step further, into the unknown. 
“The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy” is on view now through October 11, 2021 at the Guggenheim in New York.
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Last week at around 2 a.m., multidisciplinary artist John C. Sims was awoken by the sound of intruders storming his home. 
Sims quickly grabbed his phone to call 911, jumping into the bathroom of his apartment, one reserved for the artist in residence at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, South Carolina. Sims’s solo exhibition, “AfroDixia: A Righteous Confiscation,” was in the adjacent building and features deconstructed, distorted, and reimagined presentations of Confederate symbols—including a lynching of the Confederate flag. 
As an artist showing a body of work in the South centered on a critique of revisionist historical materials, Sims immediately feared that “some white supremacist mob or the KKK had come for my life,” he told me over Zoom this week. “I didn’t want to disappear in some underground torture chamber.” 
When the intruders revealed themselves to be cops, Sims had to switch fear gears. He was taken back to his mother’s and every Black mother’s survival lesson. He prayed that the clanky radiator wouldn’t echo loudly enough to suggest that he had a gun. 
Exhibition view, John Sims’s “AfroDixia: A Righteous Confiscation” at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
After multiple pleas for an explanation, and multiple attempts to identify himself as the artist in residence, he was seized, handcuffed, and detained for nearly eight minutes. “Why are you here?” one officer asked. 
For Sims, this question was particularly gutting. “Black people are always in a defensive stance when we want to take up space. ‘Why are you here?’ they ask you. ‘What gives YOU license to do and say what you do?’”
After the police ran his license, confirmed he was in fact the artist in residence, and released him from handcuffs, he felt the pendulum swing in his favor. He was lucky to be alive when the alternative could have been a death marred by a media narrative suggesting he had asked for trouble by staging a show disrespecting the Confederate flag in South Carolina. 
Before the police drove off, he took a picture of their squad cars through the window. Immediately, he felt called to tap into his creative self—time was of the essence. He needed to translate his experience into art in order to stake a claim to the narrative before his voice got drowned out. 
John Sims, A Near Death Residency: Reflections of a Black Artist/Space (2021). © John Sims
The result is a new body of work that has already begun to take shape under the title “A Near Death Residency: Reflections of a Black Artist/Space, 2021.” So far, it consists of two parts: the only photo he was allowed to take as documentation of what happened on May 17, 2021, and an Artist Report he drafted in response to the police’s official incident report. This account will also provide the basis for a future film, a dramatic reenactment meant to turn the villainizing crime-show format on its head.
Sims’s booming laughter rang through my speakers as we spoke. “The police may beat my ass, but once I’m robbed of the opportunity to tell my story, my trauma of how they beat my ass?” he said. “If you squash people at that level, you don’t have a democracy. You can’t have a democracy. If people don’t have the space to express their own voice, that is evidence of the American sham.” 
***
The police department’s press release recounted a “police-citizen encounter” in which officers “noted an open door at the side of a building which is normally locked.” They entered with firearms drawn, the release stated, and “repeatedly identified themselves” as they pursued footsteps on the second floor of the building, where they placed “the man…in handcuffs to determine why he was in the building.” 
Sims’s answer to the police’s statement, which he drafted hours after the intrusion, reclaims his personhood and respect by replacing the sanitized label of “citizen” with Artist Sims. “I mimic the energy” of the original report, he explained. “I’m saying, ‘You will respect me.’” 
The document is styled like the one released by the authorities, with his “John Sims Projects” artist logo in place of the Columbia police department’s emblem and a case number of 3.14159265 (pi out to eight decimal points), a figure that Sims has been using in his art for years. 
In the official incident report, the Columbia police chief referred to the refusal of the supervising officer to allow Sims to take a photograph of the cops in his home as “the only misstep” committed by law enforcement that night. Sims is determined to transform the police department’s reductive statement of “accountability” into an indelible body of work.
The artist sees a clear line between his show, “AfroDixia,” which is about remixing artifacts of the Confederacy, and his new series, which comes out of a desire to drain law enforcement, which he calls the “cousins” of the KKK, of their power to intimidate, smear, and subjugate Black folks, stripping them of agency. 
John Sims, A Group Hanging. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
“I’m sure there are plenty of people who thought I’d shut up and just be an artist,” Sims said. Instead, he plans to start work on the next chapter: a film that brings together what happened to him, the significance of his art, and the precarious nature of his life as a Black artist. 
“The writing paints the pictures and brings the bullets,” he said. “The film will create heat and drama around the boundaries of our sense of respect and respectability.” 
***
The anniversary of George Floyd’s death has come and gone, along with calls for community reconciliation after John Sims’s encounter with police. Since the incident, the 701 Center has invited the Columbia city mayor, police chief, and city council members to Sims’s “AfroDixia,” which now radiates with heightened significance. 
In a statement released on May 28, the 701 Center noted that “this was not the first occasion in which a resident of… the 701 Whaley Street building encountered a law enforcement officer searching the premises for a possible intruder.” But it was the first time, the statement noted, that “such an encounter led to hostile confrontation, detention, cuffing, and a records check.”
While previous encounters “resulted in courteous apologies from officers,” there was a key difference: “Mr. Sims is a Black man; the other incidents involved a white man.”
John Sims, Drag Flag. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
Earlier this week, while showing the mayor, a Black man, Stephen K. Benjamin, around the gallery space, Sims was assured that he would be able to address the city council directly on Tuesday, June 1. 
At the meeting, Sims will read his Artist Report to both the city council and representatives from community organizations who have pledged their support, including Black Lives Matter South Carolina and the National Action Network. 
The reading will serve as the next phase of the “Near Death Residency” project, continuing the act of blending art with life, an artistic foray that Sims says was brought about by the cosmic combination of “AfroDixia,” his residency, the Southern city with its cotton-mill grounds, and the police—all players in a production for which life set the stage. 
“I couldn’t have planned this,” he said. “The experience is now part of the work.”

