Exhibitions

So often, a work of art is meant to reflect beauty, the artist dexterously rendering something that is pleasing to the eye, recording it for posterity. But in “Uncanny” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, there’s something downright anxiety-provoking about the work on view, all of which is slightly strange and unsettling, mixing the familiar and the unknown to an uncomfortable effect.
“This is a show about how women artists express their discomfort and unease about the world around them, reflecting on their lived experiences,” NMWA associate curator Orin Zahra said at the exhibition press preview.
“The exhibition name comes from Sigmund Freud,” she added. “He described the term ‘uncanny’ as a psychological experience of seeing something that was both familiar and foreign at the same time, something that we recognized was also something mysterious and alien. The two-sided nature of that is what provokes these feelings of discomfort and unease in us.”
In organizing the show, Zahra wanted to see how women artists had explored the concept—something she realized had not really been done in other exhibitions.
“There has been a lot of historical stereotypes about what women’s art looks like: pretty, ornate, or small,” she said. “It’s not necessarily weird, or cerebral, or irrational. This is a show that turns that on its head because you’re looking at those exact ideas through the women’s lens.”
That includes works that explores the ways in which the world can be an unsafe space for women—something that seems especially timely in Washington D.C. given the current political climate.
The exhibition features examples of 20th-century Surrealism by the likes of Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) and Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985), as well more contemporary works by established names including Laurie Simmons (1949–) and Gillian Wearing (b. 1963), and less well-known figures such as Fabiola Jean-Louis (b. 1978) and Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990).
We asked Zahra to tell us about five of the most uncanny works in “Uncanny.”

Julie Roberts (b. 1963), Sigmund Freud Study (1998)
Julie Roberts, Sigmund Freud Study (1998). Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection. Photo by Lee Stalsworth, ©Julie Roberts/DACS, London.
The show’s Freud connection is most prominent in the work of Julie Roberts, who paints interior scenes on colorful, monochromatic backgrounds. Each work looks unassuming at first glance, but these are places where women have been harmed, be it physically, mentally, or emotionally.
That includes Roberts’s painting of Freud’s famous study, with the psychoanalyst’s chair and the couch for the patient, rendered in neat, precise detail against a field of mustard yellow.
“Julie is quite critical of those institutions that exercise control over women. And it was Freud who theorized about hysteria, and that it was a disorder that was found predominantly in women,” Zahra said. “As a result of his writings, a lot of women are put in mental asylums. Because he wrote that they were directly related to their reproductive organs, a lot of women were forced to have hysterectomies.”

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), Untitled (with Foot), 1989
Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (with Foot), 1989. Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., gift from the trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Museum purchase with funds provided by the Roger S. Firestone Foundation Fund, the Friends of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, William A. Clark Fund, the gift of William E. Share [by exchange], the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Carolyn Alper). Photo ©the Easton Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.You’d be forgiven for mistaking this pink marble sculpture by Louise Bourgeois for an abstract work, depending on the angle from which you approach the piece.
“I do recommend that you walk around. You have this really smooth, perfectly formed orb, this globe—this is not easy [to carve] by the way,” Zahra said. “And then you see this chubby baby leg sticking out from underneath that ball. On one hand, you have this tender flesh, something that feels cute and pudgy, and you have these feelings of tenderness towards it. And you’re suddenly shocked with that association that the baby may have gotten trampled under that heavy object.”
The somewhat disturbing work is likely inspired by Bourgeois’s own experiences with childbirth—which is often traumatic both physically and emotionally—and the challenges of motherhood.
“She felt quite ambivalent about the idea of childbirth. That in itself is, I think, was due to the defined expectations of women’s roles at that time,” Zahra added. “Bourgeois thought that she could never have children, and when she did, she suffered postpartum depression. She’s giving voice to these experiences that certainly her male counterparts were not exploring in their art.”

Stephanie Dinkins (b. 1964), Conversations With Bina48 (2014–)
Stephanie Dinkins, Conversations with Bina48 (2014–). Photo courtesy of the artist, ©Stephanie Dinkins.
A trio of short videos in the exhibition capture the artist Stephanie Dinkins’s conversations with Bina48, a chatbot with a human face based on a Black woman named Bina Aspen, the wife of the robot’s creator, Martine Rothblatt.
But Bina48’s conversations suggest that the chatbot likely has very little in common with the face she embodies—something the artist believes reflects the biases of the white men who programmed the robot.
“What Stephanie is pointing out is the kind of lack of diversity in the tech world, both gender and racial,” Zahra said. “Because when she’s asked questions like ‘who are your people’ or ‘what emotions do you feel,’ Bina48 is not able to talk about the Black experience or the experience of Black women in America, even though she’s modeled after a Black woman. When you have a homogeneous population in charge of developing technology that will be deployed everywhere all over the world, that becomes very problematic.”

