Exhibitions

Museums and galleries throughout Tokyo are gearing up for Art Week Tokyo, November 5–9, a celebration of the local contemporary art scene co-hosted by more than 50 venues. In lieu of a typical art fair, which brings exhibitors together at a central convention center, visitors can hop on free shuttle buses that crisscross the city, taking them from site to site.
Now in its fourth edition, Art Week Tokyo is the brainchild of director Atsuko Ninagawa, owner of Take Ninagawa Gallery, and is organized by Japan Contemporary Art Platform in collaboration with Art Basel, with support from Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.
Among the leading dealers featured are Pace, Perrotin, Kaikai Kiki Gallery, and Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, the nation’s first contemporary art gallery, which is turning 75 this year. Museums and nonprofit spaces such as the Mori Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and Espace Louis Vuitton, are also taking part.
Other highlights include special programming like a guided tour of the city’s micro homes, led by Kazuyo Sejima, and “Rituals, or the Absurd Beauty of Prayers,” a selection of video works by 10 artists curated by Keiko Okamura and screening for free at a special pavilion in the Marunouchi district.
Ichio Matsuzawa, concept image for AWT Bar 2025. Photo: ©ichio matsuzawa office, courtesy of Art Week Tokyo.
And architect Ichio Matsuzawa has designed a unique pop-up space called the AWT Bar, made from acrylic glass warped into strange shapes, where vistors can taste from a menu by chef Shinobu Namae, a recipient of three Michelin stars.
It’s a unique model, melding together the best of art fairs, festivals, and biennials. The event has drawn increasing international crowds since its soft launch during the lockdown in 2021, earning a slot on the global art world calendar. Last year, 80 percent of the event’s VIP guests were visiting from overseas, with overall attendance topping 50,000.
Here are eight must-see shows across the city this year.

“What Is Real?” at the Okura Museum of Art
Saori Akutagawa (Madokoro), From Folk Tales (1955). Photo: courtesy of Kotaro Nukaga.
Curator Adam Szymczyk, the artistic director of documenta 14, has curated this year’s AWT Focus exhibition, where 100 works by 60 international artists represented by the week’s participating galleries are for sale. Housed in the city’s first private art museum, founded in 1917, the show is inspired by the increasingly complex question of how to define the “real” in the digital age. Work by Sachiko Kazama, Gen Otsuka, and Danh Vo, among others is on display.
The Okura Museum of Art is located at 2 Chome-10-3 Toranomon, Minato City, Tokyo 105-0001, Japan.

“Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989–2010” at the National Art Center
Noboru Tsubaki, Aesthetic Pollution (1990). Taku Saiki, ©Noboru Tsubaki, courtesy of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the National Art Center, Tokyo.
Co-curated with M+ in Hong Kong, this survey exhibition looks at contemporary art made in Japan after the end of the Cold War, as international exchange flourished during the Heisei era. More than 50 artists are featured, including Rirkrit Tiravanija (b. 1961), Matthew Barney (b. 1967), Mariko Mori (b. 1967), and Lee Bul (b. 1964).
The National Art Center, Tokyo, is located at 7 Chome-22-2 Roppongi, Minato City, Tokyo, Japan.

“Aki Sasamoto’s Life Laboratory” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Aki Sasamoto, Point Reflection (2023), video still.  ©Aki Sasamoto, courtesy of Take Ninagawa and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.
This marks New York-based Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto (b. 1980) first mid-career retrospective, highlighting the range of her practice, which incorporates installation, video, dance, mathematical theory, and pop psychology. Her elaborate sculptures will be activated by four performances, to be held throughout the show’s run, including Strange Attractors, which debuted at the 2010 Whitney Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is located at 4 Chome-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto City, Tokyo, Japan.

“The Architecture of Sou Fujimoto: Primordial Future Forest” at the Mori Art Museum
Sou Fujimoto, House N (2008), (interior). Oita, Japan. Photo: Iwan Baan.
This is the first major museum show for architect Sou Fujimoto (b. 1971), known for projects like  the 2013 Serpentine Pavilion in London, which he constructed from a matrix of thin white steel poles. Aged 41 at the time, he was the youngest architect ever tapped for the annual project. The exhibition features the typical architectural scale models, drawings, and renderings, but also incorporates installations that the visitor can explore to get a true sense of his architectural forms.
The Mori Art Museum is located at 53F, Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, Tokyo, Japan. 

“Andy Warhol: Serial Portraits” at Espace Louis Vuitton
Andy Warhol, Self-Portraits (1977–86). ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Adagp, Paris 2025, ©Primae/Louis Bourjac.
Highlighting previously unseen Andy Warhol (1928–87) portraits from the Fondation Louis Vuitton collection, this exhibition unites several bodies of work. The simple and elegant line of his “Unidentified Male” series of sketches from the 1950s are joined by the colorful silk-screened canvases of his “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century” portfolio (1980) and a series of self-portraits shot in a photo booth the year before Warhol’s death, featuring his platinum blonde “fright wig.”
Espace Louis Vuitton is located at 5 Chome, Shibuya, Jingumae,〒150-0001 Tokyo, Japan.

