Exhibitions

Although the less-than-stellar weather has meant summer getting off to a slow start, triple-digit temperatures and heavy humidity are surely in our future. Want to escape the heat? Step into the cool air-conditioned galleries of an art museum, where you can take a mental vacation. Feeling FOMO about the European excursions you’re not able to attend? Gustav Caillebotte’s 19th-century views of Parisian life are a good consolation. And if you’re looking to expand your mind beyond this realm, Anicka Yi and Saya Woolfalk have conjured up alternate realities in mind-bending solo exhibitions. Here are our pick of the best shows to see around the country this summer.

“Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings” at the Morgan Library and MuseumJune 27, 2025–January 4, 2026
Lisa Yuskavage, (b. 1962), Neon Sunset, 2013. Monoprint with hand additions in pastel mounted on aluminum. Private Collection © Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
After a rocky start in the art world—where critics dismissed her high-octane, hyper-feminine style as girlish or superficial—Lisa Yuskavage’s legacy is undergoing a reappraisal. Now 62 and firmly mid-career, she has found renewed critical and market recognition. Her recent painting show at David Zwirner in Los Angeles confirmed her commercial relevance; and a new museum exhibition of her drawings aims to cement her place in the critical canon.
On June 27, the Morgan Library and Museum opens Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings, the first comprehensive museum presentation of her work in just one medium, charting back to the 1990s through now. It’ll be an opportunity to see her work without the effect of her usual color range, as the works on paper are often made with materials with set pigments like graphite, pastel, charcoal, and Conte. The entirety of the museum’s Thaw Gallery will be filled with renderings of Yuskavage’s early explorations of the figure and still lives, and more recent dives into landscape.
—Annie Armstrong

“Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World” at the Art Institute of ChicagoJune 29–October 5, 2025
Gusave Caillebotte, Boating party (1877) Private collection. Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images.
French painter Gustave Caillebotte was a member of the Impressionist group though his style stands out for being decidedly more realistic than some of his fellow artists (think Monet’s brushy waterlilies) and was also closely tied to his love of photography. Caillebotte frequently depicted friends and relatives in scenes set in late 19th-century urban Paris, whether it was famous scenes like Floor Scrapers or the Art Institute’s own Paris Street; Rainy Day.
This exhibition, which originally on view at the Musée d’Orsay last fall, includes more than 120 works—paintings, works on paper, photographs and other ephemera—and showcases a number of lesser-known but important works such as Musée d’Orsay’s recent acquisition, Boating Party, and the Louvre Abu-Dhabi’s The Bezique Game, alongside many works from private collections that are rarely seen by American audiences.
—Eileen Kinsella

“Anicka Yi” at the Museum of Fine Arts, HoustonJune 29–September 7, 2025
Anicka Yi, Each Branch Of Coral Holds Up The Light Of The Moon, 2024, film still, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment. © 2025 Anicka Yi / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
Deep in the heart of Texas, South Korean bio-tech artist Anicka Yi is having a museum show that opens on June 29 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, with several works dedicated to the theme of “karmic debt.”
Yi is known for her deeply imaginative conceptual artworks that toe the line between artwork and scientific exploration. Often, she blends uncommon mediums together, such as fragrance, musical instruments, and homemade robotics. Two of the pieces prominently featured in the show in Houston include an animatronic sculpture that moves in a manner meant to emulate prehistoric lifeforms, and another is a fully programmed software designed to keep Yi’s studio practice ongoing after her death.
—Annie Armstrong

“Queer Lens: A History of Photography” at the Getty CenterJune 17–September 28, 2025
Gay Liberation March on Times Square, 1969. Diana Davies. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations © NYPL. Image Courtesy of Getty Center/Valerie Tate.
Photography has long served as both a mirror and a weapon for the LGBTQ+ community—capturing, affirming, and at times rescuing queer life from erasure. “Queer Lens” at the Getty traces this layered history from the mid-19th century to the present, veering from the hyper-stylized, baroque portraits of Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle to Weegee’s raw street reportage. A 1966 photograph of the “Sip-In” protest at Julius’, Manhattan’s oldest gay bar (still open, still slinging cheeseburgers and brews), is especially resonant. So, too, are images of early pride events, long before corporate floats and branded sponsorships, when protest signs were handmade and clothing logo-free.
This hits differently in light of this year’s pride season, as the cowardly banks and big-box retailers—who once latched on to pride to vacuously virtue-signal and shill their wares—have retreated, fearing retribution from the current administration. But we don’t need them, and never did. As these images make clear, queer communities have always created space for themselves—and will continue to persevere, with or without corporate approval.
—William van Meter

“Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” at the Museum of Arts and DesignThrough September 7, 2025
Installation view of “Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” (2025). Photo: Jenna Bascom, courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
Fans of Saya Woolfalk’s “world building” installation have a lot to dive into here. “Empathic Universe” marks a retrospective of her work, famous for a fictional narrative focused on an imagined race of women known as “Empathics.” Woolfalk creates a signature visual imagery for these women that is a blend of visual symbols and folklore that are rooted in an analysis and exploration of African, African American, Japanese, European, and Brazilian art and stories.
The artist tells her stories with the use of garment-based sculpture, video, paintings, and works on paper.
—Eileen Kinsella

“Wrapped Walk Ways” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of ArtJune 28, 2025–January 18, 2026
Christo, Wrapped Walk Ways (Project for Jacob L. Loose Memorial Park, Kansas City, Missouri), 1978. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Photo: by Eeva-Inkeri, © the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
In 1978, visitors strolling through Kansas City’s Loose Park might well have thought: “we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” If they chose to follow the saffron fabric road, they’d find themselves immersed in Wrapped Walk Ways, the temporary outdoor installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude that transformed 2.7 miles of park pathways into a glowing, otherworldly landscape. As with their many site-specific interventions, the Bulgarian-born Christo and his partner Jeanne-Claude reimagined the familiar, inviting the public into a new, heightened experience of place and scale.
Now, as the 50th anniversary of Wrapped Walk Ways approaches, the Nelson-Atkins Museum revisits this “fabulous expedition” through an exhibition drawn from the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation’s 2024 gift of preparatory drawings, plans, photographs, and archival materials—much of it ephemeral, yet visually compelling enough to be artworks in their own right. This behind-the-scenes look into the intricacy and artistry of the duo’s process is revelatory, offering a rare glimpse of Christo and Jeanne-Claude in two dimensions.
—William van Meter

“Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy” at the Walker Art CenterJune 26, 2025–May 24, 2026
Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy. Image Courtesy of Walker Art Center Public Relations (Walker).
The exhibition, which marks Rauschenberg’s centennial year, pays tribute to the groundbreaking 1979 dance of the same name (Glacial Decoy), which premiered at the Walker. Brown choreographed the performance, in which four figures in flowing dresses shift back and forth on the stage, against a backdrop created by Rauschenberg. His oversized, rotating black-and-white photographs of everyday objects serve as a way to ground the performers’ dramatic movements in the physical world. The exhibition includes original costumes, video documentation, and archival materials. Further, it kicks off a multidisciplinary series of programs to celebrate the artist’s centennial.
—Eileen Kinsella