Read Sims’s Artist Report in full below.

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After a year’s delay, the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture opened last week with a sprawling series of exhibits, including a central exhibition, 61 national pavilions, and more than a dozen collateral events.
And despite the difficulties of the past 18 months, the show (titled “How Will We Live Together?” and curated by Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) remains upbeat.
“At this moment, we are tired of dystopias,” Sarkis told Architectural Record. “We were looking for signs of hope and optimism, and we found a lot of it.”
Here is a round up of some of the biennale’s highlights.

Exhibits From the International Exhibition
Studio Other Spaces, “Future Assembly”
Studio Other Spaces, “Future Assembly” at Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy of Atudio Other Spaces.
Studio Other Spaces, founded by artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Sebastian Behmann, has put together an installation with work from 50 participants in the central pavilion in the Giardini. The presentation sits atop a massive carpet woven from recycled ocean plastic, and imagines a “Future World Assembly” where legislation protects the rights of entities beyond human beings, such as trees, fungi, and even rocks.

Aerocene Foundation, “Museo Aero Solar for an Aerocene Era”
Aerocene Foundation, “Museo Aero Solar for an Aerocene Era” in the international exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images.
The Aerocene Foundation is a nonprofit founded by Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno. Its team of 200 spent the past two years stitching together the Museo Aero Solar, an inflatable floating sculpture that can fly without fossil fuels. It’s made from used plastic bags, thousands of which were collected from 30 countries around the world. The project’s hope is to usher in a new epoch free of fossil fuels to follow on the heels of the Anthropocene.

Superflux, “Refuge for Resurgence”
Superflux, “Refuge for Resurgence” at the Sylva Foundation in Didcot, Oxford, ahead of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Mark Cocksedge.
Superflex welcomes visitors to a post-Anthropocene banquet where plants and animals have a seat at the table (made a massive slab of oak), with chairs made to seat 12 different species, including humans, reptiles, farm animals, birds, insects, and even rats and wasps. It’s part of an imagined future where wildlife has reclaimed our cities.