Frida Orupabo (b. 1986), Labour II (2022)
Frida Orupabo, Labour II (2022). On loan from Darryl Atwell. Photo by Nina Lieska, ©Frida Orupabo, courtesy of the artist and Stevenson Cape Town/Johannesburg/Amsterdram.
The exhibition showcases a pair of work by Frida Orupabo, a Nigerian Norwegian artist who is gaining attention for her collages based on historical imagery.
“Frida mines colonial archives for imagery. She also looks at Renaissance paintings, at films. She goes through pornography to get different body parts,” Zahra said. “She might get an arm from one source, a leg from another, and then she pins them together and essentially Frankensteins a new being.”
It’s this use of familiar images in strange combinations that give Orupabo’s work its uncanny sense, her hybrid creatures literally held together by pins.
Her piece Labour II is a dark one on multiple levels, referring both to the historical experiences of enslaved women who would have their children stolen from them, having to care instead for white children, and to maternal mortality in the present day, which is statistically far more likely to impact Black mothers.
The work shows a naked Black woman lying down, as if just having given birth. Her baby, which has no arms or legs below the knees is perched on her stomach, and both turn their heads to meet the viewer’s gaze.
“Frida herself went through some difficulties and challenges postpartum and through the labor process in the modern medical system,” Zahra said. “She says that by staring back at the viewer, it is her way of refusing to be made into an object.”

Remedios Varo (1908–1963), Tejido espacio-tiempo (Weaving of Space and Time), 1954
Remedios Varo, Tejido espacio-tiempo (Weaving of Space and Time), 1954. Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., gift from a private collection. Photo by Lee Stalsworth, ©2023 Remedios Varo/Artists Rights Society, New York/VEGAP, Madrid.
Spanish Mexican painter Remedios Varo had her own unique take on the Surrealist trope of the woman as an inanimate object—rather than dehumanizing the female form, Varo was thinking more broadly about humankind, and how we can all be cogs in the machine.
Both the man and woman in Tejido espacio-tiempo (Weaving of Space and Time) have wheels and gears where their bodies should be, and are encircled in a kind of woven basket themselves.
“Varo was part of this generation that escaping the fascism and totalitarianism in Europe,” Zahra said. “They were really leaning into the irrational as a way to offset what they thought was responsible for all the war and violence that they were seeing.”
“Uncanny” is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C., February 28–August 10, 2025. More

There is no museum that could contain art made on a truly monumental scale. It needs space to breathe. In turn, man-made architectural and artistic interventions have an almost paradoxical ability to articulate a landscape of already stunning natural beauty. It is these elements that make Desert X a much-anticipated staple of the art world calendar that always promises panoramas verging on the sublime. The 2025 edition is no different.
Once again, a crop of 11 artists from across the globe have had their site-specific ideas installed amid the sprawling, breathtaking landscapes of California’s Coachella Valley, which range from dusty, arid deserts to regions of luscious, green oasis.
Artistic director Neville Wakefield is back for the fifth edition, this time partnering with co-curator Kaitlin Garcia Maestas, and both hope that the exhibition will prompt some pause for reflection on the myth of “unadulterated nature” and the future of our relationship with the environment. “The realities of the world we live in now are both more complex and contested,” said Wakefield. “Time, light, and space permeate every aspect of this work but so too does an urgency to find new sustainable approaches to living in an increasingly imperiled world.”
Here is our pick of five top works to check out.
1. Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid
Installation view of Agnes Denes, The Living Pyramid at Desert X 2025. Photo: Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X.
The Budapest-born, American conceptual artist Agnes Denes‘s The Living Pyramid overturns our assumptions about the desert topography by drawing on the abundant flora and fauna of Sunnylands Center & Gardens. The work was installed in November, and has already changed in form thanks to the constant growth of the its native vegetation. Indeed, the plants’ eventual death will also be part a natural part of the works evolution.
“My pyramids are an ointment to ease the wound,” explained Denes. “An optimistic edifice in a place of turmoil. It conveys the cycles of life as it renews itself from soil to seed to plant to blossom. It speaks many languages to all of humanity.”
2. Sanford Biggers, Unsui (Mirror)
Installation view of Sandford Biggers, Unsui (Mirror) at Desert X 2025. Photo: Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X.
California-native Sanford Biggers is best known for incorporating antique quilts into paintings and sculptural installations, which often deal with very painful histories. For Desert X, however, he has chosen to provide some light-hearted humor and the sky is, quite literally, the limit. The artist’s pair of glittering gray, cartoon clouds atop tall poles are a whimsically garish addition to the infinite blue. The name Unsui (Mirror) means “cloud and water” in Japanese, and refers to Biggers own personal relationship with Buddhism.
“I wanted to make something to remind viewers of the limitless possibilities of freedom, of being a cloud,” he said. “To be liberated and free from definition, limitations, and form. It is also an opportunity to meditate and be dreaming.”