“Eiki Mori: Moonbow Flags” at Ken Nakahashi
Eiki Mori, Untitled from “Moonbow Flags” (2025). Courtesy of Ken Nakahashi.
Using layers of film negatives, Eiki Mori (b. 1976) has made a new series of photogram portraits called “Moonbow Flags,” named after the subtle phenomenom of a rainbow in the moonlight. The work incorporates geometric shapes inspired by flag designs, turning these symbols of authority into personal and playful works.
Ken Nakahashi is located at 3 Chome−1−32, Shinjuku City, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan.

“YEYE: Telepathy” at Kaikai Kiki
One of Yeye’s paintings of her late dog Moonge. Courtesy of Kaikai Kiki, Tokyo.
This is the first large-scale solo show from Korean artist YEYE, who channeled her studies in animation and cartooning into a career in manga before transitioning to painting in 2022. Her debut show with Kaikai Kiki is a tribute to her adorable late dog Moonge, who was her dedicated companion for 15 years.
Kaikai Kiki is located at Motoazabu Crest Building B1F, 2 Chome−3−30 ,Motoazabu, Minato City, Tokyo, Japan. 

“Marina Perez Simão” and “Tomie Ohtake” at Pace
Tomie Ohtake, Untitled (1983). © Tomie Ohtake. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Nara Roesler Gallery.
Pace has staged not one but two solo shows for the occasion, pairing works by the contemporary Brazilian artist Marina Perez Simão (b. 1981) with those of one of her greatest influences, the late Japanese-Brazilian Modernist Tomie Ohtake (1913–2015). Ohtake, who immigrated to Brazil in 1936, incorporated both geometric and organic forms into abstract works that spanned painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Simão, who recently had a solo show at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, is showing semi-abstract landscape paintings.
Pace is located at Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A, 5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan. More

Boston’s cityscape just welcomed a new sculpture by Gaetano Pesce. The late, great Italian designer’s final public artwork, Double Heart (2024–25), has landed on Lyrik Back Bay, joining the city’s blossoming public art scene.
Double Heart certainly holds its own, towering 30 feet tall and radiating a warm red glow that echoes the highway’s streaming taillights in the evening. This is Pesce’s only permanent outdoor sculpture to grace America—and it just might prove iconic enough to rival Anish Kapoor’s famed Cloudgate (2006) sculpture in Chicago.
Gaetano Pesce, Double Heart (2024-25). Lyrik Back Bay, Samuels and Associates, Boston, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Goodman Taft. Photo: Aram Boghosian (AramPhoto). Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce’s Studio, New York and Champ Lacombe, Biarritz / London.
Pesce famously worked across art, architecture, and design—eschewing creative categories, while prioritizing innovation. As aesthetics have grown more uniform and utilitarian over the past few decades, he embraced playfulness and imperfection, especially favoring unpredictable resin.
Boston-based developer Samuels and Associates commissioned Pesce’s Double Heart for Lyrik Back Bay, which perches atop a CitizenM hotel, a Rivian store, LEGO’s U.S. headquarters, and more above the eight-lane turnpike, right where Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood becomes Fenway. The sculpture is the sole artwork slated to enliven the site’s plaza, flanked by two tall buildings. The developer opted for this double-pronged layout at the request of locals, who wanted to keep the sunset view that the previous barebones bridge in this spot afforded. It recruited Cambridge and New York-based art curatorial and advisory firm Goodman Taft, however, to sniff out the ideal artist to activate this prime alcove.
Goodman Taft co-founder Abigail Ross Goodman intimated over email that when her team got started on the project three years ago, Pesce was on their shortlist. “This very prominent and public site called for a work of art that could match its spirit, its scale, and its nature as the nexus where many neighborhoods connect and converge,” Goodman Taft senior partner Molly Epstein explained. “Gaetano Pesce reminded us that ‘color is energy, it is happiness, a positive sign,’ and in Double Heart—a unique variant of the sculpture conceived and designed at a monumental scale by the artist specifically for the site and executed in his signature resin and bold red hue—he gives Boston a new public icon of love, empathy, creativity and connection.”
Gaetano Pesce, Heart Lamp prototype (2009). Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce’s Studio, New York, and Champ Lacombe, Biarritz/London.
Double Heart actually began in 1979 as an idea for a table lamp featuring a bespoke base that would reflect the favorite city of whichever collector commissioned it. When Pesce sketched its prototype, he was drawing from that ubiquitous Valentine’s Day motif where Cupid’s bow pierces a heart. The addition of a second heart doubles his message of connection.
“If you want to be sincere in what you do, you have to use material of your time, because that is the proof you work in the moment,” Pesce once said. Because it’s so recognizable, viewers driving by Lyrik Back Bay won’t have to waste any time decoding the sculpture’s meaning.
Pesce previously turned the Double Heart lamp into a monument for Paris+ par Art Basel 2022. “This object is significant because it has meaning in a moment when the world is not doing so well,” he told Art Basel at the time. “So many stupid people are in positions of power, and they are doing serious damage. Art and design have a very significant role to play.”
Gaetano Pesce, Double Heart (2024-25). Lyrik Back Bay, Samuels and Associates, Boston, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Goodman Taft. Photo: Aram Boghosian (AramPhoto). Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce’s Studio, New York and Champ Lacombe, Biarritz / London.
To drive his point home, Pesce made this second, permanent iteration of the work two times taller than its Parisian predecessor. Although he died last spring before bringing the piece to fruition, his estate, his longtime studio staff, and gallery Champ Lacombe, all joined forces to oversee its production at the very fabrication shop that Pesce had selected in Viareggio, Italy. In other words, this sculpture was a labor of love, from beginning to end. More