“Charles Atlas: Hail the New Puritan” at the Bass MuseumThrough October 19, 2025
Charles Atlas, Hail the New Puritan (film still). ©Charles Atlas. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
“Hail the new puritan! Righteous maelstrom!” sang Mark E. Smith of The Fall, the English post-punk band who, by the early 1980s, was finding renewed vigor through its unexpected collaboration with renegade Scottish choreographer Michael Clark. The group’s 1984 live television appearance featured Clark’s troupe in their signature cut-out tights (and often bare backsides), merging the raw energy of punk with the formal discipline of ballet and queer subcultural spectacle—polka dots, whether painted on faces or used in fabric for costumes, was also a big thing for some mysterious reason. Their collaboration would later culminate in the 1988 ballet I Am Curious, Orange. Experimental filmmaker Charles Atlas was there to capture the scene—or rather, to reinvent it. Hail the New Puritan (1985–86) is not so much a documentary as a fictionalized portrait of Clark’s world, offering an intimate, stylized snapshot of the vibrant collision of dance, fashion, nightlife, and underground culture in 1980s London.
Leigh Bowery, one of Clark’s most audacious collaborators, appears throughout this scene, as performer, muse, and provocateur. With Hail the New Puritan now on view at The Bass, the film offers a timely counterpoint to the major retrospective “Leigh Bowery!” currently on view at Tate Modern in London. The unbridled creativity that flourished in 1980s London—rising up amid economic hardship, social unrest, and fraught sexual politics—feels especially resonant today, as artists once again turn to performance, identity, and community as radical forms of expression.
—William van Meter

“Vermeer’s Love Letters,” at the Frick CollectionJune 18–August 31, 2025
Johannes Vermeer, The Love Letter (ca. 1669-70). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Now that one of New York’s all-time favorite museums is back and better than ever, the Frick has another major treat for art lovers this summer. “Vermeer’s Love Letters” is the first show to be held in the museum’s new Ronald S. Lauder galleries. It features three of the beloved Dutch painter’s masterpieces, the Frick’s own Mistress and Maid, alongside two major loans, The Love Letter from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Woman Writing A Letter With Her Maid from the National Gallery in Ireland. This marks the first time all three are being displayed in a single gallery together. It’s also the first major Vermeer exhibition in New York City in nearly 25 years.
—Eileen Kinsella More

Jill Magid‘s latest solo show is more than just a gallery show. It’s part of her dealer Esther Kim Varet’s run for Congress. For the exhibition, at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, Magid made a replica of the platform in the White House Press Briefing Room, with its star-spangled carpet, and invited Kim Varet to use the work, titled The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), to deliver stump speeches.
When Kim Varet announced her run for office in January, Magid had already been hard at work on the show. It was originally focused on a deep dive into official books published by U.S. government offices featuring political speeches, as transcribed in stenographers’ notes. There are still elements of Magid’s initial vision present in the final show, but she very much pivoted to respond to Kim Varet’s campaign.
“I’m an artist who makes work about power and accessing power structures, and here the gallerist is running a political campaign for Congress. How can I not do something with that, you know?” she told me.
”For me, it’s important to put myself in an uncomfortable situation.
And make work from that position that provokes or asks questions.”
The exhibition press release consists of Magid’s email to Kim Varet describing the new direction for the show: “You noted that my work is most powerful when it responds to a site or situation. For this reason I am integrating your run for office as a material of the work.”
Jill Magid, The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), 2025. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
Magid is careful to note that the show is not meant to be an endorsement of Kim Varet’s candidacy. (The dealer is running as a Democrat to unseat a Republican incumbent in California’s 40th Congressional District, and has already raised over $1 million, according to Ballotpedia.)
“I’m questioning free speech, and democracy, and how platforms work,” Magid said. “Not everyone is getting on a state-sanctioned platform. People are using other kinds of platforms and building other places to speak from. For me, I would never step on that platform. I would speak from the floor.”
Titled “Heart of a Citizen,” the show is largely staged outside, with only The Platform in the main gallery space, accompanied by a vitrine of documents related to its creation and the complex campaign finance laws that allow its display in a business owned by a political candidate.
Jill Magid, The Rose Garden (2025) and Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
The other two works are displayed outside in the courtyard, with a 15-foot-long neon sign reading Stenographer’s Note: [At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden] hanging on the wall, and 12 cast concrete facsimiles of the artist’s heart, which are titled The Rose Garden. 
To create the sculptures, Magid got an MRI at the Cleveland Clinic, and enlisted the artificial heart lab (officially called the Therapeutic Technology Design and Development Lab) at the department of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to fabricate an accurate replica of the organ.
Jill Magid, The Rose Garden (2025) and Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
“Everyone kept saying, ‘wow, your heart’s really big!’” Magid said.
But if the gallery is the press briefing room, the courtyard has become the White House Rose Garden. Magid was inspired by Trump’s announcement in February that he would pave the historic space to create a patio like the one at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach golf course. (He said it was because women’s high heels were sinking into the grass.)
“At Various Small Fires, you come off the street and there’s a corridor that opens up on this courtyard with tall cinder block walls, painted white, and then it’s this gray, dusty gravel,” Magid said. “It just worked with this kind of lament about the garden as an inquiry of power.”
The White House Rose Garden renovation, tearing out the lawn to create a Mar-a-Lago-style patio, on June 12, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Photo: by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
And even since the exhibition has opened, Trump has begun to make good on that plan, beginning on June 9 to bulldoze the lawn. (Though the rose garden’s origins can be traced to the early 1900s, noted art collector and horticulturalist Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon created the current design for President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.)
Trump had already put his mark on the Rose Garden in his first term, removing the crab apple trees that had lined the space since the 1960s and replacing many of the colorful flowers with more staid greenery and white roses.
Magid pays tribute to those lost trees with the Stenographer’s Note piece, which is taken directly from a transcript of a Rose Garden speech: “[At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.]”
Jill Magid, Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
She was transfixed by the idea that a stenographer, ostensibly tasked with a straightforward transcription, would write such a poetic note, and that it would become part of our historical record, preserved in the presidential papers.
And then there was the vision the words conjured, contrasted with the work’s surroundings, Magid said. “The courtyard being this very barren, desert-like
space. The sun just beats down on it, and it’s dusty. And then there’s this quote where you can only imagine the trees and the wind and the roses.”
Jill Magid, Stenographer’s Note: (At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.), 2025, installation view in “Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” at Various Small Fires. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
Magid’s work has engaged with landscape architecture before. She is perhaps best known for her efforts to secure the return of the archives of Mexican Modernist architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988) to his homeland from Swiss furniture company Vitra in exchange for a diamond ring made from his compressed ashes.
But her interest in the White House Rose Garden actually originated with the flowers, and how they can have a wide variety of associations. For her 2020 project Tender, Magid engraved the edge of 120,000 pennies with the phrase “THE BODY WAS ALREADY SO FRAGILE” and distributed them at bodegas around New York City.
That sparked an interest in cheap bodega flowers and the flower economy. In October, Magid had a floral-themed solo presentation with Mexico City’s Labor Gallery at Art Basel Paris, complete with an installation of blooms from Paris’s open-air flower markets.
Jill Magid, The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), 2025, vitrine documents. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
“Heart of a Citizen” is comparatively spartan. But it had other kinds of complications. Presenting The Platform required a careful study of campaign finance laws, to avoid financial fraud.
Ahead of the show, Magid actually sold the work to collector Michael Young, who donated it as an in-kind contribution to Kim Varet’s campaign. And because she spoke on the platform at the opening, Kim Varet needed to rent our her own space for the occasion, at the rate of $200 an hour. (The plan is to take The Platform on the road for campaign events after the exhibition run.)
“I found it really fascinating and learned a lot about the inner workings of finance and political campaigns,” Magid said.
Jill Magid, The Platform (U.S. General Elections, 2026), 2025, envelope with stamp by the artist. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles.
The exhibition also includes a stack of paperwork. Magid has provided copies of the official U.S. application to run for Congress, and envelopes to mail them off. On the back, she’s stamped each one with a quote from cultural theorist Robert M. Ochshorn, paraphrasing French writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot, about how one should “only start building platforms once you’ve fully and deeply rejected the notion and premise and promise of platform.”
“I hope,” Magid said, “that The Platform will be a really good place to provoke questions, debate, and dissent.”
“Jill Magid: Heart of a Citizen” is on view at Various Small Fires, 812 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, California, May 22–June 28, 2025.  More