3. Alison Saar, Soul Service Station
Installation view of Alison Saar, Soul Service Station at Desert X 2025. Photo: Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X.
Though all the works at Desert X are best explored, rather than viewed, in person, it is Californian sculptor Alison Saar’s Soul Service Station that could never be summed up in just one photo, or even two. This fun twist on a classic Western gas station considers more than simply the most practical necessities. What if it is ourselves, not our machines, that are running on empty and need a top up before hitting the wide open road? Then we’d be relieved to chance upon Saar’s spiritual oasis, handcrafted by a community of artisans out of salvaged materials.
Installation view of Alison Saar, Soul Service Station at Desert X 2025. Photo: Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X.
The gas station is manned by a larger-than-life statue of a woman who Saar has named Ruby. “When you think about the desert as being this landscape for opening your mind and letting go of all of those pressures,” the artist mused, “it just feels like a collaboration with the landscape itself.”
4. Cannupa Hanska Luger, G.H.O.S.T. Ride (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology)
Installation view of Cannupa Hanska Luger, G.H.O.S.T. Ride (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology) at Desert X 2025. Photo: Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X.
The seemingly endless stretch of desert in Coachella Valley is usually admired while on the move, and Cannupa Hanska Luger’s unusual vehicle for G.H.O.S.T Ride (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology) will be making some pitstops over the course of Desert X’s run. The artist lives in New Mexico but was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. His shiny caravan’s wacky collection of accoutrements may even be capable of time travel, as it channels imagined, speculative futures that center the region’s Indigenous communities.
Luger explained that the van’s inhabitants are the “ancestors of these folks who developed and sustained a relationship with the land that was generative and passive and still didn’t lose style.” He said, “I pulled some of the technological forms of my people and reinvented them onto this vehicle, looking at Indigenous technology as a 20,000 year proof of concept. Once we recognize that we can look at the land with reverence rather than resource, we begin to understand not the value of being here, but the cost.”
5. Muhannad Shono
Installation view of Muhannad Shono, What Remains at Desert X 2025. Photo: Lance Gerber, courtesy of Desert X.
Saudi artist Muhannad Shono presented The Lost Path at Desert X AlUla 2020. Now, he infiltrating another renowned desert with What Remains, a work that fully embraces the destructive potential of the elements. You might even say these loose structures of fabric collaborate with the wind, becoming freely tangled or bundled over the course of Desert X’s run. After all, if we exit the heavily regulated atmosphere of the white cube gallery, we surely invite such unexpected elements of chaos.
“It started with this idea of, what is home, and how do you carry that with you?,” said Shono. “I grew up struggling with notions of home, trying to trace this line of earth back to what is home and realizing that there is no such place. When there is no place left that you call home that you can return to, what is left?”
Desert X 2025 runs through May 11. More

In 1894, the renowned actress Sarah Bernhardt (1845–1923) tapped the Parisian studio Lemercier to create a last-minute poster for her production of Gismonda. The assignment fell to Czech artist Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939), and it not only jump-started his career and a six-year partnership between the two—it helped establish him as one of the leading lights of the Art Nouveau style movement, creating a signature style that continues to inspire artists, illustrators, and designers to the present day.
That lasting influence is the jumping off point for “Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line,” which opened last month at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
Organized by the Mucha Foundation, which is run by the artist’s descendants, the show features not only their extensive holdings of the artist’s posters, drawings, paintings, and other works, but also a wide selection of album covers, manga illustrations, comic book covers, and other 20th- and 21st-century artworks inspired by Mucha.
So a classic 1896 Mucha poster for Job cigarettes—one of his first and best-known advertisements—featuring a woman with long hair that curls into exaggeratedly stylized decorative swirls, is shown alongside a Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley poster for a 1966 concert featuring Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Alphonse Mucha, JOB (1896). Collection of the Mucha Trust, ©Mucha Trust 2025.
The duo repurposed Mucha’s female figure, but transformed her with electric green hair set against bold shades of red and magenta and their own curving lettering.
“They are really identifying with this work’s graphic potency,” Phillips associate curator Renée Maurer told me. “They are relocating it to another time period by using a psychedelic color palette to promote the event.”

Mucha was undeniably revered in his day, when his posters and advertisements were widely disseminated. His posters lined the streets, and his illustrations graced the covers of major magazines.
And to feed the public demand for his work, Mucha even produced smaller posters printed in publications, allowing people to bring his ornately detailed lithographs home without having to rely the luck of finding one in the wild.
Alphonse Mucha, Monaco Monte-Carlo (1897). Collection of the Mucha Trust, ©Mucha Trust 2025.
“This moment in history is really a wonderful time because there are less restrictions on printed materials, so more and more artists are creating posters and prints,” Maurer said. “Posters are everywhere, creating that open air exhibition space for everyone.”