In August, Brian Eno set out hundreds of small wood panels across a series of worktables in his London studio. Over two days, he laid cut-out stencils atop the array, before spray-painting the blocks in blues, pinks, greens, and metallic shades. Pieces were removed when the artist thought them finished; others stayed until he felt they “got somewhere.”
The upshot of Eno’s project, simply titled “Blocks,” is more than 400 birch plywood slabs carrying surprising, one-of-a-kind designs. From November 12, you will be able to snap them up through London’s Paul Stolper Gallery for £500 ($656) each.
Brian Eno in his London studio during his two-day continuous performance for “Blocks.” © Brian Eno. Photo courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery 2025.
And you’ll be spoiled for choice. Measuring about seven-by-five inches, the compositions on offer range from the minimal to the complex, vivid to muted. Block 223, for instance, features various color fields quietly merging into one another, while Block 55 dances with licks of sunset tones. Some pieces, such as Block 1 and Block 288, boast eye-catching interplays between positive and negative spaces—the result of Eno spraying over objects from cut-out shapes to dried pasta.
Brian Eno, Block 223 (2025). © Brian Eno. Photo: Luke Walker, courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery 2025.
The improvisational nature of the series is in line with Eno’s generative ethos, which hinges on randomness and unpredictability. He believes there’s meaning in the method (see: his 1975 “Oblique Strategies” card deck, created with Peter Schmidt, that encourages creatives to view their process from fresh angles).
“Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen,” he once wrote. “The value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.”
Brian Eno, Block 55 (2025). © Brian Eno. Photo: Luke Walker, courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery 2025.
In “Blocks,” chance and randomness also turn up in Eno’s grouped panels. These works are composed of four painted panels, fused together such that a square gap remains at the center. The panels were picked by the artist to showcase unexpected juxtapositions of color and compositions. While Block 367 offers a contrast of spray-painted forms, say, Block 378 brings together panels of a similarly shaped and toned motif.
Brian Eno, Block 378 (2025). © Brian Eno. Photo: Luke Walker, courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery 2025.
This latest artistic series follows Eno’s drop of a custom turntable in 2024, also through Paul Stolper. The $25,000 gadget doesn’t just play records, but lights up with what the artist termed “seductive” color transitions. “When it doesn’t have to do anything in particular, like play a record,” he explained, “it’s a sculpture.”
Earlier this year, Eno and Beatie Wolfe released their twin collaborative albums, Lateral and Luminal, in which the Roxy Music founding member and multidisciplinary artist endeavored to put music to feelings. In yet another collaboration, Eno paired up with Dutch artist Bette Adriaanse for the 2024 book What Art Does, which posits a new theory about, well, what art does.
Brian Eno in his London studio during his two-day continuous performance for “Blocks.” © Brian Eno. Photo courtesy Paul Stolper Gallery 2025.
“Blocks” is available for sale from November 12 at 4.00 p.m. GMT / 11 a.m. ET online, in person, or over the phone through Paul Stolper Gallery. The works will be on view at the gallery, November 14, 2025–January 17, 2026. More