During her two-decade reign, Marie Antoinette didn’t just preside over France, she reshaped the worlds of 18th-century fashion and design in her image. From her sumptuous pastel gowns and towering wigs to her dazzling jewels and gilded furnishings, the queen embraced a personal style of lavish elegance that bled into her quarters at the Château de Versailles, where striking color, lush tapestries, and rococo touches newly defined royal grandeur.
So revolutionary was Marie Antoinette’s style that centuries on, we’re still talking about it. Artists, designers, and filmmakers—from Alexander McQueen to Sofia Coppola—have been captivated. London’s V&A Museum is not sitting this out either; in September, it’s rolling out a major show dedicated to the regal fashion icon.
Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, Portrait de Marie-Antoinette à la rose (1783). Photo: © Château de Versailles, Dist. Grand Palais RMN / Christophe Fouin.
“Marie Antoinette Style,” the first exhibition in the U.K. centered on the French queen, will unpack her dress and interiors, exploring how her unparalleled style has echoed through the ages. Among the 250 objects going on view are historical artifacts, some traveling from Versailles, as well as contemporary pieces that speak to the monarch’s timeless appeal. The exhibition is sponsored by shoemaker Manolo Blahnik.
“The most fashionable, scrutinized and controversial queen in history, Marie Antoinette’s name summons both visions of excess and objects and interiors of great beauty,” noted the show’s curator, Sarah Grant, in a statement. “This exhibition explores that style and the figure at its center, using a range of exquisite objects belonging to Marie Antoinette, alongside the most beautiful fine and decorative objects that her legacy has inspired.”
Beaded pink silk slipper belonging to Marie Antoinette. Photo: CC0 Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris.
When she ascended the throne in 1774, the royal’s style choices swiftly caused a stir. Against the dreary palette of the French court, Marie Antoinette’s light, cascading gowns stood out for their silhouettes as much as for their bright color and intricate detailing—lace, ribbons, ruffles. She would popularize comfort-first styles including the Robe à la Polonaise, recognizable for its fitted bodice and a skirt gathered into three distinct puffs, and Robe à L’anglaise, where the fitted bodice flows into a wide skirt with an opening that reveals an underskirt.
That look was immortalized by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun in her 1783 portrait of the ornately dressed queen lightly clutching a rose, which is making an appearance at “Marie Antoinette Style.” Also going on view are fragments of court dresses, silk slippers, jewels, and a bottle of eau de cologne from her personal collection. The museum is even recreating the aromas of the court and the queen’s favorite perfume for an immersive scent experience.
Crystal flask with label “Eau de Cologne” from the “Nécessaire de voyage,” belonging to Marie Antoinette. Photo: © Grand Palais RMN (musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado.
Visitors will also get a sense of how Marie Antoinette decorated her private chamber at Versailles, known as the Petit Trianon. Here, in her private sanctuary, the royal indulged her love for rococo, fitting the space with painted wallpaper, objects and furniture with floral forms, and her famous mirrored shutters. Her exquisite dinner service is making a rare outing at the V&A, as are her chair sets and other decorative objects.
‘Lettre’, 1921 from Fêtes Galantes. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The exhibition will also delve into how the sovereign’s fashion footprint has outlived her, fueling the cultural imagination from the 19th century to today. Where Art Deco illustrators Erté and George Barbier sought to capture the fantasy of Marie Antoinette’s style, modern-day couture designs from the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Moschino, Dior, Chanel, and Valentino have attempted to match her extravagance.
Moschino show, Runway, Fall Winter 2020, Milan Fashion Week, Italy. Photo: PIXELFORMULA / SIPA / Shutterstock, courtesy of the V&A Museum.
Of course, due space will be given to Sofia Coppola’s beloved 2006 film Marie Antoinette, which won an Academy Award for costume design. Looks and Manolo Blahnik shoes designed for the movie will be featured, alongside other costumes, film stills, and music videos that highlight the doomed queen’s broader legacy on screen and stage.
“This is the design legacy of an early modern celebrity and the story of a woman whose power to fascinate has never ebbed,” Grant added. “Marie Antoinette’s story has been re-told and re-purposed by each successive generation to suit its own ends. The rare combination of glamour, spectacle and tragedy she presents remains as intoxicating today as it was in the 18th century.”
“Marie Antoinette Style” is on view at the V&A Museum, Cromwell Road, London, September 20, 2025 – March 22, 2026. More