“Everyone wanted to live with it,” Maurer added, citing the artist’s “sinuous line and curving form.”
Alphonse Mucha, Lily, “The Flowers” (1898). Dean Torrence (Kittyhawk Graphics), Diana Ross and the Supremes, Let the Sunshine In (1969). Collection of the Mucha Trust.
His flowing compositions with their intricate line work are a timeless celebration of female beauty, as evidenced by the comparison between Mucha’s Lily from his 1898 series “The Flowers,” and the cover for the 1969 Diana Ross and the Supremes album Let the Sunshine In designed by Dean Torrence (of the band Jan and Dean) for his company Kittyhawk Graphics. In both, the woman’s face is framed by a profusion of white flowers growing all around her.
In addition to some framed versions of mid-20th-century album art on display, the museum also has a retro-looking listening station featuring these records. Just put on the supplied headphones and place the album sleeve down next to the record player to listen to the music from Mucha-inspired artists including the Grateful Dead, Thin Lizzy, and King Crimson.
A visitor to “Timeless Mucha” listens to a record with cover art inspired by the Art Nouveau style of Alphonse Mucha. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
“Seeing these connections, having lived with or grown up with these posters, to see what inspired them is really fascinating,” Maurer said.
The Phillips is the first stop of the exhibition’s five-city North American tour, although the foundation has staged versions of the show in Japan and China. Mucha Foundation shows at U.S. museums are relatively rare; a 2021–23 show that only  traveled to the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky and the North Carolina Museum of Art, was the country’s first in 20 years. (In Prague, the foundation opened the first official Mucha Museum at the Savarin Palace just last week.)

The current retrospective, curated by Tomoko Sato, also includes some of Mucha’s childhood drawings, as well as items from his home and personal collection, such as Japanese prints that influenced his compositions.
It’s only fitting, therefore, that such cross-cultural exchange goes both ways—the show includes a number of contemporary manga illustrations from artists such as Hideko Mizuno, Ryoko Yamagishi, and Yoshitaka Amano that undeniably bear Mucha’s influence. That includes works mimicking Mucha’s signature “Q-formula,” in which a woman is seated within a circular halo shape, with drapery trailing off below her to form the tail of a capital “Q.”
Alphonse Mucha, The Arts Dance (1898). Collection of the Mucha Trust, ©Mucha Trust 2025.
Mucha’s style has become so famous and influential the world over that some of these artists weren’t even aware of who they had to thank for the elegant line, ornate framing devices, and gentle, organic beauty of the flowers and drapery that they were incorporating into their own work.
This embrace of the Mucha style—even unknowingly—speaks to an artistic connection across countries, from generation to generation, underscoring the lasting power of his art.
Yoshitako Amano, Final Fantasy XIV: Adventurer and God of Storms (2010). ©Yoshitako Amano, Final Fantasy XIV, SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD.
“Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line” is on view at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, D.C., February 22–May 18, 2025. It will travel to the New Mexico Museum of Art, Plaza Building, 107 West Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 20–September 21, 2025; the Boca Raton Museum of Art, 501 Plaza Real, Boca Raton, Florida, November 19, 2025–March 11, 2026; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, Missouri, April 11–August 30, 2026; and the Museo Kaluz, Avenue Hidalgo 85, Historic Center, Mexico City, Mexico, October 8, 2026–February 8, 2027. More

At long last, Meow Wolf is bringing its otherworldly enchantment to New York City, with plans to open its seventh permanent exhibition at Pier 17 in South Street Seaport. The immersive experience company, which launched as an art collective in Santa Fe in 2008, announced the project at the SXSW festival in Austin today.
For years, Meow Wolf fans have been waiting for the company to come to the East Coast. The success of the original Santa Fe exhibition, which opened in 2016, inspired ambitious expansion plans announced in 2019 to open 15 locations in the next five years.
The pandemic slowed things down, and scuttled plans for an interactive hotel in Phoenix and exhibition in Washington, D.C. But Meow Wolf debuted permanent exhibitions in Las Vegas and Denver in 2021, Dallas Grapevine in 2023, and Houston in 2024, with Los Angeles on track to open in late 2026. Now, with New York officially in the works, the East Coast expansion is finally back on.
“It’s a dream come true for us,” Vince Kadlubek, Meow Wolf’s cofounder and chief vision officer, told me. “Some of the greatest art institutions on this planet are in New York, and amazing DIY performance spaces and live venues. There’s just so many reference points in New York that we’ve been inspired by our entire lives. We’ve always known that we wanted to do a project in New York, but we needed to grow and evolve as a creative company to reach the standards of a New York project.”
The castle on the ice planet Eemia at Meow Wolf Denver. Photo courtesy of Atlas Media.
If you’ve never been to a Meow Wolf, the exhibitions exist at the intersection of an art museum, an interactive theater production, and a theme park, with high-tech light, sound, and video melding with painting and sculpture for an immersive storytelling experience. And the company is hoping to take that to the next level in New York.