Chelsea is rich with blue-chip shows right now, jewel-box wonders fill Upper East Side townhouses, and Downtown Manhattan teems with emergent names. But if you are seeking truly heady and bizarre art experiences in New York at the moment, and if you have limited time, head to Midtown. On a brief stroll, without spending a dime, and without setting foot in a single museum or commercial gallery, you can savor (1) a formidable corporate curatorial effort, (2) a tantalizing marketing spectacular, and (3) a slow-burning delight that is hidden in a luxury emporium and on offer for just a couple weeks. All three of these displays are thrillingly, brutally of the moment. Let’s take a tour.
JPMorgan Chase’s new home at 270 Park, which was designed by Foster + Partners. Courtesy JPMorgan Chase
1. JPMorgan Chase’s Headquarters at 270 Park Avenue
Start on Park Avenue, between East 47th and 48th Streets. Over the past four years, JPMorgan Chase’s beast of a new headquarters has been rising here, a sleek, impressive, and faintly evil addition to the skyline. Last week, the nation’s largest bank officially moved into the tower, which was designed by Foster + Partners. It cost more than $3 billion to make, has 2.5 million square feet across 60 floors, can hold 10,000 employees, and soars a breathtaking 1,388 feet, making it the sixth-tallest building in the city.
But we are here for the art at street level. The biggest-ticket attraction is a pair of absolutely enormous abstractions by the German grandmaster Gerhard Richter, who is 93 and the subject of an expansive retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Titled Color Chase One and Color Chase Two, they are “painted works made with interlocking, hard-angled aluminum shapes,” according to press materials. With their peculiarly angled planes of flat color, these hard-edged pieces could be chopped-and-screwed versions of Richter’s redoubtable, rectilinear “Color Charts.” They’re punchy, pleasantly awkward, and ultimately forgettable: perfect corporate-lobby art. The unfathomable cost of these things is at least part of their pleasure. The bank did not reply to a question about what they paid, but to offer a point of comparison: back in 2007, Goldman Sachs forked over $5 million for a Julie Mehretu mural.
Wind Dance by Norman Foster on the mezzanine of the lobby at 270 Park Avenue. Courtesy JPMorgan Chase
There’s also a charming Maya Lin installation that clads one side of the building’s base with stone and a Leo Villareal light show on the building’s crown at night, but the work that steals the show is by Norman Foster himself. Centrally positioned in the capacious lobby, it’s a 3-D–printed bronze flagpole that shoots air from its top, keeping its flag fluttering. This invention is designed to replicate wind conditions outside (very cool), though it’s apparently also configured to never let the flag go limp. The Stars and Stripes hangs on it now now, waving surreally. (It recalls, for me, Pope.L’s massive indoor American flag).
A flag with an endless supply of artificial wind, forever aloft: The metaphors write themselves. Take it as a symbol of an institution too big too fail, a troubled republic pretending that everything is normal, or a company that is proud to know which way the wind is blowing. Either way, it’s deranged, and I love it.
Is that augmented reality or an A.I. creation? Neither. It’s Louis Vuitton’s flagship store on East 57th Street, which is currently undergoing a major renovation. Photo by Andrew Russeth
2. Louis Vuitton’s Under-Renovation Flagship Store
Ten blocks north and one avenue west, another impressive feat awaits. Louis Vuitton’s flagship store at the corner of East 57th Street and Fifth Avenue is undergoing a multi-year renovation, but you will see few indications of construction, save for scaffolding above the sidewalk. The whole structure has been done up to resemble a stack of gargantuan LV trunks, and the verisimilitude astonishes. Even up close, the exterior suggests monogrammed leather. To amplify the illusion, the company’s in-house design team installed 840 large rivets, as well as gleaming clasps and handles that weigh up to 5,000 pounds. It shimmers in the sun, and glows at night, thanks to lights secreted along various edges of the trunks.
An artist acquaintance compared it, admiringly, to the basket-shaped building that was built in 1997 for the now-defunct basket-making Longaberger Company in Newark, Ohio, by NBBJ and Korda Nemeth Engineering, a classic of postmodern architecture. It also vaguely harkens to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects that involved wrapping architecture, turning them temporarily into artworks and obscuring their decorative elements. LV has instead forged a building that is pure decoration, a canny advertisement that demands to be photographed. It’s easy to imagine super-fans of the brand replicating the display on their own homes. Silent and impassive, it’s an irresistible monument to luxury.
Espace Louis Vuitton’s display of two works by Gustave Caillebotte on the fifth floor of Louis Vuitton’s temporary store on East 57th Street. Courtesy Espace Louis Vuitton
3. Gustave Caillebotte at Espace Louis Vuitton
For now, LV’s main shop is a temporary, but still quite impressive, space across the street, designed by the serial museum architect Shohei Shigematsu of OMA (who, like Foster, has gotten into the sculpture game by stacking Louis Vuitton trunks into zigzagging columns that stand more than 50 feet tall). Up on the fifth floor, the luxury giant is, for the first time in New York, staging an exhibition under its Espace Louis Vuitton platform, which regularly does ambitious shows at dedicated venues in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul, and Osaka. This display consists of just two paintings, but what paintings! They are prime pieces by Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94) that, earlier this month, were hanging in a touring Caillebotte survey at the Art Institute of Chicago. They will be here until November 16, and an appointment is required to visit them.
Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man at His Window (1876) at the Espace Louis Vuitton in New York. Courtesy Louis Vuitton
Both pictures focus on solitary men. The Impressionist was only 27 when he painted the earlier one, Young Man at His Window (1876), which is owned by the Getty, and it shows a besuited figure from behind. It’s the artist’s younger brother, René, who died a year later, only 26. He’s high up in an apartment that belonged to the wealthy family, hands in his pockets, gazing down onto a street in the 8th arrondissement that is cloaked in shadow. Dapper and still, he’s a man in control of his destiny, but there is a hint of melancholy, even discomfort, about him. He’s isolated, perhaps yearning for something. That woman walking below? An escape, via that horse-drawn carriage in the distance? He can’t bring himself to move.
Gustave Caillebotte, Boating Party (1877–78) at the Escape Louis Vuitton in New York. Courtesy Louis Vuitton
In contrast, the man in the second picture, Boating Party (1877–78), is pure action. A black top hat is perched atop his head, and he is rowing a small boat down the Yerres River in northern France, where the Caillebottes had a summer home. He’s taken off his jacket and put it on the seat next to him so that he can really go at it. We are sitting across from him, almost uncomfortably close, and can see a pair of boaters that we are about to pass. Tall trees recede into the background. It looks relaxing out there on the water. Until last year, the work was still owned by Caillebotte’s heirs, but the Musée d’Orsay was able to pry it loose thanks to a donation of about $50.5 million from LVMH, Louis Vuitton’s owner. For the next two weeks, though, it belongs to New York.
Seeking more Midtown art action? Here’s another roundup, from 2019. Most of the entries remain on view. More