Most Americans know Harriet Tubman as the fearless conductor of the Underground Railroad—but few know she led the largest liberation of enslaved people in U.S. military history.
A new exhibition at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., “Picturing Freedom,” uncovers this little-known chapter. During the Combahee River Raid of 1863, Tubman guided Union troops behind Confederate lines and freed 756 people in a single night—10 times as many people than she helped escape than all her years on the Underground Railroad.
Featuring works by Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, and Faith Ringgold (1930–2024), among others, the show brings fresh attention to one of the most daring and underrecognized moments of the Civil War. Underscoring Tubman’s enduring ability to inspire, there are also pieces by contemporary artists.
“Harriet’s story has been told visually over and over and over again,” Angela Mack, the museum’s director, said in an interview. “Just pulling all these works together around the Combahee River Raid is very, very powerful.”
Aaron Douglas, Harriet Tubman (1931). Collection of the Bennett College for Women Collection,Greensboro, N.C.
A Daring Feat
The exhibition, guest curated by Vanessa Thaxton-Ward of Virginia’s Hampton University Museum, is based on the new book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for history. Author Edda L. Fields-Black, a descendant of one of the raid’s participants, conducted years of archival research to identify those freed that night, and tell their stories, as well as Tubman’s. Fields-Black first reached out to the Gibbes Museum while she was working on the book in 2022.
“She was kind enough to send us a very early manuscript of the book, and we knew right away this was a story that we wanted to try and tell through an exhibition,” Mack said. The project became her swan song, as she is retiring this year after 44 years at the museum, where she has been director since 2008.
J. Henry Fair, Alligator in rice field (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
The result is a multimedia display combining Modern and contemporary art inspired by Tubman with audio from interviews with descendants of those liberated during the raid. There is also a video reenactment of the daring mission and archival photos of enslaved plantation workers toiling in the fields. Setting the scene are gorgeous landscape photographs of the region—with its tidal rice swamps and dangerous wildlife, including alligators and venomous snakes—by local artist J Henry Fair.
“What is remarkable about what Edda and Henry have done is actually experiencing the site, walking through the pluff mud, understanding the perils that these individuals experienced, knowing perfectly well that if they were captured, their lives would be over,” Mack said. “The daring of it is really unbelievable.”
J Henry Fair, Fields Point and Combahee River Wetlands (2015). Courtesy of the artist.
“You almost feel immersed in the Combahee River as you’re walking through the gallery spaces,” she added, “and you’re understanding Harriet’s presence there.”
The representations of Tubman include a Catlett linocut of her pointing the way to freedom, an inspiring light green canvas by Douglas of the silhouette of a woman in the center of a crowd breaking chains over her head, and a moving quilt by contemporary artist Stephen Towns of Tubman and two escaped plantation laborers slipping away on a small boat on the river by the light of the moon.
Terry Plater, Harriet (née Araminta Ross), 2021. Courtesy of the Cayuga Museum of History an Art in Auburn, N.Y.
The exhibition also includes work by William H. Johnson, who created the cover artwork for Fields-Black’s book. An early 20th-century South Carolina artist, he is the subject of a traveling retrospective from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., that opened at the Gibbes in 2022 and goes to Ohio’s Dayton Art Institute later this month. He’s represented here by Three Freedom Fighters, depicting Tubman hand-in-hand with John Brown and Frederick Douglass, on loan from Hampton.
Preserving a Legacy
“Combahee River Raid” opens at a time when Tubman’s legacy is more important than ever, and in danger of being lost. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed national institutions to present a sanitized version of U.S. history that glosses over the evils of colonialism and slavery, and a photograph of Tubman and one of her quotes was briefly removed from the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad website earlier this year. Though it has since been restored, the U.S. Navy recently included the USNS Harriet Tubman on list of vessels honoring Civil Rights leaders that it recommends renaming.
William H. Johnson, Three Freedom Fighters (ca. 1945). Collection of Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia. Gift of the Harmon Foundation.
The change is meant to ensure that all military installations “are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement.
But Tubman, as the first African American woman to serve in the U.S. military, certainly embodied the spirit of a warrior. She was a spy for the Union Army, scouting ahead of the Combahee River Raid and heading a ring of others working secretly behind Confederate lines.
J Henry Fair, Cypress Swamp, Yamasee. Courtesy of the artist.
The raid made her the first woman in American history to lead an armed military engagement, leading troops of 150, including the Second South Carolina Volunteers and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first all-Black regiments in the Union Army. The mission’s three gunboats hit plantations along the Combahee River, destroying Confederate crops and storehouses, liberating as they went.
The enslaved people working the rice plantations in the area endured backbreaking labor. The very next day after Tubman helped free them, 150 of those men joined the Second South Carolina Volunteers, joining the Union cause.
Stephen Towns, Wade in the Water (2020).
“These individuals achieved their freedom and then turned right around and joined the Union Army to come back and fight for others to be freed is pretty remarkable,” Mack said. “It’s extremely important for institutions across the country—whether they are art museums, historical societies, or libraries—to tell these important stories about our history.”
“Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid” is on view through October 5 at the Gibbes Museum of Art, 135 Meeting Street, Charleston, S.C. More