“This is a a new tier of exhibition. We’re gonna bring detailed physical environments and remarkable digital environments together in a mixed reality ecosystem,” Kadlubek said. “We are striving to create alternate worlds that are alive—an immersive, animated world that is responding to your actions.
It’s gonna be something that nobody in the world has seen before.”
Finding space in Manhattan big enough for one of Meow Wolf’s maximalist exhibitions was no easy task. At Pier 17, Meow Wolf is partnering with the Seaport Entertainment Group, which operates a series of Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurants at the site, as well as open-air concert venue called the Rooftop, under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.
“The Seaport has close to 400 years of history. It used to be a Dutch fur trading port. Up until 20 years ago, it was a very famous fish market. Today it’s an amazing cultural center,” Meow Wolf CEO Jose Tolosa—a 10-year resident of the city—told me. “It has reinvented itself through the years, in the same way that the city reinvents itself consistently. It pays homage to to our immigrant past, present, and future in many ways.”
Meow Wolf Gas Station in the in Projected Desert in Meow Wolf Las Vegas. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Wherever it goes, Meow Wolf always looks to tap into the local community and its history, with installations designed by local artists complementing the work of the in-house team. New York, of course, will offer no shortage of talent to add to the mix.
“They will become part of our family, just like every group of local artists that work in in every single Meow Wolf exhibition,” Tolosa said. “Meow Wolf artists always impress me with their own unique way of looking at the world, and I can’t wait for the New York filter on that view.”
And for all that Meow Wolf explores portals to alternate dimensions, its storylines are also rooted a sense of place, inspired by history. For New York, Kadlubek expects to highlight the role the city played in American independence, and the meaning of freedom, as well as how it has become a melting pot for cultures from across the globe.
“As we get to know local artists and curators, I’m sure a lot of the story of New York will start to come through authentically,” he said.
The exhibition is still in the early concept stages, even after a year of talks with the Seaport to secure the location. Kadlubek estimated a late 2027 or early 2028 opening, adding that it was “probably safely say that this is going to be our most expensive project project yet.”
Neon Kingdom in Meow Wolf the Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.
Despite its impressive growth over the years, the company has hit speed bumps along the way, including three rounds of layoffs—one in 2020 and two last year. The first of those was primarily a reduction in staff at the exhibitions, and in-character actors were on hand to interact with visitors. The second, Tolosa told me, was a means of adjusting staffing needs from the lead up to opening two locations in back-to-back years, compared to the two-year gap before Los Angeles will debut.
The Meow Wolf Workers Collective has been outspoken in its criticism of the layoffs. Company employees first unionized in 2020 and have secured contracts in Santa Fe, Denver, and Las Vegas, with negotiations ongoing at Dallas. (There are currently 962 staff members.)
Meow Wolf has also faced criticism for setting up shop in Texas, given the state’s restrictive reproductive health care laws and outlawing of gender-affirming care for minors, among other anti-LGTBQ legislation. I asked Kadlubek if the company felt an added pressure to continue to tell diverse stories given the current political climate.
“We need courageous champions who are willing to stand up for human rights and what’s made this country great, and that includes the incredible weave of cultures that America has always welcomed,” he said. “And honestly, New York represents that more than any other city.” More

Just two weeks after picking up the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlinale, actor Tilda Swinton is already on to her next project. But this time, she is taking up the role as an exhibition curator.
The Oscar-winning actor is taking helm of “Supersonic Mediaeval,” an exhibition of British artist and designer Marianna Kennedy set to take place at Christie’s Paris from May 5 through 11. This retrospective delves into Kennedy’s practice and use of materials from resin and wood to bronze and Murano glass in her artisan oeuvre through the eyes of Swinton, who is a long-time admirer and collector of Kennedy’s work. This event is organized by PLVR Zurich.
Tilda Swinton, right, and Marianna Kennedy. Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.
“Marianna’s work has always sprung from and lived in, for me, a particularly sweet spot, one where the ancient and resonant meet the unknown and surprising,” noted Swinton in a statement. Earlier this month, she was presented the honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlinale, during which she gave a headline-grabbing speech.
The exhibition’s title, which playfully juxtaposes two seemingly contradictory concepts, pays homage to the actor’s admiration of Kennedy’s practice of skillfully blending art and craftsmanship, modernity and tradition, through her creation of objects such as carved and gilded mirrors and lamps.
“This is the landscape of the ‘Supersonic Mediaeval,’ invested in exquisite craftsmanship and joyful color and merging the familiar and the fresh: its atmosphere brings with it a breath to the heart of condition, renewal, and of bright new horizons ahead,” Swinton added.