At your typical fashion show, stone-faced models walk the runway before expressionless designers, buyers, and editors. The night before Halloween, at the SoHo studio of New York designer Stella Ishii, it was a very different scene indeed. As models of varying ages walked a narrow path between rows of seats packed with admirers, there was applause the entire time, and plentiful hooting and hollering. 
This fashion show was different in another way, too: the hip clothing—$50,000 worth of donated designs by Ishii—was decorated by artists from Oakland, California’s venerable Creative Growth Art Center, which has supported artists with disabilities since 1974. (There are now many such studios nationwide, but Creative Growth was the first.) Stylish, one-of-a-kind looks by studio artists such as Casey Byrnes, Maureen Clay, Zina Hall, Dan Miller, Lynn Pisco, Nicole Storm, and many others included paintings of smiling faces and landscapes as well as abstract decorations and patterning, which the models exhibited on the catwalk. Some went with the typical pouty look, but many grinned from ear to ear.
Matilda wears a cardigan by Emma Holbrook and jumpsuit by Brian Nakahara.
Japan-born Ishii heads up fashion agency the News, at whose 3,000-square-foot studio the event took place, and founded the label 6397 (the alphanumeric rendering of the word “news”) after working for Comme des Garçons and introducing brands like Martin Margiela and Vivienne Westwood to U.S. audiences. “The work that comes out of the Creative Growth studio gives me so much joy,” said Ishii in press materials.
“I loved it so much,” said New York designer Colleen Allen, who’s been profiled by W Magazine and Vogue and is a 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 for art and style, after the runway show. She was positioned, naturally, in the front row. “There was so much energy, and the concept is amazing. I was very impressed.” 
When I told her this was the first runway show I’ve attended, she issued a warning: “This is a high bar.”
A rack of Stella Ishii designs modified by Creative Growth Art Center artists, on view at a fashion show. Photo: Otto Harris.
The crowd also included outsider art devotees like Matthew Higgs, director of New York’s White Columns; Elizabeth Denny, ex-New York dealer and incoming director of the Outsider Art Fair; New York dealer David Fierman, co-founder of the Open Invitational fair, which represents disability studios exclusively, and of the similarly focused gallery Open Studio; and artist and MacArthur “genius” Josiah McElheny. The host committee included Paper magazine co-founder Kim Hastreiter and editors from Purple, Vogue, T: the New York Times Style Magazine, and New York Magazine’s The Cut, all in attendance.
The rousing pop-and-rock soundtrack, meanwhile, was provided by Hop Peternell of Beauty Music, a music studio practice, collaborative recording project, and record label centering the musical practices of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It’s housed at Studio Route 29 in New Jersey.
A visitor checks out the lewks by Creative Growth artists on Stella Ishii’s clothing. Photo: Otto Harris.
The fashion show began 12 years ago, as Creative Growth executive director Sunny A. Smith (tapped for the post in August) told me before things got underway. The studio’s artists were already making clothes, he said, and have great style to begin with. What started as a little runway show at the studio, with the artists modeling their own creations, has become Creative Growth’s largest fundraising event, dependably drawing 1,000 to its annual gala. Currently on view in Oakland is the show “Fashion Is the Sunshine That Spotlights Everyone.” This was the second New York edition of the event.
“When we asked the artist Emma Holbrook how she felt” in the garment she created, Smith told me, “she looked in the mirror and said, ‘I just love myself.’ That goes to the heart of what we do.” The “neuro-expansive” artists the studio supports, he said in remarks before the runway show, offer new ways of seeing and imagining the world.
Kola wears a blazer by Christine Szeto, t-shirt by Isaiah Jackson and jeans by Casey Byrnes. Photo: Otto Harris.
Browsing the racks, I was struck by many inspiring looks, including a pair of jeans decorated with Pokémon characters by Lynn Pisco ($350); a poncho painted with abstract patterns by Maureen Clay ($1,400); an earth-toned necklace by Avery Babon ($125); jeans painted with abstract designs by Barry Reagan ($350) and Stephanie Hill ($650); and an abstract painted blazer and shorts ($1,250) by Isabel Gallegos.
A visitor checks out the styles at the Creative Growth fashion show. Photo: Otto Harris.
Mickey Boardman, Paper’s editorial director and host committee member, served as auctioneer for three of the night’s outfits, all of which sold at prices under $1,000. 
“Those artists are living their best life,” he said of the artists modeling their looks at the Oakland runway shows. “I cry every time.” More