A devastating world war, widespread use of penicillin, the adoption of jet engine propulsion, and the very first electronic computer: the events of the 1940s would have a defining impact on the course of the 20th century. The art world also underwent a major transition, as the bold experiments of European modernism paved the way for New York artists to unleash a fresh, re-energizing proposition in the form of Abstract Expressionism.
At least this is the dominant narrative, and not without reason.
However, a new survey of 1940s art and design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art invites visitors to consider a more complex, comprehensive picture. With over 250 pieces of painting, photography, jewelry, ceramics, fashion, and furniture, “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” provides the evidence for a rich variety of visual languages beyond Abstract Expressionism, from charming figurative studies of everyday life and wartime propaganda to resourceful tailoring and eccentric takes on traditional home decor.
Installation view of “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” at the Philadelpha Museum of Art, 2025. Photo: Aimee Almstead.
“As an art historian, there’s a tendency to try to make sense of things, to tell a more linear narrative,” said Jessica Smith, the PMA’s chief curator. “By focusing on a decade, you pivot away from the idea that there’s one story. We’re able to give a more multivalent, subtle message.”
All works on view have been sourced from the museum’s own collection, and the desire to tell a more complex narrative about the 1940s has created the perfect opportunity to spotlight some of its lesser known gems. Around 40 percent of the works in the show have never been exhibited before. “What’s most exciting is the way the media interact with one another,” according to Smith. “They’re greater for the collective conversations they have than they are as individual pieces.”
Jackson Pollock, Male and Female (1942-1943). Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Visitors can rest assured, however, that the expected classics are not in short supply. As Smith pointed out, “the 1940s is a generative moment, a moment of genesis for things that develop more maturely in the 1950s.” As such, visitors can expect to see early works from celebrated American artists like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, and designers like Charles and Ray Eames, whose ideas would go on to shape midcentury movements.
Though Pollock and Krasner each had a distinct practice, their aims overlapped enough that Pollock’s Male and Female (1942–43) and Krasner’s Composition (1949) make useful bookends to the decade. In the earlier work, the quintessential AbEx artist seeks to push through figuration to access abstraction. The later work, in a style Krasner called “hieroglyphs,” was made while the couple were living together and both working on canvases laid horizontal. Her highly controlled mark making appears to have a logic and rhythm but it resists narrative.
Installation view of “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” at the Philadelpha Museum of Art, 2025. Photo: Aimee Almstead.
Though Pollock, Krasner, and their peers’ experiments with abstraction would change the course of modern art, plenty of artists had a different story to tell that relied instead on figuration. One such group was a milieu of queer artists like Paul Cadmus, Beauford Delaney, George Platt Lynes, and Romaine Brooks, whose network extended to include figures like Man Ray and Isamu Noguchi. Some created blatantly homoerotic artworks and many depicted each other, as in the case of Delaney’s 1945 portrait of his close friend, the writer James Baldwin. Two years earlier, the Harlem Renaissance artist had also been the subject of a rare portrait by Georgia O’Keeffe. She described Delaney, by all accounts a magnetic presence, as “impossible to define” and “a special kind of thought.”
Horace Pippin, The Park Bench (1946). Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Self-taught American artist Horace Pippin, meanwhile, used figuration to create records of the deeply racist, segregated society he had returned to after serving in World War I. The double standard in treatment of Black and white veterans is the subject of Mr. Prejudice (1943), an unflinching worked haunted by the presence of a hooded member of the Klu Klux Klan looming on the upper-right. But Pippin was also drawn to scenes of everyday life, as evident in The Park Bench (1946), in which a man enjoys a moment of peace. It was possibly inspired by a local resident the artist has observed in Everhart Park, West Chester.
Though politics are not a principal focus of the show, any viewer preoccupied with the current state of affairs will find plenty to mull over while looking back on the 1940s. It seems unlikely that the U.S. will be forming an international alliance to fight fascism any time soon, but a series of propaganda posters remind us of a time when the U.S., Britain, and Soviet Union joined forces to defeat the Nazis. Though the text is in Russian, the message is clear. In one image, the three countries’ flags unite to create a lightening bold striking down on Hitler and Mussolini, both bloodied and cowering in fear. These fragile pieces were recently uncovered in the PMA’s store room and conserved for the exhibition.
Kukryniksy (artists’ collaborative), Mikhail V. Kupriyanov, Porfiry N. Krylov, A Thunderous Blow (1942). Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Other wartime messaging that feels relevant to the present moment includes posters that call for cutting down on food waste and fashion designs that balance practicality with a more efficient use of material. Everyone had to play their part in the communal effort to ensure the military remained well-supplied. The same spirit of sustainability has proven to be a harder sell in the 2020s, despite our understanding of how overconsumption is fueling climate catastrophe.
But, out of necessity came plenty of invention. “I think there’s a misconception that creative pursuits ground to a halt during World War II,” said Smith. One of the show’s highlights, a woman’s dinner jacket form Elsa Schiaparelli’s spring 1940 collection, is a particularly charming example. The piece is part of a military-themed collection produced at a time when the Italian designer was forced to slash her workforce from 600 to 150. It’s particularly generous: gold-embroidered pockets were intended to take the place of a handbag for a wearer who was too preoccupied with carrying a gas mask she might, at any time, have to don in a hurry.
Woman’s dinner jacket from Elsa Schiaparelli’s spring 1940 collection. Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“We found inspiration from this idea that people persisted and wanted to find a way forward and continued creative pursuits, despite restrictions and adversity,” concluded Smith. “That is an optimistic message that is probably applicable at all times to a greater or lesser degree.”
“Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, through September 1, 2025. More

Celine is marking its first partnership with the Centre Pompidou by offering free public access on four select days this summer to coincide with Wolfgang Tillmans’s major new exhibition “Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us.”
The house’s “Accès Libre par Celine” initiative launches today, June 13, and will offer complimentary entry on three additional dates: July 3, August 28, and September 22.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lacanau (self)” (1986). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou.
The exhibition gives Tillmans full rein over the museum’s vast second floor, typically home to the Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi), and will remain on view through September 22. Timed ahead of Michael Rider’s arrival as the house’s artistic director in January 2025, the collaboration signals Celine’s continued investment in the cultural sphere. As the Pompidou prepares to shut down for a years-long renovation, Tillmans’s exhibition offers a final chapter for the institution—arriving just as Celine begins a new one.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Miss Kittin” (2001). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou.
Rather than a chronological retrospective, the installation engages directly with the building’s architecture, reimagining the space as a dynamic platform for images, objects, and ideas.
“Since the 1990s, Tillmans has constantly questioned the conventions of hanging: he suspends, juxtaposes and assembles works on walls and tables, mixing formats, materials and techniques,” said assistant curator Olga Frydryszak-Rétat. “At the Bpi, he pushes this even further by modifying the site itself—repurposing library furniture, redesigning partitions, and developing new structures that respond directly to the material and symbolic architecture of the space. This immersive and experimental intervention echoes a central part of his practice: bodies of works such as Lighter, Silver, and Freischwimmer—where photography is abstracted, materialized, and redefined—feature prominently in this exhibition. Shown in a public library, these camera-less or chemically manipulated works take on a new significance: they embody experimentation as a form of knowledge, and reinforce the idea that images can be tools for thinking, not just for seeing.”
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lighter, yellow green III” (2009). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou.
The show follows Tillmans’s major traveling retrospective “To Look Without Fear,” which opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2022, and his recent intimate solo presentation at David Zwirner which featured standout minimal sculptures and pieces that seemed more “Space and Light” than his usual oeuvre. Whether photographing still lifes, lovers, those in his social circle, or—as he has increasingly turned toward in recent years—the stars and the sea, what runs through Tillmans’s broad oeuvre is its earnestness and honesty. Even when his subjects challenge conventional norms, there’s no sense of subversion or irony—only his distinctive heartfelt clarity.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “in flight astro (ii)” (2010). Courtesy of the artist and Centre Pompidou. More