The Canadian-born Kennedy went to the National College of Art in Dublin and furthered her studies at the Slade School of Art in London. In 2006, she began making her now iconic gilded mirrors at her studio in Spitalfields, London, where she is still based today. Her elegant body of work, made with refined, contemporary techniques and precious materials, are in the many private collections.
Marianna Kennedy’s mirror and lamp. Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.
Swinton and Kennedy were introduced by a mutual friend, and they were connected by a shared passion for collaborating with artisans, which involves the contemporary reinterpretation of historical craft techniques. Drawing inspiration from the houses and neighborhood of Spitalfields, which has a history of silk-weaving brought by the French Huguenot Protestants and is a culturally diverse area, the show is expected to carry a cinematic vibe, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in an imagined theatrical set while experiencing Kennedy’s work.
“I have always been inspired by Tilda’s unique artistic vision combined with a playful sense of collaboration. We both share a respect for craftsmanship and a love of beauty, bridging the gap between the past and present but always looking forward. For us, the past is always new,” Kennedy noted in a statement.
Throughout Swinton’s film career, she maintained close ties with art and artists. She made her film debut in Caravaggio in 1986, directed by Derek Jarman, who was also an artist whose works have been exhibited at galleries in recent years.
In 2019, she organized her first art show, “Orlando,” at the Aperture Foundation in New York as a curator. Named after Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel of the same title, the exhibition featured more than 50 works by 11 artists, who explored the themes of identity and transformation in the book as well the 1992 film adaptation starring the Swinton. Last year, she played the role of a harried art-world outsider in the satire Problemista. More

What does a retrospective accomplish? A major show on Gabriel Orozco in Mexico City offers a new idea.
From an academic standpoint, an institutional retrospective exhibition is seen as a crowning jewel of an artist’s career, the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of work and oeuvre that has had an outsized influence on the state of artmaking. Typically, retrospectives are staged roughly, if not precisely, chronologically, showing how the artist started in one place and—traced through subsequent periods and bodies of work—ended up in another. A nice tidy package.
Gabriel Orozco, Empty Shoe Box (Caja vacía de zapatos) (1993). Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/Los Angeles.
But what if another, more valuable function could be found within the retrospective format? On view through August 3, 2025, Gabriel Orozco’s career-spanning exhibition at the Museo Jumex, “Politécnico Nacional,” all but abandons traditional considerations around what a retrospective can or should be. Instead, the retrospective is approached less as a case study of an artist and more as an open field of exploration, one where time, context, and medium are not presented hierarchically, but as entry points to the core tenants and recurring lines of inquiry of the artist’s practice.
The exhibition is curated by University College London Professor and Fellow of the British Academy Briony Fer, who has been a leading scholar on Orozco for more than two decades (she also curated a show of his work at White Cube Hong Kong in 2016). The artist and curator’s longstanding working relationship undoubtedly led to the ability for a more experimentally organized show. “This is an artist who is very open and has been very open to intellectual dialogue as well as to conversation and argument, that’s been very generative to me,” said Fer in an interview.
Installation view of the exhibition “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” (2025) Photo: Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López (GLR Estudio). Courtesy of Museo Jumex, Mexico City.
The show comprises 300 objects (more if you consider that some works include dozens of objects themselves) installed across four floors plus the public plaza and terraces. A proverbial homecoming for the artist, the exhibition marks Orozco’s first major museum show in Mexico since 2006 (in an opening talk, he was quick to point out that though he hasn’t had a project of this scale in Mexico for some time, he has always maintained a presence in the country, continually returning from his forays around the world).
Orozco’s role in facilitating Mexico’s recognition as an international powerhouse of contemporary art cannot be understated. In the early 1990s when Orozco was first rising to fame, Mexico was still best known for its advancements in Modernism, à la Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, or José Clemente Orozco (unrelated to Gabriel). Early works like La DS (1993), made from a Citroën DS car cut lengthwise and reassembled to be surreally slim, and Empty Shoe Box (1993), became exemplary of his practice, which centers on locating the fractures and intersections between art and everyday life.
Installation view of the exhibition “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” (2025) Photo: Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López (GLR Estudio). Courtesy of Museo Jumex, Mexico City.
It is this specific element of Orozco’s artistic focus that underpins the present exhibition at Museo Jumex, where works from across his career comingle and are instead loosely organized on an elemental basis, or as Orozco refers to them, “constellations.” The top floor of the show brings together atmospheric, airy works, including ceiling fans with streams of toilet paper hanging from their blades (emblematic of Orozco’s wry sense of humor), and the floor below presents bodies of work with a decidedly earthy, vegetal sensibility. In the first-floor gallery are aquatic works, including one of his iconic whale skeletons (another of which, Mobile Matrix [2006] hangs at the Biblioteca Vasconcelos across town). And the museum’s basement level is the “compost,” reflecting a buildup of ideas, voices, and overlapping media. The star of this lower level is a video work that mimics the format and style of viral videos on TikTok.