On paper, a description of Nick Cave’s bronze sculpture Amalgam (Origin) (2024) might be interpreted as Lovecraftian horror. A humanoid figure looming 26 feet tall, with skin wrapped in organic patterns and, in place of a head, a spray of logs and branches on which all manner of birds sit perched, preternaturally still. But, standing in its presence, the effect is quite the opposite.
Amalgam (Origin) marks the artist’s first public outdoor sculpture, recently installed at the sweeping 158-acre main campus of the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park and joining the institution’s permanent collection of over 300 sculptures as its largest figurative work. A creative evolution of his iconic “Soundsuits,” the towering bronze figure conveys a powerful sense of calm and solemn composure—an otherworldly sentinel that, through compositional and material weightiness, evokes themes of protection and sanctuary.
“There’s an aura around the piece, a stillness,” said Cave at the unveiling of the sculpture, which is located along the North Path. “You come here, and you just want to be with that stillness. That’s an important moment to me, that it’s relatable and majestic at the same time.”
Nick Cave, Amalgam (Origin) (2024). Photo: Jason Whalen, Fauna Creative. Gift of Fred and Lena Meijer © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Soundsuits
The artist’s “Soundsuits” were first made in 1992 in response to the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department; since then, Cave has created more than 500 of the sculptures—elaborate, wearable works of art composed from all manner of materials that, contrary to their dazzling, eye-catching compositions, are ultimately forms of disguise as they obscure the wearer’s identity.
“I was thinking: how do I think about roles of protection?” said Cave. “This idea of pushback, of resistance, and finding ways to be empowered by societal wrongs—how do I stand in that and stand up to that?”
Unlike the “Soundsuits,” which are sewn and constructed with materials like fabric and synthetic hair, Amalgam (Origin) is cast bronze, making it a viable work to show within the context of an outdoor sculpture park. But he said there is a key connection between the series.
“[With Amalgam (Origin)] and with the ‘Soundsuits,’ it’s always been about ways of adorning the body, which for me was about ideas of protection and shielding my identity to some degree, but at the same time being very vulnerable and sensitive.”
Using his own body as well as casts of flowers, birds, and trees, the works suggest a new type of monument—one that isn’t explicitly tied to a specific event or person but is adaptable and can engage with broader thematic issues tied to social issues, responsibility, and resilience.
Amalgam (Origin) debuted earlier this year at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, in Cave’s solo show “Amalgams and Graphts.” Three of the large-scale bronzes were on view alongside “Graphts,” mixed-media assemblages that feature needlepoint portraits of Cave immersed in arrangements of colorful florals drawn from vintage serving trays. Diverging from the “Soundsuits” and “Amalgams,” both of which obscure the figure’s face and identity, here the artist for the first time reveals himself in the work.
Installation view of “Amalgams and Graphts” (2025). Photo: Dan Bradica Studio. © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
From Thread to Bronze
While the inspirational and thematic underpinnings of the “Soundsuits” and “Amalgams” in many ways run parallel, their construction reflects material polarities. Sewing is an intimate, often solo method done by hand, but creating bronze sculptures—especially ones at the scale of Cave’s—requires teams.
Early experiments with bronze saw the artist casting various parts of his own body, but for Amalgam (Origin) more advanced tech was called in. Working with outfits in both Chicago and on the East Coast, scans of his body were taken and rendered digitally. For hours a week, Cave worked with team members to refine the final design. From conception to execution, the project took roughly two years.
The ornate floral pattern adorning the figure’s skin was drawn from decorative low wall reliefs like Anaglypta, popular both during the Victorian Era and the 1960s, which were scanned and then arranged on the sculpture’s torso, arms, and legs. The figure’s hands and feet, however, remain realistic and are replicas of the artist’s own body.
Nick Cave, detail of Amalgam (Origin) (2024). Photo: Jason Whalen, Fauna Creative. Gift of Fred and Lena Meijer © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
The sticks and branches protruding up from the figure’s shoulders were gathered from the area around the foundry where the piece was manufactured, in addition to a few significant logs that were taken from a tree cut down at the School, a Jack Shainman Gallery exhibition space in Kinderhook, New York.
Colloquially referred to by Cave as the “migration hub,” between 40 and 50 birds situated amongst the various branches conspicuously eschew total realism: each has some form of base, indicating they are bird figurines like the kind now frequently found in vintage shops.
“As a kid, these were what was in the china cabinet, and I could only look at and admire them from a distance,” said Cave. “It allows me to go to a place of memory.” The choice also presents a good-natured interplay between high and low art, and hierarchies of value—while these types of porcelain figurines were once prized, today they are often overlooked as the epitome of kitsch. Playful and perhaps even a bit confounding, the birds lend a sense of playfulness and visual accessibility to the work’s overarching themes.
Nick Cave, Amalgam (Origin) (2024). Photo: Jason Whalen, Fauna Creative. Gift of Fred and Lena Meijer © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
“I think about birds of a feather flock together,” said Cave, “and about ideas of unity and how we can collectively come together as one.”
Outside the White Cube
Unlike traditional indoor gallery spaces, exhibiting work outdoors presents a whole new set of opportunities and considerations, such as the landscaping around the work and the climate of the region.
Vice President of Collections and Curatorial Affairs Suzanne Ramljak noted that while the team had long followed Cave’s work, it wasn’t until they’d learned of his experiments in bronze that the possibility of acquiring his work for the collection became a feasible idea. “[Amalgam (Origin)] is an amalgamation of art, nature, and culture, the three primary foci here at Meijer Gardens, making it the perfect embodiment of what we do here,” said Ramljak. “It really couldn’t be a stronger statement of what we believe in.”
While it will take some time to grow in, Cave worked with a team of Meijer Gardens horticulturists to plan the immediate surroundings of the sculpture. Tall grasses will rise and obscure the plinth on which the figure stands and, woven within a winding path—part paved, part earthen.
“Everything is going to just look wild,” Cave explained. “When you’re coming to the piece from a distance, the figure is going to look as if it’s floating.” And as the seasons change in Michigan, so will the backdrop of the work. “The environment, the setting around the piece is so dynamic. I’m interested to see once all the leaves fall off the trees behind it, how will it step back within the landscape?”
Nick Cave, detail of Amalgam (Origin) (2024). Photo: Jason Whalen, Fauna Creative. Gift of Fred and Lena Meijer © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
There is also the possibility of actual birds making their homes in the construction of the sculpture, and only time will tell how the bronze will patina over the years to come.
As his first outdoor work in a sculpture park, Amalgam (Origin) has opened a new horizon of tantalizing exhibition opportunities for the artist. “There are a lot of sculpture parks, and that just opens up this whole other space in terms of presentation.”
Already, Cave is gearing up for his next outdoor public sculpture project, this time at the Phoenix Desert Botanical Garden, where he will show a new series of bronze works in 2027 with a whole new set of contextual and environmental concerns.
“I’m just trying to get it out in the world,” he said. “Hopefully it will be not only in sculpture gardens, but also within city halls, campuses, where it becomes more accessible in a different way.” More