Tomas Libertiny, “Beehive Architecture”
A visitor views “Beehive Architecture” by Tomas Libertiny at Slovakia’s pavilion, on a press day at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in Venice on May 20, 2021. Photo by Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images.
“Beehive Architecture” is an exhibition of honeycomb sculptures created by swarms of more than 60,000 honeybees that take the shape of iconic forms, like Nefertiti’s bust, as well as more abstract figures. Tomas Libertiny provided the bees with 3-D printed armatures and let the bees go to town. He calls the process “slow manufacturing,” allowing for minimal intervention to the natural process. Debuting just after World Bee Day on May 20, the works are meant to raise awareness to the threats to the species, an essential pollinator.

National Pavilions
Dutch Pavilion, “Why Is We?”
A visitor views “Why is We” by Afaina de Jong and Debra Solomon at the Dutch pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in Venice on May 19, 2021. Photo by Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images.
In response to the question posed by this year’s biennale exhibition, “How Will We Live Together?” architect Afaina de Jong and artist Debra Solomon want to know “Who Is We?” The Dutch pavilion, from the Het Nieuwe Instituut, offers a critique of architecture that is created with only a small group of mind, calling for design that is more inclusive of diverse identities.

Swiss Pavilion “oræ – Experiences on the Border”
Swiss Pavilion “oræ – Experiences on the Border” at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Keystone, Gaetan Bally.
One of the most prescient international issues addressed at the biennale is that of borders: how they are drawn, who they keep in, and who they are meant to keep out. (The title, oræ, is Latin for borders.) In completing the project, the curators of this pavilion traveled to visit those living on the Swiss border, and invited them to construct an imagined or real place. A raft of border restrictions triggered by the global health crisis prompted the organizers to revisit original interview subjects to see how their perceptions had changed.

Spanish Pavilion, “Uncertainty” More

The artist Rafael Pérez Evans, who gained notoriety for dumping 240,000 carrots (plus some potatoes) outside of Goldsmiths College, his alma mater, has just opened his first museum show—and while there’s nary a root vegetable in sight, there are several grain silos and a lake of milk.
Greeting visitors at the entrance of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds are two full-size grain silos, sourced from a manufacturer in Northern Ireland. The installation, titled Mountain, is inspired by the E.U. practice of stockpiling grain—which can send prices plummeting and threaten farmers’ livelihoods.
“Since the 1970s, [there have been] policies of stocking masses of grain, butter, powdered milk—ridiculous amounts of food. They became known as grain mountains,” Evans told Artnet News.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
“This idea of food security and food protectionism is something that shakes the whole market. When such large quantities of food are stocked, it devalues food products and farmers get very upset,” he said. “I’ve always been very interested in how these fluctuations from the central government cause deep wounds for small-hold farmers.”
Presented empty in the exhibition, “the silos become almost a metal carcass of excess,” Evans said. “It becomes a monument to that unsustainable, postindustrial way of thinking about food production.” (The silos are expected to go to a farm after the exhibition, but the artist will also entertain acquisition offers if there’s interest.)
Rafael Pérez Evans, Handful (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
A tiny pile of grain displayed inside the galleries, titled Handful, stands in stark opposition to the massive scale of both the silos and Evans’s infamous carrot pile.
“During the lockdown, it has been important for me to become aware of what fits in my mouth and my stomach and my hand,” Evans said, and to work in opposition to this monumental, monstrous scale that is the industry of food.”
Evans became an internet sensation with his contribution to Goldsmith’s annual MFA exhibition, which arrived at the school via truck and was unloaded in dramatic fashion: an orange tidal wave of 31 tons of root vegetables dumped on the school courtyard.