The monumental environmental installations of the late husband-and-wife duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude are having a major moment, timed to the 90th anniversary of their births—both artists’ birthdates are June 13, 2025. This year and into 2026, a flurry of major projects and exhibitions are revisiting or paying tribute to their groundbreaking work that transformed not just landscapes but the very definition of public art.
“Ultimately, all the work of art that Christo and Jeanne-Claude did is about freedom. And Christo’s childhood growing up in a Communist Bulgaria had a lot to do with it,” said Vladimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew and the longtime director of projects for the duo. He now helps run their foundation.
The artists, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009) and Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020), met in 1958 and began working together almost immediately. In 1961, their very first collaborative piece, Stacked Oil Barrels and Dockside Packages, featured the main elements that would become the hallmarks of their work. It was a temporary outdoor installation on the harbor in Cologne, Germany, with groups of oil barrels covered by tarps secured with ropes.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude would go on to take this vision to seemingly impossible heights, wrapping entire buildings in fabric—most recently with L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped in Paris, a piece posthumously realized under Yavachev in 2021. He’s worked on every Christo and Jeanne-Claude project since The Umbrellas, a Transpacific installation staged in Ibaraki, Japan, and Southern California in 1991.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, Paris, (1961-2021). Photo: Lubri, ©2021 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
“I was underage labor when I started,” Yavachev recalled. He was 17 when he left his native Bulgaria in 1990, and began working with his aunt and uncle.
Now, it is up to him to complete Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Mastaba in the Abu Dhabi desert. First conceived in 1977, the piece will be the artists’ only permanent installation and the largest contemporary sculpture in the world—taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza, made from 410,000 multicolored oil barrels.
Marvels of Engineering
But while construction on that long-gestating project has yet to begin, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are perhaps more visible than ever. The artists’ 90th birthday year has proved an apt moment to look back at some of their most famous works, marvels of engineering and visual spectacles that crisscrossed the globe, often taking many years to come to fruition.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates, Central Park, New York City (1979–2005). Photo: Wolfgang Volz. Courtesy of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
Preserving Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy is complicated by the fact that their ambitious projects were designed to be ephemeral. There are early sculptures, drawings, and preparatory works, but the big pieces that made them famous live on only in photographs and memories. They were committed to the works’ temporary nature and transient beauty.
“[Our projects] exist in their time, impossible to repeat,” Christo told Artnet contributor Devorah Lauter just two months before his death. “That is their power, because they cannot be bought, they cannot be possessed… They cannot be seen again.”
The magic of technology is helping change that.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag (1971–95), Berlin. Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © Christo and Wolfgang Volz, 1995.
This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the Wrapped Reichstag, the 1995 project in which the artists covered a Neo-Renaissance government building in Berlin with silvery fabric. And it’s the 20th anniversary of The Gates in New York’s Central Park, which saw 7,503 metal frames draped with orange fabric placed along a pathway of 23 miles.
Both have been resurrected, in a high-tech way.
In Central Park, visitors this February and March could experience the display anew via augmented reality, with the artists’ foundation recreating the dramatic addition to the park landscape digitally in the Bloomberg Connects app. (An accompanying exhibition was held at the Shed in Hudson Yards.)
A person taking part in the Augmented Reality experience and art exhibition for the 20th anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” in Central Park, New York (2025). Photo: Leonardo Munoz/AFP via Getty Images.
“People’s reaction was very similar to The Gates when they actually saw the project in real life.
So that was very, very nice,” Yavachev said.
Currently, in Berlin, the artists’ foundation is using digital projection to rewrap the Reichstag every night until June 20. The project requires some 30 projectors with a collective 1.2 million lumens, and features an animation of the silvery fabric unfurling over the building’s façade, which had to be digitally mapped for the occasion.
“It’s a little challenging because there are a lot of windows,” Yavachev said. The original piece involved fabricating 70 tailor-made fabric panels, installed by a team of 90 trained rock climbers.
A projection of the Wrapped Reichstag by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude is displayed on the Reichstag building to mark the artwork’s 30th anniversary, at Platz der Republik on June 9, 2025, in Berlin, Germany. Photo: Adam Berry/Getty Images.
“Of course you cannot replace the real feel of the fabric and the wind,” he said. “This is a way to commemorate the project and as well to introduce young people to Christo and Jean’s work.”
Exhibitions Galore
There are also currently a slew of Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibitions doing just that. That includes a permanent exhibition with documentation from Wrapped Reichstag at Berlin’s Deutscher Bundestag, the home of the German parliament. A preparatory work for Wrapped Reichstag, featuring a collaged photograph and drawing, was acquired by Bulgaria’s National Gallery in February, and will go on view at the museum on June 24.
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is also getting on the celebration for Wrapped Reichstag, having added Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon to its permanent collection display this week. (The work was also shown in Art Basel’s Unlimited section in 2024.)
Christo, Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon (1963/2014). Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © 2014 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
The artists made the original version of the work in 1964, but had to quickly unwrap the vehicle at the request of the car owner who lent it for the exhibition.
“He later said that it was the biggest mistake of his life,” Yavachev said—the young car owner wanted to be able to drive his car, but it would have proved considerably more valuable if it had remained an artwork. But Christo returned to the idea in 2014, buying the same model year car as he had the first time around to recreate the work permanently.
“The fabric is really thick, so it has great folds,” Yavachev added. “It’s a beautiful work. It just looks really, really good. And it’s almost like a shrunken version of one of the larger [wrapped structures].”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Surrounded Islands (1983). Photo: Wolfgang Volz. © 2024 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, via the Collection NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
There are also larger Christo and Jeanne-Claude shows at museums that have received generous gifts from the artists and their foundation connected to their projects. Works connected to Surrounded Islands, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1983 work outlining 11 islands in Biscayne Bay with pink polypropylene fabric, were gifted to the NSU Art Museum, in 2024, and are currently on view in a dedicated exhibition.
And later this month, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., will unveil the foundation’s gift from Wrapped Walk Ways, a 1978 project in a local park creating 2.7 miles of pathways traced in saffron-colored fabric.
Christo, Wrapped Walk Ways (Project for Jacob L. Loose Memorial Park, Kansas City, Missouri), 1978. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo., gift of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, 2024. Photo: Eeva-Inkeri, © The Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
The biggest outing is “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped. Tied. Stacked. Würth Collection,” a 60-year retrospective featuring over 120 works at the Würth Museum in Künzelsau, Germany. The museum has one of the largest collections of the artists’ work in the world, thanks to founder Reinhold Würth’s close friendship with the couple.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude undoubtedly shifted the dimension of what had been conceivable as a work of art until then. Their boldness to wrap a building or monument, or surround an entire coast, did not change the world, but how we see it,” museum director C. Sylvia Weber, who co-curated the show, said in a statement, calling their work “a celebration of the moment.”
Artist Tributes
Other artists are also paying tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and how their wrapped structures created moments of mystery in everyday environments, igniting the imagination.
Ibrahim Mahama’s wrapping of the Kunsthalle Bern (2025). Photo: Cedric Mussano.
In April, Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987) wrapped the exterior of the Kunsthalle Bern in jute sackcloth ahead of the renovated institution’s reopening this month. The Ghanaian artist has wrapped buildings before, like the Barbican in London in 2024, but this is his most overt homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
The duo had memorably covered the building for their project Wrapped Kunsthalle (1967–68). Mahama’s take on the piece used a material tied to colonial history and the export of African goods, while referring back to the original installation.
“It was actually the first time that Christo and Jean Claude wrapped a public building—that had never happened before,
such a serious intervention,” Yavachev said. “It’s amazing that it paved the way for young artists to do many other things, so it’s great.”
Christo during the installation of Wrapped Kunsthalle iin Bern (1968). Photo:  Carlo Bavagnoli. © 1968 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.
The foundation wasn’t involved in Mahama’s project, but welcomes the creation of new work inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects.
“Any artist can do anything they want.
That’s the beauty about art,” Yavachev said.
He actually personally reached out to the French artist JR (b. 1983) to help set in motion another forthcoming Christo and Jeanne-Claude tribute, titled Projet Pont Neuf: “I’ve known him for many years and I know he’s very inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work.”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975–85), Paris. Photo:  Wolfgang Volz. © 1985 Christo.
The piece pays homage to Pont Neuf Wrapped, a 1985 project in which Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped Paris’s oldest bridge in silky, light golden-brown fabric. JR plans to tap into the city’s architectural history by installing a photographic display of the rocky outcroppings formed at the stone quarries that provided the raw materials to build Paris.
He’s re-envisioning Pont Neuf as a grotto, its arches and parapets obscured by the full-scale black and white photos of the large rock formations that celebrate the natural elements that contribute so much to the beauty of the city.
The technical details of the JR project are still under wraps (no pun intended), but when I asked if the photos would be affixed to some kind of armature, Yavachev said that it would be “more like an inflatable technology.”
JR, Projet Pont-Neuf (collage préparatoire) (2024). Courtesy of Atelier JR. © 2024 JR.
In true Christo and Jeanne-Claude fashion, the new installation is actually getting pushed back to 2026. Their works were so logistically complex that it could take decades to finally bring their vision to life. Wrapped Reichstag took 24 years to finish. The Gates took 26. So what’s one more year waiting to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pont Neuf Wrapped?
In the meantime, the foundation is partnering with Paris City Hall to stage a public art installation on the banks of the River Seine, near Pont Neuf, presenting a brief history of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Paris projects.
“The nice thing about public art is that it confronts people who are usually not interested in art with art,” Yavachev said. “If you go to a gallery or to a museum, you’re already interested to end up there.
But with public art, you can’t miss it. And as Christo used to say, whether they hate it or love it, it’s OK, because at the end of the day, they just talk about art.”
“Kunsthalle Bern Wrapped: Ibrahim Mahama” was on view at the Kunsthalle Bern, Helvetiapl. 1, 3005 Bern, Switzerland, April 30–June 1, 2025.
“Anniversary Illumination of the Reichstag Building: Tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude” is on view at the Reichstag, Platz der Republik 1, 11011 Berlin, Germany, June 9–20, 2025, each night from 9:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Wrapped Reichstag (Project for Berlin, 1971–95) will be on view at the National Gallery, Kvadrat 500, 1, 19th February Street, St. Alexander Nevsky Square,1000 Sofia, Bulgaria, starting June 24, 2025.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Volkswagen Beetle Saloon is on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße 50, 10785 Berlin, Germany, in the permanent collection exhibition “Extreme Tension. Art between Politics and Society. Collection of the Nationalgalerie 1945–2000″ starting June 11, 2025.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Surrounded Islands Documentation Exhibition” is on view at the NSU Art Museum, 1 East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, through February 23, 2026.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped. Tied. Stacked. Würth Collection” is on view at the Würth Museum, Reinhold-Würth-Straße 15, 74653 Künzelsau, Germany, through anuary 25, 2026.
“Wrapped Walk Ways – A Gift From the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation” will be on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, 4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, Missouri, June 28, 2025–January 18, 2026.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971–95. A Documentation Exhibition” is on view at the Deutscher Bundestag, Platz der Republik 1, Berlin, Germany, through November 25, 2035.
“Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Paris Projects” and will be on view on the banks of the River Seine, near Pont Neuf, Paris, France, September and October 2025.
“JR: Projet Pont Neuf” will be on view at Pont Neuf, Paris, France, fall 2026. More