Installation view of the exhibition “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” (2025) Photo: Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López (GLR Estudio). Courtesy of Museo Jumex, Mexico City.
Despite the show’s massive size, parsing through decades of Orozco’s work was no small feat, involving going back into the artist’s archives and meticulously tracing the elemental aspects of various works from across decades.
“The only thing that I was not so sure about is that there were so many works, because you know I have worked a lot, and I have done a lot of different things,” Orozco said. “But [Fer] was just ‘yes, and this and then this and then this and that. And then we combine this with that.’ All the dynamics of co-relationships and putting so much research into finding pieces … The museum wanted to have a really ambitious show, and a very complete show. It was the one thing that I was a bit worried about. But she was so happy choosing works. I can see that she really likes my work. I think maybe she likes it even more than me,” he added wryly.
Gabriel Orozco, Empty Shoe Box (Caja vacía de zapatos) (1993). Photo: John Berens. La Colección Jumex, Mexico
Dotted throughout the show are some of Orozco’s most recognizable works, such as his “Samurai Tree Paintings” (2004), geometric abstractions with circular, diagrammatic designs that recall compositions he had toyed with years earlier on everything from graph paper to airplane tickets. These are juxtaposed with pieces such as Árbol nuevo (2006) illustrating how the inspiration behind the works lives on, ever-evolving, ever-adapting. Examples of his large-scale “Working Tables,” like Working Table, (Tokyo) (2015–2023) bring to life the intimate details of his process, displaying collections of various found and made objects, scraps of materials, partial works, and sketches, conceptually held together by the artist’s pursuit of finding the connections between things.
In the museum courtyard, Ping Pond Table (1998), a four-player construction of a ping pong table playable by visitors, has been reproduced with native water-based plats at its center, alluding to Orozco’s interest in games and penchant for the playful and humorous. Adapted from its original installation featuring lily pads, the work conveys a message that is perhaps even more potent today than at the time of its creation.
A new iteration of Gabriel Orozco’s Ping Pond Table (1998) is installed in the plaza of Museo Jumex, Mexico City. Photo: A. Olsen.
Art history, like much of the humanities, bears an impulse to categorize, codify, define, and place things (artworks, artists, periods of time, etc.) in little boxes. In “Politécnico Nacional,” Orozco and Fer resist such inclinations and instead consider the oeuvre holistically. In turn, the show can be understood more as a practice-based framework or roadmap from which visitors can freely explore the tactics and methodologies of the works—and how the implication of each has changed or stayed the same in the time since it was made.
“It changes the way I think about art history,” reflected Fer on the show. “For years I’ve been very dubious about the art historical construction that the meaning of the work is constructed when it’s produced…And everything about this work defies that. That sense of how meaning transforms, and I got very interested in temporality and time. I even in [the exhibition catalogue] called one of his techniques not a conventional technique, but time and temporalities … in the sense that everything is always in the process of changing through time.”
Installation view of the exhibition “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” (2025) Photo: Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López (GLR Estudio). Courtesy of Museo Jumex, Mexico City.
The exhibition’s installation underscores chronology’s backseat role. Across the floors, works from across the periods and places of Orozco’s career comingle, offering new insight into the heart of his practice.
At the extreme, on the top floor, a recent work, Ánima / Anima (2023) is hung on the wall beside the artist’s personal suitcase, replete with luggage tags and worn-off labels, which Orozco placed there on one of his last walkthroughs before opening. Brought on his most recent trip to Mexico City, and placed specifically next to this work (which references ancient Mexican imagery and symbolism), the addition reflects the continuing inspiration for new work inspired by way of revisiting another within the context of the exhibition.
“Both works are our cultural baggage because we do carry a lot of luggage and we need to know when to leave,” Orozco explained. Incongruities balanced by unseen connections in the world around us are a cornerstone of the artist’s work and the addition speaks to how this process of sousing out these intersections in his work—both old and new—is ongoing. No work is inherently fossilized within the time and place it was created.
Gabriel Orozco, Árbol nuevo (2006). Collection Isabel and Agustín Coppel.
The show’s title speaks to this egalitarian sensibility. Orozco took inspiration from the nearby Instituto Politécnico Nacional, and more broadly polytechnic education, which is geared toward applied sciences like engineering, but notably has no courses on art. For Orozco, this is a shortcoming, as shown in much of his work there are significant intersections between artmaking, engineering, music, computer technology, history, and so on.
In the context of the present exhibition, the retrospective format by way of Orozco’s practice itself is transformed into a type of school, one that forefronts accessibility, malleability, and a hope to inspire rather than indoctrinate in a particular pedagogy or canon. In the same way, an artist or art historian might have one takeaway from the exhibition, and an engineering student or architect might have another. Its aims are generative, rather than purely reflective.