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The piece, titled Grounding (2020), was intended as a condemnation of global food waste, using vegetables that had been deemed unfit for human consumption. It mimicked the farmer protests of dumping produce that are common in Spain, where Evans grew up on a farm.
“It produced a lot of different conversations, and that’s a good thing,” Evans said. “That’s what protests are for, to open up conversations and dialogues about things that people don’t necessarily want to look into.”
Now, Evans has again borrowed a popular farmers’ protest action by flooding one of the Henry Moore galleries with about an inch of milk for a work titled Lake. (It’s heavily cut with water and laced with preservatives to keep it from turning sour during the show.)
Rafael Pérez Evans, Lake (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
“The farmers dump milk in roads in city centers, and it it becomes a temporary lake of this white substance,” Evans said. “Small-hold farmers have no voice. So the milk becomes the voice. The dumping becomes the scream. They use produce to disturb the city.”
The effect is somewhat different in a white cube space, where the pooling liquid “is staining the floor, making it white,” Evans added. “It becomes a meditative state.”
The artist plans to bring in farmers from nearby Yorkshire for programming related to the exhibition, allowing them to speak directly to the issues that have inspired his work. “What can we learn from soil workers, from voices outside of the city?” Evans asked.
He hopes to encourage conversations about what food production might look like in the future, such as Spanish writer Jaime Izquierdo Vallina’s notion of an “agripolitan city.”
“It is reimagining a future in which agricultural production is integral to the running of the city,” Evans said. “Having the silos outside the Henry Moore Institute is a bit of a hint toward that imagined future.”
See more photos from the exhibition below.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Lake (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Handful (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Installation view of “Rafael Pérez Evans: Handful” at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Lake (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Rafael Pérez Evans, Mountain (2021). Photo courtesy of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
“Rafael Pérez Evans: Handful” is on view at the Henry Moore Institute, 74 The Headrow, Leeds LS1 3AH, May 18–August 29, 2021. 
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German artist Katharina Grosse might technically be classified as a painter, but the artist has made a career out of exploding the limitations of the medium (sometimes quite literally). Her sprawling interventions and installations call attention to the architecture in which they are installed and encourage viewers to walk around, atop, and sometimes inside them.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 filmed back in 2014, the artist describes her process as an attempt to “reset the idea of what a painting can be.” As Grosse’s works became larger, with site-specific commissions at Brooklyn’s MetroTech Plaza and Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center, she began collaborating with her brother, who works as an engineer.
Speaking about the impact of having a non-art worker as part of her team, Grosse said that she benefitted from her brother’s ability to “connect the theoretical thinking” of the engineering process to the practical aspects of building large-scale works.
Katharina Grosse, Mumbling Mud – Silk Studio (2018) at K11 Art Museum. Courtesy of Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, Austria, © 2021 Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
“My work is not idea-based, it’s really thought based,” the artist said, describing it as a fluid process that is also physically engaging. In an upcoming installation at the Helsinki Art Museum, Grosse will be on site painting while viewers wander in and out, becoming active participants in the creation process.
In the Helsinki exhibition, which opens June 8, the artist’s work will take over the main exhibition halls—which Grosse hopes will also challenge the hierarchy of media.
“Am I a painter? Am I a sculptor? I don’t know,” Grosse said in the interview. “I’m talking to the world while painting on it.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. Katharina Grosse: Chill Seeping From The Walls Gets Between Us,” opens June 8 at the Helsinki Museum. 
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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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The Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris reopened last week with its first solo show dedicated to a contemporary African artist: Barthélémy Toguo. Displayed alongside historical African artworks, the Cameroonian multimedia artist’s exhibition addresses viruses, immigration, the lynching of African Americans, African dictators, and the shortage of water.
Titled “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo,” it is curated by Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau, director of Fondation Dapper. Launched in Amsterdam in 1983 by Michel Leveau to support African and Caribbean art, the foundation was given carte blanche for the exhibition.