The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown is developing an immersive exhibition with Van Gogh Immersive creator Massimiliano Siccardi, debuting in 2026.
The experience will let visitors explore Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions and artworks through large-scale projections and interactive environments.
Produced by Brett Kerr and Andrea Bari, the project aims to merge art, technology, and storytelling, expanding the possibilities of immersive entertainment.

Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code is getting the immersive exhibition treatment.
As first reported by the entertainment publication Deadline, Brown has teamed up with Massimiliano Siccardi, the mind behind the wildly successful Van Gogh Immersive experience, which has been staged in cities across Europe, Asia, and the U.S.
“The visceral power of immersive experiences has always fascinated and moved me,” Brown said in a statement. “I’m beyond excited to be developing this project with the legendary artist Massimiliano Siccardi.”
Brown’s bestselling book from 2003 follows Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu who become entangled in a murder investigation at the Louvre that brings them into contact with secret religious societies. The main conspiracy is that the early kings of France were descended from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. In 2008, a film adaptation of the book was released starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tatou, and Ian McKellen. It grossed $800 million.
Exterior of Immersive Van Gogh at Pier 26. Photo by Ben Davis.
Although details of the venture’s creative partners and opening venues won’t be announced until early 2026, Siccardi has described the scope and intention of the project, calling it “a journey through the mind of Leonardo—his inventions, his obsessions, his brilliance—and the unveiling of Da Vinci works the world has never seen.” Expect to soar above the Tuscan hills in an ornithopter, roll through Paris in an armored tank, and come face-to-face with Leonardo’s mechanical lion, all while solving the greatest of ecclesiastical mysteries.
The Da Vinci Code immersive experience is being backed by U.S. film producers Brett Kerr and Andrea Bari. Kerr’s most recent feature was Waltzing with Brando, a drama starring Billy Zane as Marlon Brando who is trying to build an eco-retreat on an uninhabited island of Tahiti.
“We’re thrilled to help build a bridge between the genius of Da Vinci and the limitless possibilities of immersive art,” Bari and Kerr said in a statement. “This is about expanding how audiences experience wonder — and rewriting the boundaries between art, technology, and emotion.”
It’s not the first time the Renaissance master’s work has fueled an immersive experience. Last year, the Lume, in Melbourne, Australia, staged “Leonardo da Vinci – 500 Years of Genius.” The exhibition, created by the Australia-based entertainment company Grande Experiences, projected some of the artist’s most celebrated paintings, offered the world’s only exact 360-degree replica of Mona Lisa, and presented pages from the Codex Atlanticus, the 12-volume set of drawings and writings by Leonardo that is housed in Milan.
“Leonardo da Vinci – 500 Years of Genius” Installation View. Image courtesy of The Lume.
Fully immersive, multi-sensory experiences have rapidly grown in popularity in recent years, with some citing the appearance of the Immersive Van Gogh in the hit Netflix show Emily in Paris as a breakthrough moment. Investor money has poured in and today artists including David Hockney, Gustav Klimt, and Claude Monet have all seen their work turned into immersive experiences. More