Speaking on the show overall, Fer said, “It’s for a wide audience but never underestimate them. Never patronize them. And in a way, there are very specialist audiences and then there is this very wide public and some of that public is not knowledgeable about art, but if you make a good enough show, it will work for those different audiences.” More

Right now, at the Gibbes Museum of Art, an Alexander McQueen ombre creation is rubbing shoulders with a Hokusai print, and a Molly Goddard dress with a Joan Mitchell. Fashion legend Dapper Dan, meanwhile, is brushing up against painter Barkley Hendricks.
These artworks and fashion pieces are among the many that the Charleston institution has paired for “Statement Pieces,” an exhibition exploring the centuries-spanning dialogue between the two fields. Co-curated by Gibbes’s director of curatorial affairs Sara Arnold and the VP of Barrett Barrera Projects Kelly Peck, the show spotlights artworks from the museum’s permanent holdings and designs from the latter consultancy.
Installation view of “Statement Pieces” at the Gibbes Museum of Art. Photo: David Johnson, courtesy of Barrett Barrera Projects and the Gibbes Museum of Art.
The show, Arnold told me over email, “offered an opportunity to recontextualize our collection, and to bring world-class fashion design to our galleries.” It’s a sentiment echoed by the museum’s director Angela Mack, who told me: “Embracing other art forms as opportunities to interpret or enhance our understanding of the visual arts only broadens our understanding and increases our ability to reach new audiences.”
Childe Hassam, April (The Green Gown) (1920). Photo courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art.
The art-fashion couplings were devised with Arnold first selecting a group of artworks with stylistic throughlines, before Peck proposed some potential pairings. Peck also delved into the museum’s online database to identify artworks that might match objects she hoped to showcase.
“This was not simply a process of artwork dictating fashion or vice versa,” she told me. “Rather, it was a dynamic conversation between the collections.”
Left: Molly Goddard, Green Tulle Dress with Embroidered Flowers, Autumn/Winter 2017 Collection. Photo: Jonas Gustavsson / courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art. Right: Joan Mitchell, Series: July 25 I (1966). Photo courtesy of Gibbes Museum of Art.
The curators created the combinations, Peck added, based on visual similarities, whether in form, color, or texture, as well as research into the artist’s and designer’s bodies of work. “This ensured that the final pairings had both visual congruence and conceptual depth,” she said.
Indeed, most immediately, a visitor’s eye is drawn to the aesthetic connections between a garment and an artwork. The structured appendages on a red dress from Comme des Garçons’s Spring/Summer 2015 collection is echoed in the textured bulbs on a 2020 stoneware sculpture by Donté K. Hayes; the gold of a Gucci mini-dress is reflected in an 18th-century portrait by Benjamin West, in which landowner Thomas Middleton stands draped with a rich ocher fabric.
Donté K. Hayes, Sanctuary (2020) and Comme des Garçons Red Dress from Spring/Summer 2015 on view at “Statement Pieces” at the Gibbes Museum of Art. Photo: MCG Photography, courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art.
Sometimes, these graphic links surfaced shared approaches between designer and artist. For instance, Arnold highlighted how the partnering of Romare Bearden’s abstract canvas Untitled (Green) (ca. 1950s) and a severe Serena Gili ensemble turned up more than visual correlations. “A closer investigation of the artists’ practices reveals their shared intuitive approach,” she explained. “Each relies heavily on memory, family tradition, and an interest in experimentation and innovation.”
Serena Gili, Cashmere Beaded Top and Fiberglass Skirt (2012) and Romare Bearden, Untitled (Green) (c. 1950s) on view at “Statement Pieces” at the Gibbes Museum of Art. Photo: David Johnson, courtesy of Barrett Barrera Projects and the Gibbes Museum of Art.
A host of fashion designers featured in “Statement Pieces” have taken cues from art history—McQueen, Peck noted, was known for his “engagement with art”—but so too have artists relied on fashion to denote identity and authority.
Note, say, Thomas Sully’s portrait of Sarah Reeve Ladson, seen decked out in a fur-trimmed coat and colorful turban, nodding to her exotic sense of style and her association with the arts; or Barkley Hendricks’s Ms. Johnson (Estelle) (1972), in which the crisp lines of his sitter’s everyday wear convey “an attitude and ease of style,” in Peck’s words, and in turn a profound individuality.
Barkley Hendricks, Ms. Johnson (Estelle) (1972).Photo courtesy of Gibbes Museum of Art.
“In some sense, fashion is an artistic medium we all engage with on varying levels daily,” said Arnold. “Bringing these fashion objects into conversation with paintings and sculpture or other mediums traditionally considered fine art not only expands how we define art but awakens us to how we look at all art, and the significant role it plays in our everyday lives.”
“Statement Pieces: Contemporary Fashion Design and the Gibbes Collection” is on view at the Gibbes Museum of Art, 135 Meeting St, Charleston, South Carolina, through April 27. More