Particularly pertinent is Vaincre le virus! (Beat the virus) (2016). The six-and-a-half feet tall vases depicting bats, red hands, and patterns relating to the transmission of the Ebola and HIV viruses were realized five years ago when Toguo was nominated for the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp. After carrying out research with scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris to glean ideas on how to convey the viruses visually, Toguo had the vases produced in Jingdezhen, China, which is renowned for ceramics.
“In 2016, I talked about the problem of viruses and how we should encourage scientists to find the viruses that are threatening the world—it was a universal message but nobody listened to me,” Toguo told Artnet News. “Then in 2020 came the worldwide problem of Covid-19 that mobilized the world of science and medicine.”
Barthélémy Toguo, Strange Fruit. Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Nearby is the disquieting installation Strange Fruit (2017). Next to an empty noose tied to a branch are a swooping vulture, crows and aggressive dogs all in brass. Vinyl records from Billie Holiday’s 1939 record about lynchings in the American South, the sleeves painted with an open-mouthed face, are scattered among the branches. “I wanted to talk about the mistreatment of Black people and then a few years later [the murder of] George Floyd happened,” Toguo said.
Born in Cameroon in 1967, Toguo studied at the fine arts school of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, then in Grenoble and the Dusseldorf arts academy. In Dusseldorf, he was taught by the Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis and encountered Tony Cragg.
In 2015, his work featured in the Venice Biennale, eight years after he refused to participate in the African Pavilion organized by the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. “The proposal was reductive because Africa is not a country but a region and I maintain my position about that problematic ghettoization of African artists,” he said. “My stance upset the Italians.”
It was reading the French author Albert Camus’s 1957 Nobel Prize speech, about an artist’s obligation to move the largest number of people by offering an image of common suffering and joy, that instilled in Toguo his sense of mission.
“Camus’s thoughts on the role of an artist fascinated me,” Toguo recalled. “I told myself that I have a role in society to bring a message. For me, an artist is a visionary who has the capacity to look into the future, see societal problems and inform people through his production.”
Barthélémy Toguo, Water Matters (2020). Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Some artworks evoke ideas metaphorically. Road to Exile (2008)—a wooden boat overflowing with cushions in African fabrics and surrounded by innumerable bottles of water—expresses the precariousness of young Africans trying to reach Europe in boats that might capsize. The newest work, Water Matters (2020), made for the exhibition, comprises a painting of a figure with outstretched palms in front of a table lined with glass bottles. It pertains to Toguo’s desire to redistribute water between countries that have too little and those that have too much.
Around 50 works by Toguo are presented along with historical African artworks from Fondation Dapper, the Musée du Quai Branly, and other collections that find a resonance with his pieces. The first two parts showcase works relating to the body, such as a painting of bleeding hands wounded by nails.
“I tried to identify recurring elements in Barthélémy Toguo’s work and noticed the presence in his paintings and drawings of nails, which hark back to Christ and the crucifixion, but also to objects used by people in Congo to master negative forces,” Falgayrettes-Leveau said. “Although he didn’t consciously reflect upon this aspect of African heritage, they’re unconscious references.”
Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Toguo’s engagement as an artist extends far beyond his own practice. In 2013, he created Bandjoun Station in Cameroon, encompassing an art center, artists’ residency and coffee plantation. “There was no place to celebrate art in Cameroon and, with all my experience, I needed to give something back to Africa,” said Toguo, who divides his time between Cameroon and Paris. “All my artistic production was in western museums like Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and MoMA.”
Vocal about the need for the African continent to acquire artworks by its artists, Toguo added: “Whereas African masks were stolen by colonizers and remained in the west, contemporary works by Romuald Hazoumè, Chéri Samba and El Anatsui have been bought by western museums who recognize their value. But there is nothing in Africa because politicians don’t know [about contemporary art]. So I’ve created a space for artistic exchanges. Kounellis gave me three drawings and artists worldwide have given me works that I’ve installed alongside African artists like Soly Cissé and Siriki Ky.”
The Musée du Quai Branly, which is restituting 26 works to Benin, has been called upon by a group of African activists to restitute more pieces to the continent. But that is a “different issue”, pointed out Toguo, who was clearly elated about his solo show: “I’m astonished and moved because this is the first time that this curatorial eye has been applied to my work.”
“Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” is on view at Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris through December 5.
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