People have believed in ghosts since time immemorial. Our enduring fascination with these spooky spectres has seen them haunt all manner of popular media, from folklore to film, and art. But, trapped between our earthly realm and whatever awaits, ghosts are often felt as an intangible presence. Only sometimes are sightings reported, so how best to represent the supernatural?
Ever inventive, artists have come up with different answers to this conceptual challenge over the centuries. “Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural,” a new survey at Kunstmuseum Basel, takes visitors on a 250-year journey from the 19th-century obsession with spiritualism, seance, and the occult, to modern-day apparitions. Among the 160 works and objects on display are conjurings by contemporary artists like Urs Fischer, Ryan Gander, Rachel Whiteread, Erwin Wurm, and Nicole Eisenman.
Erwin Wurm, Yikes (Substitutes) (2024). Photo: Markus Gradwohl. Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie. © 2025 ProLitteris, Zurich.
“Art and new forms of media share an interest in rendering things visible that are on the edges of our perception,” the exhibition’s curator Eva Reifert said. “Dealing with ghosts is an immensely creative undertaking, the imagination is liberated and the what ifs and how take it beyond the limits of materialistic reality.”
Depicting the Imperceptible
One reason for the rich variety of ghosts in art is the tantalizing impossibility of defining these entities. Are they benevolent or malevolent? “The idea that the past lives on is very powerful,” said Reifert, and “the idea that we can’t control [ghosts] appearances is, in turn, a very scary thought.” Their existence may resist and confound scientific rationality, but we can’t look away. After all, ghosts might be “figures of memory, of a person we loved, or, more probably, of violent and wrongful happenings in the past that have come to haunt the present.”
William Blair Bruce, The Phantom Hunter (1888). © Art Gallery of Hamilton.
Inevitably, we are left to wonder whether what we sense is real or a phantom of the imagination. Or, as goes the Emily Dickinson poem quoted in the show’s catalogue: “One need not be a chamber–to be haunted, One need not be a House–, The Brain has Corridors–, surpassing, Material Place–.”
The mystery of in-between beings is well captured by Canadian painter William Blair Bruce’s The Phantom Hunter (1888). A man cowers on a desolate, snowy plain, reaching out towards a strange, semi-translucent figure. “Is it the soul that leaves the body of the dying hunter?” Reifert asked. “Is it the phantom that leaves no traces in the snow but induces a ‘fear-chill like a shroud’?”
Meret Oppenheim, Ghost with Sheet (Spectre au drap), 1962. Courtesy of Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, Vaduz. © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich.
A filmy, loosely-rendered form is one way of evoking the “shift in atmosphere” associated with an invisible being. Another option is the loose white sheet, suggestive of a presence, or absence, beneath. The origins of this method can be traced back to the simple burial practice of wrapping the dead in a sheet in place of a coffin. “Many other aspects of ghostly appearances seem to be tied to the emergence of new media, like projection technologies or photography,” said Reifert. These can be used to “play with the theme of transparency, of blurred outlines, double or long exposure to indicate that the ghost is not fully of this world.”
Gillian Wearing, Me as a Ghost (2015). Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London © The artist and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.
Spiritualism and Spectacle
In challenging religion, the Enlightenment of the 18th century had promised a rational, controllable world, but one that paranormal activity threatened to upend. After all, novel uses of electricity began to power seemingly magical technologies, like the telegraph or the telephone, such that invisible forces suddenly felt real. In the late 19th century, many became fixated on the possibility of transcendence, whether by seeking channels of communication with new realms or probing inwards, toward previously unexplored layers of the psyche. No doubt, the spectacle and illusion of popular seances helped feed this appetite.
The medium Eva C. (aka Marthe Béraud) with a slipper-like teleplastic form on her head and a luminous apparition between her hands. © Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene, Freiburg im Breisgau.
Several mediums with a special “gift” were also artists, including Madge Gill, Augustin Lesage, and Georgiana Houghton, whose works are included in the Basel show. They saw themselves not as authors in the traditional sense but as being conducted by a higher power. Therefore, an intuitive “automatic” process was used by Houghton to produce her intricate, semi-abstracted spirit drawings. Though her aims were distinct from the modernists that would come later, many of her achievements appear to pre-empt their work.
Georgiana Houghton, The Spiritual Crown of Annie Mary Howitt Watts (1867). Photo: © Collection of Vivienne Roberts, London.
By the 20th-century, however, the avant-garde had inevitably put their own spin on the spiritual. Ghosts became “free-ranging agents of the irrational” and “metaphors for psychological extremes like trauma, anxiety or grief,” Reifert said. For the Surrealists, they were an avenue into the unconscious, appearing in the work of artists like Max Ernst, a pioneer of automatic painting techniques, and René Magritte.
René Magritte, The Comical Spirit (1928). Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin, courtesy Sammlung Ulla und Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich.
“Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural” is on view through March 8, 2026 at Kunstmuseum Basel. More