The circus has come to town, courtesy of Joe Coleman (b. 1955), painter, performer, and collector of the odd, unusual, and grotesque, from mummies to side show ephemera to true crime artifacts.
The artist is currently enjoying two star turns. One is as the subject of How Dark My Love, a nonfiction narrative film directed by Scott Gracheff that premiered this weekend at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. The other is as curator of “Carnival,” a wild group show at Jeffrey Deitch, also in New York, that seamlessly melds Coleman’s own paintings and offbeat holdings with high-end art by the likes of Derrick Adams, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, George Condo, and Anne Imhof.
The show also includes Coleman’s magnum opus, a life-size portrait of his wife, Whitney Ward, in his signature hyperrealistic style. Working with jewelers’ glasses and paintbrushes so fine he has been known to use one with just a single hair, Coleman has illustrated Ward’s entire life, filling every square inch of the canvas with different vignettes drawn from her biography. Nearly four years in the making, the painting’s creation became the heart of How Dark My Love, which itself actually began production way back in 2012.
The painting, Doorway to Whitney, is a companion piece to Coleman’s self portrait, Doorway to Joe. Coleman’s approach to portraiture is unique, choosing to incorporate minute details into text-rich paintings that craft a compelling narrative and demand close looking. An art school dropout, he works unconventionally, completing one small section at a time until the blank canvas is entirely filled in, rather than sketching out the entire composition with a preliminary drawing.

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“I don’t know what the whole image is going to become—it grows organically,” Coleman said in the movie.
The film begins with Coleman already about one year into work on the Whitney painting. (“I can’t believe he started with the rack,” Ward tells the cameras, standing next to a canvas that so far depicts only her shoulders, upper arms, and ample cleavage in the central portrait.)
Joe Coleman, Doorway to Whitney (2011–15). Photo: courtesy of Whitney Ward.
Long before the song “Nasty” wondered “Is somebody gonna match my freak?” there were Coleman and Ward. She’s a dominatrix and photographer (and suspects her 1998 profile in the New Yorker helped cost editor-in-chief Tina Brown her job). He’s bitten the heads off live rats and detonated explosives strapped to his chest during his performances. In recounting their love story in the film, Ward spoke fondly of introducing him to her mother’s ashes on an early date, taking the lid off the urn so the two could hold hands through a fistful of human remains.
At their wedding 25 years ago, Coleman arrived at the ceremony at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum via hearse, and was carried up the aisle in a wicker casket. The officiant was “Dutch,” a ventriloquist dummy who invoked the power of Satan before pronouncing them man and wife (and is among the objects on view in “Carnival”).
Installation view of “Carnival” curated by Joe Coleman. The works on view include a waxen effigy of St. Agnes in the foreground, flanked by two fantasy coffins of the artist and his wife, Whitney Ward, in their wedding attire by Ghanaian artist Theophilus Nii Anum Sowah. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
“Whitney and I are so fortunate that we found each other. And you know, it’s almost like in this lifetime we were searching for each other,” Coleman told me. “Psychics have said that we’ve been together many lives.”
Once introduced in public access TV interview as “a totally bizarre… despicable, vile, horrendous, rodent-like facsimile of a human,” Coleman is open about the dark chapters of his life, recounting his years of heroin addiction. At the depths of his ten-bag-a-day habit, Coleman would drive his taxi cab to an Alphabet City drug den, reach in with his money, get injected through a glory hole, and then pick up passengers.
Joe Coleman, Stigma Stigmata Camille 2000 (2019). Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
But his years as a cabbie also facilitated his entry into the art world. In 1986, he happened to pick up David Owsley, then a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Before the ride was over, Owsley had agreed to a detour to see Coleman’s first-ever solo show at a gallery called Chronocide. (The owner, who lived upstairs, kindly opened up the show in the middle of the night.)
“David bought two paintings from that show.
Later he showed me where they were hanging in his home, and they were between an actual Brueghel painting and a work by Reverend William Blayney, an Outsider artist,” Coleman said. “He got it started, you know, got the ball rolling.”
The film has a few glimpses of how Coleman has flourished in more conventional settings, such as his 2017 solo show at the Begovich Gallery at California State University, Fullerton. (Even then, the white cube gallery space was painted a deep red.)
Crowds at the opening of “Carnival, Curated by Joe Coleman” at Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: by Christos Katsiaouni, courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
But for the most part, the filmmakers stay firmly planted in Coleman and Ward’s world. Their home, now in an old Victorian upstate where they moved in 2020, is a veritable museum that he’s christened the “Odditorium” and hopes to open to private tours. The artist credits a childhood trip to Times Square to see the old Hubert’s Museum—a Coney Island-style attraction where Madame Tussaud’s wax museum now stands—for his fascination with the fun house aesthetic. (The original painting advertising the Hubert’s flea circus, from about 1935, is included in “Carnival.”)
“There was this kind of chamber of horror, with a woman in wax, and this one little door with a tiny window on it.
And you could see this eye staring through this opening. It was frightening, but fascinating,” Coleman said. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
I said ‘When I grow up, that’s where I wanna live.
In the place that has the burlesque, the sideshow, the wax museum.’”
Johnny Meah, Boy changing to girl (1989). Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Darkness clearly fascinates Coleman, who has made paintings about drug use, murderers, and serial killers. (His piece inspired by the so-called Slenderman stabbing even led to a lawsuit with HBO.) But How Dark My Love is at its heart a love story—and Door to Whitney is nothing if not a labor of love.
“It was hard to finish because I didn’t want to stop making it, if that makes any sense,” Coleman admitted. “And Whitney told me that she missed me making her, because that I would constantly be asking her questions.”
The film indulges Coleman and Ward’s quirkiness, but it also acknowledges the realities of what it means to be an artist in New York City. Because he spent so many years singularly devoted to Doorway to Joe and then Doorway to Whitney, Coleman wasn’t making or selling anything else. (Coleman didn’t want to talk prices, but his record at auction, set in 2011 at Christie’s New York, is $98,500, according to the Artnet Price Database.)
Joe Coleman paints with jeweler’s glasses in a still from How Dark My Love (2025). Photo: by Gregg de Domenico.
As the film goes on, the need to sell the painting so they don’t go broke is very real. Doorway to Whitney is unveiled to great fanfare during Art Basel Miami Beach, as part of Deitch’s 2015 “Unrealism” show with dealer Larry Gagosian.
Seeing the work in person today, reunited with Doorway to Joe at Jeffrey Deitch, is not to be missed—although they have plenty of competition amid the eye-catching display, which includes paintings hanging from the ceiling by Johnny Meah, who’s been called “the last carnival sideshow banner painter.”

There is a full-scale, bedazzled carousel by Raúl de Nieves, and an interactive Narcissister sculpture in which you crank a bike pedal to activate a praxinoscope—a kind of spinning flip book that creates animation—cheekily nestled amid the pubic hair of a female circus performer mannequin clad in sequined-trimmed pink spandex.
And then there’s a life-size wax model of Johnny Eck, a sideshow performer born without legs due to a rare congenital disorder affecting the development of the lower spine. Coleman has brought together a collection of archival photographs from Eck’s life and career, as well as puppets that Eck made himself and the working Railmaster train that he used to bring with him to fairs and carnivals across the country for children to ride. (It’s one of only two surviving models, built by Bruce Rowell in the 1940s.)

Another highlight is Dedicated to Coney Island (1984–2002), Tom Duncan’s mechanized miniature of the boardwalk and amusement park at Coney Island, crafted over the course of nearly 20 years from found objects.
You’ll spot life-size funerary sculptures of Coleman and Ward lying in caskets in their wedding garb by Ghanaian artist Theophilus Nii Anum Sowah, who specializes in fantasy coffins.
Also from Coleman’s personal collection is a waxen effigy of the martyred St. Agnes said to contain a piece of her actual bone, displayed next to wax figures of serial killer Richard Ramirez and cult leader Charles Manson by Hollywood practical effects sculptor Henry Alvarez. And there are elaborate nautical-themed costumes that Ward made for the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, where she and Coleman are the reigning king and queen.
Installation view of “Carnival” curated by Joe Coleman. Two paintings by Derrick Adams are displayed next to an Octopus Mermaid Queen costume designed by his wife, Whitney Ward, with Mr. Gorgeous, for the 2024 Coney Island Mermaid Parade. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
The exhibition grew out of his most recent book, A Doorway to Joe: The Art of Joe Coleman. When it came out last fall, Deitch, who had included the artist in group shows in the past, agreed to interview him at a talk promoting the 450-page tome.
“After, Jeffrey had a big party at his home, and he and I got to talking. He just got it in his head that he wanted me to curate this carnival show,” Coleman said. (Deitch has long had a fondness for Coney Island, curating the “Coney Island Walls” outdoor street art museum from 2015 to 2018.)
Installation view of “Carnival” curated by Joe Coleman, showing a wax figurine of sideshow performer Johnny Eck, and his train. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
It proved the perfect partnership, with Deitch there to help bring in contemporary artists exploring carnival-related themes to go with the works that Coleman picked out, including by his friends from the burlesque, sideshow, and Mardi Gras communities.
“Those really complement the show in a really great way and go perfectly with the older, you know, crazy stuff,” Coleman said, “I didn’t have access to them, but Jeffrey did.”
KAWS, UNTITLED (BELIEVE IT OR NOT), 1998. Photo: courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
That’s not entirely true. The street artist Chris “DAZE” Ellis is a longtime friend due to their shared interest in Coney Island. And there is also a piece by KAWS, who has become well-known as a collector with a penchant for Outsider art, and included Coleman in a show of his holdings at New York’s Drawing Center.
And the film has a few celebrity cameos from fans of Coleman’s work such as singer Iggy Pop and guitarist Dave Navarro. He also has a studio visit with actor and filmmaker Asia Argento, a friend who appears in the Whitney painting and also cast Coleman in her debut film, Scarlet Diva (2000), in a role inspired by her alleged sexual assault at the hands of producer Harvey Weinstein.
Joe Coleman and Whitney Ward at the opening of “Carnival, Curated by Joe Coleman” at Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: by Christos Katsiaouni, courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Less sympathetic is Coleman’s time with a friend and painting subject, Sam “Sammytown” McBride, a punk singer for the band Fang who killed his girlfriend, Dixie Lee Carney. It’s a reminder that many of Coleman’s works depict, if not celebrate, humanity’s darkest impulses, blurring light and shadow.
“It’s a show that you can keep going back to and finding more,” said Coleman.
”And the same is true for my paintings, too.”
“Carnival, Curated by Joe Coleman” is on view at Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, New York, New York, May 3–June 28, 2025.
How Dark My Love is screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, AMC 19th St. East 6, 890 Broadway, New York, New York, June 12, 3 p.m.; June 13, 9:15 p.m.; and June 15, 8:15 p.m. More